Giving up Women

There are two ways to become satisfied:

1. Get what you want.
2. Not want it anymore.

I began crudely on path 1 especially with women, but quickly began to realise that even if I did get what I wanted it would never be exactly what I wanted (since both it changes and what we want changes) and also it was a lot of effort for an uncertain goal. I also realised through escapades with “my muse” that worldly struggles are extremely impure and are at best only a compromise with what we originally set out to gain, and are often set to completely fail (her death in this example). Path 2 is not easy however and trying to get what you want here i.e. freedom from wanting things, is built upon shaky self contradictory principles.

With women I have become much more at ease of late. The observation is to separate one’s actual desire for them with one’s ego and desire for success with them. It is a difficult thing to accept but to be free from women one must accept that one is also a failure with women. Often we don’t really want a girl, but we also don’t want to admit we were a failure with here. The desire to conquest and success, for pride and ego is actually greater than our original desire. The suffering we feel when we fail is far greater than simply not having what we dearly, honourably wishes for, it is the suffering of ego and the struggle to avoid being labelled a failure. As my friend once put it after failing spectacularly with a girl he had been pursuing “I’m such a loser”. It wasn’t the losing her that was painful, it was the being a loser! This is ego and underlines 95% of the struggles we have in life.

A friend said last weekend that I had given up on life. I know I’ve succeeded here because I simply took this as a statement of fact and examined it as such. Only now over a week later am I reconsidering that conversation and what it entailed. Originally I was examining his attitude, but now see it reveals much about my slow advances in this department. I had been cautiously pushing the idea that “given up on what?” trying to reveal that there is no higher purpose or God given path in life. He has pursued Ayn Rand’s thinking and the notion that there are better ways of living that the Illuminati are pushing mankind away from. I’m cautious because I know that for highly driven people facing the oblivion of “giving up” is a depressing state that can be very unbalancing. I’ve faced that myself. I should be a bit careful I guess with what I write in this blog because for the wrong person at the wrong time what I say will not be very helpful, even positively unhelpful. Its not that I don’t believe in a higher cause or principle in life—this is what this whole blog is about—it is just that I realise that whatever we decide upon must enter the arena of game playing in a very Kantian sense and must play against itself so that highly driven people fighting their own corner is exactly the whole problem. Any solution must side step the tiresome worlds of politics that have dominated the mind’s of men since antiquity. Even Ayn Rand and her supporters enter this arena to some extent. Admittedly rather than take on the Corporations in Atlas Shrugged they try to set up a Shangri-La, but this is hardly a new idea, and it has happened countless times before. Even America itself was an attempt at a new Shangri-La and now it is the diseased carcass from which people flee. No this certainly is not the way; nothing new needs be born. What is new-born is born to decay and die and be re-born-a-new anyway; so what is the difference between new and old anyway; so what is the point! Here I diverge from the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna who says if there is no point then one may as well perform one’s duty. Problem for me in a modern liberal society is that unlike the warrior classed Arjuna I have no class and no duty to perform!

Accepting that one is a failure is certainly very hard to do. We may do it as a reaction to not being a success: belligerently, “If I can’t have success then I don’t want anything” or depressively, “I’m no good, I don’t deserve success” or in self –denial, ”I never wanted that anyway”, or in hope, “I’ll be a success next time.” All these share a common cause: they are born from ego and a desire for success and achievement that we adorn our self with. When this fails to materialise we adorn our self in the cloak of failure. But what is the point of all this Chivalric bearing and collecting of coats of arms? Who really cares what banner we march under if for no other reason than they are busy worrying about what banner they are flying. It’s a pointless game and I give up.

Here my friend is right I have given up on the circular, self serving and endless game. It makes no difference whether we play or not, so why bother. Life, once one has simply laid down ones weapons, is a lot simpler and it is hard to believe that I was ever afraid to just stop playing. For a white, middle-class well educated individual my parents tried to instil in me duties that Arjuna bore but unfortunately they also brought me up in a liberal society of individual rights that I have used to shake off their pressure: they can’t have it both ways. Are we feudal or modern democratic?

So what comes next. Firstly there is one battle and that is to stop the ego flaring up. It still doesn’t like being a failure. I see other people getting the girls of their dreams, marrying , settling down, buying houses, getting promotion and having children: this is great fuel for the ego. But if I am going to be a failure do I want to do it in self torment and suffering, or in peace and freedom? I always remind my ego this :-)