He's the One

A friend said yesterday with great excitement that her relationship was going the distance and that "he was the one". I realise this is a slightly different conception of The One to myself and gives me an opportunity to explore. For her the One is not the person you "should" marry but rather the one you are "going" to marry. Marriage is the given for her, it is just a matter of finding the person you will marry, while for me The One is the given and on finding them then marriage happens - otherwise not... and I don't think i will be married because I can't manifest (or even understand) The One.

What is more interesting what this means for understanding The Ego. Where a mirror image gives us a physical representation of ourself as another person, The One gives our egos a conceptual representation of ourself as another person. Marriage is a mirror. Now this is where I think homosexuality goes wrong because the mirror is too literal and we actual try and have a relationship with our selves - if a homosexual is honest they must perceive an unusual situation where they can be sexually excited by themselves in the mirror - finding their own sexual organs and look sexually stimulating. It is the false consciousness that possibly arises of having a relationship with yourself - which isn't a relationship (see SRH for the impossibility of self relations - incomplete musing however on that subject). This is not the say that heterosexuals aren't involved in equally false relationships, or that homosexuals are involved in true relationships I just find it suspicious that someone may seek a different person in the form that is their own form. Maybe homosexuals shouldn't call it homosexuality because it can't be sexual when there is only 1 sex involved! But this is also where relationships are fraught with danger because you have two people taking the other person as a mirror to themselves and the question is who are we: ourselves or our partner's mirror image? And we enter submissive/dominance relations and it all get complicated.

It is this feature of relationships that i am beginning to understand (I add from the outside it being 3 years since I bothered with a sexual relationship). Not only is the other person The One but we become The One also in the very same moment of consciousness. It is this self-realisation which is as far as I can see Life - this is the joy of love (often sexualised) where we feel alive in the reflection of ourselves in another. (It am wondering if it is a temporary stage of consciousness however.)

That experience of being The Hero where we take command of the narrative and find the future now rests squarely and without compromise upon our shoulders - that is the feeling of Love. I saw in a porn picture from asia with a chinese caption which Google translator translated as "beautiful girl: heroic feeling". Regardless how accurate the rendition, what a precise analysis of the experience. That is the purity which is seemingly increasingly lost from sexuality (tho porn it must be said means originally whore in ancient greek I think from pornography - pictures of whores) the purity which people seem to side step the heroic position and take the existence of themselves and the other on their shoulders. I imagine the media consciousness is linked to this as we are a hundred people a day these days (films, news, gossip, trivia etc) and can easily find escape from being ourselves.

A note to self here: recent dreams and thoughts are leading me to realise that maybe "I am fake". My decision 10 years ago to take command of myself has started to be fulfilled recently as I seem to have the choice to do whatever I want - while before I felt very unhappy if I didn't get what i wanted; this is I was driven by what I wanted rather than the other way around. But "what I want" has been calling faintly to me recently saying that I am now is a fake, and that I should pursue what i want to become true to myself. Is this the last attempts by the devil calling or is it true? My question here is should I even become "myself". It is all tied up in the SRH and other musing like this one "self". No decision yet, but see already it will be my choice to do what i want even if I do! That decision to make decisions seems to have been firmly made (tho SRH it wasn't a decision ;-)!

So my friend has a much more pragmatic view of The One and will find herself mirrored in the person that she forms the life bond with. For me that life bond was already made with someone by destiny and whether I actually fulfill it or not is immaterial. Mine is a Oneness that transcends death - maybe that is why i am not that fussed about marriage and families and things they are rather trivial against that romantic notion of Oneness. Marriage is only in this life and so doesn't mirror the eternal soul - which is non individual and Absolute. Maybe this is the switch that comes when we step beyond mortal mirrors and seek refuge and mirroring in ultimate beings?

Just some opening thoughts as I get to grips with understanding this.

=== Wed
There is a logical flaw in my thinking! My friend quite accurately, it seems, realises that marriage only occurs once the mutual vow has been made.

If we were destined to meet someone, this does not mean that we were destined to marry them because we would still need to actually make that vow.

What is the meaning of a vow to be faithful if it is destined? I am essentially removing responsibility from the marriage vow by saying that it is out of my hands.

But then in my thinking: upon what basis do I make a vow to be faithful? What quality do I observe, what purpose do I fulfill with this vow, and worse upon what security is there that a vow that seems worthwhile today will seem worthwhile tomorrow? This last has troubled me the most.

In a usual promise we bind ourself to a definite occasion: I promise to fulfill some engagement. Even if the wish to do this goes, we can still motivate ourselves to achieve the original purpose.

It may be that we promised to do something. If in teh future conditions have changed and the person we promised to no longer needs our service then they can anull the promise. Likewise it seems in modern thinking we can anull the promise of marriage... but what condition needs to change to make marriage either worthwhile or not worthwhile?

We often base it on ephemeral feelings, but these WILL change. I have failed to find conditions that warrant a lifetimes promise.

My only conclusion is that marriage is an a priori. We either want it, or we don't, and it does not depend upon conditions.

The only remaining this is that it is the institution for childbirth. But I have no desire to have children.

It seems that a priori I don't require marraige then, so my thinking will always be different from my friend. I may lose out on sexual pleasures, and companionship but these are ephemeral and trivial and certainly not something I base a whole lifetime on. This seems the logical conclusion then.

=== cont

But then there is a logical error here also because by arguing "essentially" that "I am not the type of person who gets married" I am once again avoiding the decision to make the vow!

So we end up with a Sartre like position where faced with the question of whether to marry (as one of S students was) Sartre answered don't decide the future: make the future. So the question is really do we wish to create a future in which we are married.

Now I always dismissed S here because this doesn't get us any further. We may indeed realise that what is holding us back is ourselves which is good thinking. But we are still faced with the problem of if I made this future would I regret it, or wish to make a contrary future after that. I mean make a vow to live with someone for the rest of my life today, but in 3 years decide to make another future where I am single again. This doesn't seem to solve this issue, or underpin it with any substance, this issue of the lifelong vows.

The best solution it seems to me is the arranged marriage where you simply accept, and make do with, the social expectations of marriage. But this doesn't work in the post-protestant world where we are "free" to chose. Normally we can just chose, and if we don't like it chose again and keep switching and turning as our fancy takes us... not so with this surviving mode of living from a by gone (pre-Protestant) age. It is ironic that the whole problem has arisen due to a break in teh church - the body that has uptil now taken charge of marriage - due famously to Henry VIII and his supposed wish for (of all things) divorce (altho I think more probably he just wanted to be rid of Rome telling him what he could and couldn't do in his own kingdom!). The age of freedom and self-determination (which the SRH seeks to show is a fundamental logical - not metaphysical - contradiction) - the post-Renaissance age of European Enlightenment - has created a problem and as mentioned often in this blog has little philosophical backing for the great move which has blighted the human race (in this view!).

So to marry or not to marry: I am still non-the wiser and see that the problem is indeed something I inherit from a badly thought out revolution in the 1500s by Martin Luther et al which has skipped and dodged its way into present times via Nietzsche, the death of God, and the post-modern age which characterises itself by avoiding any serious attention through a moronic use of irony. Even the moronic use of irony is supposed to be ironic these days (see Channel 4s T4 and Ricky Gervais). Well by irony itself the bothering to skillful manipulate the "corny and crap" actually reveals a preoccupation with the corny and crap itself, which says a lot about the mind sets of people who try to circumvent the accusation of being corny and crap by "deliberately" being corny and crap. Not that there is no room for the ironic use of corny and crap - bathos is extremely amusing - but to think that the vaulted aspirations of the European Renassance and Age of Enlightenment have brought us science, archetecture, justice and the happy meal is a statement of little worth itself except some light amusement.

But back to marriage: it is an example of the bigger question in Life: what actually to do. I have written this blog for 4 years now and still (despite understanding the world in much greater depth than I did at the start) I still have no idea of the main question "what to do or think about this thing Life.". I hope that the proven SRH will at least signal the end of the direction which is called "pursuing ones own ends".

What has mystified me about people in general has been their ability to just do thing without ever being able to be aware of what they are doing. Lots of people I know will say one thing and then do the opposite. Dirac the famous British physicist apparent was faced with the question of marriage and was looking for some justification for doing it... he got married but does this mean he found a justification or did he just do it ... in which case his desire to marriage must have been stronger than his ability to resist it... now how did he reconcile this? What if his desire had been for something bad or destructive like a drug addiction, would he have just done it also? He was an odd chap tho paying the flight to New York and back just to watch a new Tom and Jerry cartoon - one of his passions! With that level of impulsiveness and irrationality no wonder he got married ;-)