Universal v Particular

I have been staying around the family of "my muse" this week, this is her old computer, her pictures on the wall and at last I have some objectivity about the situation. She was an extraordinary person by any rating, but her specialness to me no longer obscures her reality - my mind is in balance again.

This is the risk then of so much of our living that we let our own existence and our own particular view of things become more important than the universal sharable view. It is not to say that we all have to think the same thing but just to make sure that our view does not centre about that which Buddha calls "individual existence". This is where desires become so dangerous because clearly our desires are manifest in a single body, the extinction of that body is the extinction of those desires - this is their only locus, they are that insignificant. Yet upon these desires so much in the world is influenced and for what? a single body.

Compare these desires with social living, with compassion, care, respect, love they are not physically tangible desires with the goal of oneself. Strictly also they do not have the goal of "others" either since this is simply the painful rejection of oneself and no-one likes that. It is a completely shift of driving force away from that which originates within this frail extinguishable body to live in the regions beyond.

I come to this not through an understanding of love but most easily in seeing the error of being so obsessed with things which only really interested myself. Of course we need to nourish ourselves, keep ourselves out of harms way, find warmth - but these are so easily realised. If people could manage it 100,000 years ago without machines and complex socities how much more easily should it be done today! Managing our personal needs should be a trivial part of our lives, just a hour or so a day, and becoming more trivial with each generation.

Instead our lives should be lived in the universal, focused instead upon the well being of the world and the humanity and life in which we live. A transition I hope might be occuring to myself.

I have watch some American films this week: "The Stranger" - in the cinema and "Death Sentence" and "American Beauty" on cable. It is sickenly apparent in these films that our whole existences revolve around our own needs with almost hyperbolic rejection of other people. These are just films but it is disturbing that the writers think that the audience will accept this view of the world. Of course there is the animal within us which wants self-protection, revenge, death and destruction. But it is a very small animal. American's shoot animals with impunity, even human's with some justification, how easy it should be to shoot their own animal? Yet in these films there are endless examples of total disregard for everyone but oneself.

Protecting ones family and friends does not count as selflessness. It is better than screwing them and protecting oneself, but it is still particular interest. As Jesus would have reminded us, "Love your enemy". American call themselves Christian yet I believe they love their enemy less than any other people. It is all about protecting oneself and destroying the enemy. Its great when you are winning, its very scary when you are someone's enemy and you are losing.

Buddha declares "there is no longer survival" on his enlightenment. Reading this a few months ago lit a very strong beacon in the direction of travel. To transcend the petty existence, the existence prone to buffeting by the oceans of local changes, to step toward true security, and ultimately to diminish the significance of death is the same path as to step over our obsession with our "own existence".

Yes I may have won "my muse", yes I may have lost "my muse", yes she may have died, yes I might have died - really do these things concern anyone but ourselves? Only in that everyone faces the same problems. We see the story written in a story or a blog and we think, that's not happened to me, or yes I can feel that, but that "particular" instance is not mine, that is someone else. Yet the beauty of the story in not in the actual events, but in the ability to share it, to experience that rising of the universal - that shared world which takes us beyond the worries of our own particular existence into a many-person world. And, I stress it is not the events of the story which counts but the story telling, having our eyes openeing to possibility of being beyond oneself - extasis as the ancient greeks once called it.

I realise as I write this Riswey, my alterego in stories I wrote "My muse" was a story teller and his great story was this book of 7 stories, the 7th having been lost (it represented the blank page of the future, which I always hoped was us), but since they were sent on consecutive days of the week upto Valentines day on Sunday it would never arrive (no post) so it was written into the other 6 stories as the lost story. The super-text of those stories was how 7 completely different stories could be connected. The protagonists were reincarnations of one another, yet they had completely different stories, the only link was the binding of the book of 7 stories. A question I was posed by "my muse", how can we be together yet be completely different people? And if we can't answer that then how can we be apart and completekly different people!? But the answer was written into the stories because Riswey defeated Death the Great separator. How ironic I was thinking at that time that death is commemorated in individual graves lined up separately side by side (just wrote that as the anagram: 'dies'!) when it is the same possibility of separation which is Death itself. Death is the cause of individuality! And so Riswey defeats death by resisting particular desire, so that he and the Goddess might be together in eternity. This profectically I'm realising today is maybe (I hope) what is happening. There is no way I admit I understood this fully at the time opf writing, and am only just beginning maybe to grasp its meaning now. That "my muse" (who to me always was a vidyadharas) actually did die just as the goddess died in the stories seems strangely irrelevant. The real meaning of this is beyond individual existences of her and myself.

A feeling of guilt now, should I be writing all this on her old machine? am I writing about myself again? That I live and she had passed away, can I really call this equal? I have a voice and she does not? It is like when George Bush appropraited the 911 disaster to his own political aims, speaking on behalf of the dead as though they would all have backed the wars. What would "my muse" who has her own name but I don't feel I have the right to use it, tell if she could speak her story? Even this speak of universal and particular is particular because it is my narrative. Maybe silence speaks of the universal better than what "I" have said... so I won't invade the silence that follows...