The most troublesome part of the relationship with “my muse” was the seeking “an experience”. I was faced on one occasion with a casual acquaintance of hers who had just slept with her. He was incredulous that I had not done so. Between us lay an apparent void, but a void between what and what? I was not jealous at the time for I was secure in the nature of what i was seeking and tried in vain to explain the value of this to either of us. In retrospect after failing to find what I was searching for, and worse finding that it was all a mortal - temporary - illusion, I was drawn into the sense that all she was worth was the physical. But I was falling. It is hard to see clearly when you are drowning. But I am no longer drowning and what I have read and known, but not had enough faith in, is that both he seeking in the physical and me seeking in the spiritual are actually mistaken. It is not what film we see – of which there can be many - but the cinema itself of which there is only one! It is the mind we search for not the objects of sense – and yet even with knowledge of this we seek the objects - one after another – ranking them and measuring ourselves against each other according to these objects – seeking memory of these objects – desiring these objects – feeling our life dependent on these objects – our life itself just another object of sense!
I knew all along that there was a lot more at stake with “my muse” than merely a conquest – that mundanity I was avoiding at all costs – from the outset it was the opportunity to blow away the veil of ignorance. Like with a particle accelerator there was enough energy in this to achieve anything. Yet my mistake was to seek some unique and special “experience” with her – something that I had not experienced before. Indeed this was the fascination for any number of men. And it was the same with her scoring up new experiences that she delighted in retelling. What we all missed was that no new experience can reveal anything more about the truth because that is nothing else but the nature of experience itself. If objects can show us one thing it is the gradual realisation after raking up a lifetimes worth of experiences that really no One experience counts for much and the very need for so many different experiences illustrates that the truth lies outside individual experiences. Indifference to individual experiences, times and places, is what the worldly and wise person gains - and what the child has yet to learn. A poor substitute for this wisdom is becoming jaded where we are simply numbed to experience by regret, jealousy, disappointment, hatred and hurt – this is the opposite in many ways to the wisdom mentioned; we still believe that there are experiences that can lead to salvation and yet egotistically we feel we are denied these and so we hurt.
The first thing a blind man notices when his sight is restored is that he can see something – but it is not the “something” which he marvels in but the fact that there is something there at all. What I was searching for in “my muse” was not just the experience of another girl (of which there are literally billions), but the appreciation of experience itself… this is what all people are searching for yet we always confuse what we are seeing from the miracle of seeing itself – more than seeing, of “experiencing” itself.
My early philosophy followed the well trodden path of noticing problems in the view that I experience reality. This led to separating my experience of things from the things themselves. I then took this division and noticed the implication, as so many other have done, that it means we can’t experience real things. In a flash of inspiration I cast all real things into an unknown world just as 18th century European philosophers did. And there i got stuck.
Finally the realisation above gave me the root of the problem and the solution. I had sort “my muse” as an external completion of myself and my life. There is a sense when we are in love that we cannot survive without the “object” of our desires. Our very existence seems to depend upon something external to us, as much as a hungry person needs food to live. Yet what is happening here runs into the problems outlined above. How can we ever have anything other than our experiences of the other person? We cannot be them, we can’t even know them as they really are only our experiences of them. In actuality they are apart from us in the realm of the unknown. But what was I seeking behind the world of experiences with “my muse”. What did I feel I never got from her, why did I suffer at this perceived loss?
Both problems have the same answer. We are like animals looking at our reflection and not recognising ourselves. What is it that lies “behind” the world of experiences? It is actually ourselves. This is why being lost in the world of experiences hurts so much because the more we focus on the nature of the experiences the more we lose sight of the cinema in which we are experiencing and in so doing we lose sight of the self that lies behind those experiences – the cinema screen so to speak. Daniel Dennett speaks of the Cartesian Cinema – does he realise that this is not only a metaphor for the idea that we are somehow looking at the data from our senses as much as the idea that we are separate from the outside world at all. What I sort so desperately in “my muse” and what seemed so unjust when she chose other people, was that in her I was actually looking at myself. Everything beautiful and enchanting about her is actually the same beauty and enchantment that I have failed as yet to find within myself. A girl may seem enlightened only because inside ourselves lies that very enlightenment.
Now desire is our enemy here because it fishes in the well of experience. It seeks to draw “things” from the depths of the world to feast on them. In so doing it is only interested in the contents of the well, what it can get. A mind that identifies with desire is short sighted and seeks to know only “what” it has got. It is interested only in the contents of experience. But, being free from desire the mind is not interested in “what” but sees purely only that it has got. The enlightened mind is again like the blind man who can see again, in wonder at sensation itself, joyful that they have arrived at the well. The mind clouded with desire fishes with anticipation in the well, discriminating what they fish out as good and bad, fighting for this and that, but never stopping to appreciate the well.
To the unrefined they see only a man on the stage; to the refined he is an actor or a dancer.
To the unrefined they see only a world of desirous or undesirous things; to the refined they are the product of our own self.
Raw notes: Desire fishes in the well of experience and so deals with the contents of experience not the actuality (not the experience is actual) . Things are, but the mind lacking wisdom makes things as is
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