Time to drink the Wormwood

I am reminded that it is Wesak today. May all beings be well and happy. May all beings cross to the other shore, quickly.

It was yet another sleepless night awake at 4. I have discovered that "my muse" did find love, that she was speaking of getting married before she passed away. If I have difficulties with all this, it is nothing compared with her fiancee! He is in a terrible state still after a year and as the anniversary comes around. I am relieved and so happy that she did find a man to be happy with in life. He is a wonderful person apparently and someone she really deserved. It has important implications for me too.

It means that my illusions have been shown up. That we did have a simple friendship, that she never loved me as a partner. That what i was seeking and what she was seeking were at completely different levels, and i also understand now what she wanted from life. I have at last absorbed her mind and it shows me a very great deal. This oldest soul had much to teach this young one.

Having read all her letters again things are moving into place and her picture of things was so simple and well expressed. She had two pieces of advice for me.

Firstly she explained in a poem that romance is like the ice upon a lake. Cold and without breaking the ice we cannot touch the reality.

Secondly she marvelled at the countless lives and heartbeat that beat side by side in this vast world. People living side by side but mostly in ignorance of one another.

She followed her senses. She was a "i feel therefore I am", while i was a "i think therefore I am".

Her path through life and boyfriends was a search for an organic unity one that both satisfied her heart but also her body and her mind. She felt her way to happiness and through the insights and energy of this had the power to open her third eye and to write her poetry.

This level and trust of the senses and the world was what I marvelled in her and sort to learn. For me however i have been at removal from the world because primarily I observe in advance of feel. Thus I am cautious and hindered in my path through the world. Where she would dive in and ask questions later, i do not move until i am sure.

There is one advantage to my path. On Ben Macdui in 2003 I noticed that by irony the one thing I was not going to see when I climbed the mountain was that mountain itself. You would have thought with all that work put into climbing the mountain it is that mountain you would see. Of course it is that mountain you experience, but it is everything else you see.

I have always sort perspective and vision on things, while she always sort experience. It is evident from this blog that i am positioned outside evrything that I talk about and that gives me the vision to see it. Analysis and observation liberate us from the world, while sense and feeling absorb us into the world. Both I suspect are valid ways to enlightenment. i wanted to absorb and sense the girl, but in the end I have gained perspective on her and removed myself.

I thought last night that analysis and perspective were the recourse of the coward. All these academics hiding themselves from the world behind their intense gaze. This is certainly true, but it is also the critical process to liberation to. We analyse our woes and sufferings so that they are before us and we are removed from them. The mystery of course is where are we when we have the whole world before us ;-)

So my greatest romance, the dream I have centred my life on for 10 years was an illusion, that the emotions that filled me for so long were of my own making. Thankfully I am a reserved and self controlled person and she never knew the turmoils and struggles that lay within me. That i was able to have a friendship with her even against the battle of my emotions and desires. Maybe I brought her some of the happiness that i wanted her to have, for that i can be happy, and spared her the rubbish that i could so easily have dumped on her. I failed to give her what we both originally wanted and maybe there is a great loss in that, but clearly I had these other things to learn and my future has been set.

Is there significance to the date 4/5/06? This was the day she saw the sunrise but never set. She was in love, she had a happy future before her, she had countless friends and was loved by all; the funeral was packed. Why did she pass away without explanation and hurt so many people. That now becomes the greatest mystery.

So if I lose my job which i got originally to get the money to try and hold down another relationship that I never bothered with, if that what have I got?

I have nothing! I am a failure in career, I am a failure in love, I am a failure in life. Now to most people that would be terrible, but to me that seems to be the greatest opportunity to fulfill myself.

After the last email: when exactly am I a success in a career? when exactly am I in love when exactly am I success in life? Its not that these things don't happen but that where is the border and the border controls between these lands and their opposite.

What makes a failure any different than a success? where is the boundary, where is the difference?

Now that is only the pencil marks of the watching mind. The United Nations of the head drawing boundaries and setting one bit of land apart from another.

If I call myself a failure it is as meaningless as calling myself a palestinian and living 10 miles from an Israeli and thinking there is any difference between us!

This is all very hard to really accept. If I am awake all night, night after night, things are clearly not peaceful within. But somehow I relish this journey more than the imagined bliss that I so desired and have lost. I only hope I know where I'm going.

It has brought into strong relief the problem that faces me in life. The world of sensual involvement, love, security:that bliss, and the world of mountain climbing and the vast views all around that I cannot touch but bear the soul just as high.

Do I follow "my muse" into the garden of sensory delights or do I remain outside Eden and turn that original sin into a virtue.

Either way I must become a far greater person that I am. I must develop strength and mastery of myself to follow either path.