Is Love really a friend?

Well here it is the bones of the question which has haunted me since 5th december 1997.

My life has been empty since April 2000 when I walked away from "my muse". I had struggled since falling in love Christmas 1997 knowing that this was the trap my whole life had been preparing itself for. It has been the most beautiful and incomparable experience I can imagine something which I have completely failed to replace or overcome in the 10 years that have followed. This morning i awake finally defeated: there is nothing in all this world that compares to love. To lose love is to lose the only thing that really matters in existence, and i suppose many people have been to that conclusion before and decided that existence is no longer worth having if it cannot be in love.

Well it has not be for want of trying. I've seen my life has been in two halves. Those days before 5th december when I was searching and those days after 17th April 2000 when I walked away from what I knew in my heart was this life's destiny, dousing the fire that lit my soul. The pain more than anything is the abandoning of oneself like a child on a windswept beach beneath a bleak sky and before an unforgiving sea; and like a barren beach: what remains of life when love has gone.

i had always believed myself stronger than this, too powerful and carefree to become tied down. I have loved before and each time more or less I have walked away with some pain but always arisen again to my old self. But this time on 5th december 1997 i knew with ecstatic horror that I had met my nemesis, and with all caution put to death, with reckless abandon, I gave myself up to the irresistable winds of destiny.

I have come to this because of sleepless nights last week. I have just completed a sailing course and am now a qualified novice sailor. I expected that the pleasure of new skill, a new way of communing with my greatest hope in life, the all encompassing hand of nature, might lift my spirits and bring me new life, the scent of a wind to carry me out of the stagnant becalmed waters I have become abandoned in. But while the pleasure and sense of achievement has risen it has only shown me how hopeless my task is. There is only one mountain in the plain of this life and no matter how far I travel away from it, it soars above all else through the clouds and into the realm of the sun into the boundless skies where she wears her heart in the rich colours of heavenly transience.

There is no escape from this. I have tried everything. I am a rational and sensible person, not given to senseless folly, cautious and critical and yet look as I may with every power of my inner eye, sometimes she can weaken under the unrelenting power of scrutiny and the scourge of unforgiving examination, but as soon as my mind is away she is back as powerful and beautiful as before and only by closing my eyes from love's brilliance can I gain any freedom.

This love is not my friend. It has poisoned me like a drug for which my soul yearns to the point of self extinction. Why did I know this would happen to me and yet abandon myself all the same? What masocism brought me back to this world so that I could torment myself in the cradle of a tempress of such power?

The reason is that life seems to have no meaning in the lands beyond the love. It is a featurless landscape where nothing grows. You can sow and toil all spring and summer but nothing survives to reap a harvest. I have tried.

And so I have only two choices. Either to turn back into the lands of the beautiful flame as I always expected myself to do. But now the gates of the mountain pass are locked by death and I would need to search for other ranges and abodes. Or as I have resolved this morning to realise my insights of 1997; that this love is not my friend. It is a sweet trap whose very power is that I do not want to let it go.

My every argument inside goes that it's very beauty is its goodness. That because there is no greater beauty that there can be no greater goodness. But if I see Beauty for what I might be, a snare and bated trap, siren upon the rocks which would dash this boat and feast upon its mortal flesh: if this is what Beauty really is then I have only one conclusion. I have been looking at life all wrong! That is why it is empty, that is why the wind has fallen from my sails.

Alva is the name of a boat, but I have been a bad helmsman. Is not the search for wind in the direction of attraction and beauty the wrong way? That the drug addict who steers his boat and sets his sails on the fixation of a chemical routine not missing the wind?

Life is not best lived in the grip of attraction and the shining hopes and mirages of beauty and what is likeable. We argue with ourselves that how can that which is so desirable not be the right thing to grasp? That if we do not grasp this, then what are we to grasp? And without things to grasp we grasp instead for bleakness, hopelessness and even lifelessness. It is exactly because they are so beautiful and attractive which should be our warning! It is not a struggle to overcome that which is beautiful, to somehow see through it and see it as not beautiful again, but more deeply to see that what is so beautiful that it overpowers us and leaves us destroyed, is a danger to us and something to avoid.

In the overwhelming attraction of beauty lies the very reason not to be attracted! Maybe my wisdom was alive in 1997 because I knew all along my test was to walk away from this shining beacon of destiny, hope and beauty: and yet I could not and that became the puzzle. It is because I could not, that i should! and the more I could not the more I should.

See attraction for what it is and abandon attraction!
A life steered in the winds of attraction is not a life lived,
But a life heading toward death.

So the new question is this. Abandoning the fixation of seeing life as a series of attraction: gains and losses: is there a new wind to tack into or is there a peaceful falling out of the wind all together?

3 thoughts

Todays thoughts:

> We have to follow our own self even when if leads to suffering because to follow others is to abandon the vessel.

> The path of life is simple: either attend to desires or seek to abandon desires. While we may approach the problem gradually across the middle ground, it is not a place where we can abide - you either give in or you grow wise to desires hold upon life.

> The centre does not lie at the beginning!

The endless cycle of lives has no start and no finish. It is not about "when" it first started turning cos which cycle could this be? The meaning of origin when it comes to cycles is the axle upon which the wheel turns. That is the beginning and the end and it never changes. It is because, as Buddha's contemporary Lao Tse would say, the axle hole is nothing that it is so useful to the cycle.

This is the same sort of idea (I won't accept that there is any real similarity as they are derived from completely different sources) as physics when it says that the centre of the universe is the same as the beginning of the universe and occurs as a point in 4D space-time.

Buddha's teaching is a raft

Buddha said that his teachings are a raft. No more the truth than a raft is where we want to be. They are a means within the ocean of changes to travel to the other shore. Gate, Gate, Para Gate, Parasam Gate Bodhi Svaha. Go, Go, Go to the other shore quickly and be Enlightened.

The world is conditioned. This to say everything that exists comes about through events in the past that cause it and nurture its development into what it is. It then developes out of existence as new causes and changing conditions alter its form. Everything that exists has a form which separates it from other things and makes us go... there it is. Everything that has a form has a name and that which has a name has a form. Everything we can name is transient, created and destroyed in time, and there is nothing which exists which we cannot name.

This world of named things, of existences, is not real because those named things have come about by some other means which we do not name. We think and behave as though existing things have an separate existence in their own right and we treat them as what they are, not respecting that really they have only come about through other things which we chose to ignore - so blinded we are by the form which has apparently happened.

A delicious cake is only a delicious cake because it was made well from the right ingredients. But when we enjoy the cake we like to forget about the ingredients - the sugar, flour and butter which by themselves are not so delicious. That delicious form we get attracted to like moth around a flame wanting to believe, unable to resist the tantalising belief that it really is what it is like.

Buddha says to us this conditioned existence is what makes us suffer in the long run, but true it gives us pleasure as well. There must be a reason for ignorance! Sin, evil and ignorance only happen because we enjoy it! We must not believe the evidence of our enjoyments it is often wrong!

The rafts of teaching are fashioned from conditioned entities themselves. Made as attractive as possible to encourage people toward them. They then sail the trecherous ferry through the oceans of change and suffering to safe land where we might rest is saftey. Quite how they get there, quite where this mysterious land is only the navigator who has travelled this ocean before knows. But he assures us this shore is not like the high ocean of suffering. It is a place of eternal abidance in peace, unaffected by death, unaffected by life, unaffected by all the manners of suffering.

So Buddhism contains no truth. There is no truth in all the world to attain because truth itself is a form and it changes! If there were truths beyond question we would know them and there would be no arguments and disagreements since a very long time ago!

My Musings

another issue regarding "my muse" is that we never slept together. This is confounded by a number of issues which is why it has taken me almost 10years to process it. Firstly there was a powerful expression of sexual desire from both sides. I realise more than anything now this was simply the release of sexual repression on both sides. Because she thought I looked like her screen idol it gave me the illusion that she fancied "me". In my case I did not fancy her in the first millisecond because she was not my model beauty, but only on consciously "looking again" and given myself the freedom to rewrite my expectations did she become a model beauty. The other issue which is the worst is that so much seemed to happen by "coincidence" that is seeemed that a hand of destiny was making this happen. I remember not wanting to talk to anyone about it because it was wonderful just letting things take their course and if she wanted me and I her then we were already together by some divine destined authority. So i never talked about what i wanted and never expressed personal wishes leaving that to destiny. Well i never got what i wanted and considered this the hand of destiny also. Except "my" wishes grew in demand and eventually I had leave lest they sought to govern and manufacture a relationship. I realise now maybe that people like the reassurance that comes from people enforcing their wishes, especially men over women which seems to be the structure of sexual relationships. Anyway its by the by because her last words to me were that we were never going to be intimate, although that leaves a puzzle in understanding what the nature of all that initial attraction was. When you catch a girl staring at you dreamily lost in a world of her own, what does that mean? when she waits to catch you alone and asks to see you again repeatedly, what does that mean? When her eyes are shining with excitement, what does that mean? I'll never know. And, that is the other philosophical point.
What is something that could have been but wasn't? Its not something that "wasn't and couldn't have been" like really marrying our screen idol. That is simply an idea. And it's not real that is for sure. Its has a Shroedinger's cat like existence... or so it feels. With almost no doubt in my mind, play my cards slightly differently and this Shroedingers Cat would be alive. But it seems with tragical certainty now that it is dead... altho i still resist completely believing that... i met the family but i never looked in the box/coffin myself.
I feel like a Schroedingers Cat myself until someone opens my box and tells me whether the Caesium atom decayed or not. Did it really almost happen or not? was this a once in a lifetime chance to meet the girl of my dreams, and for her to meet the guy of her dreams? Two coincidences that are rare by themselves.

Well I'm getting through it. Her sister has done a lot to lift the box and see the quantum state of this cat. I'm currently and rather selfishly seeking a break from her to see how I stand on my own 2 feet at the moment. She's pissed off and not answering texts.

I suspect the answer lies in these realisations... alot already hammered out in the previous posts.
Firstly, the existence of whatever it was is a karmic fruiting. And that includes both our desires and the responses and the overall course of events. In this sense there was no choice and I must suffer what I have suffered and learn what i am learning. We may met again karmas allowing and maybe if we made some positive ground it might work better next time. Must remain positive for that reason alone... though some
angry and hateful thoughts try to surface about her. I do something feel she deserved to die for being what she was, which is not a thought I would like to have but it's there sometimes.


Secondly, had we actually gone down that other road and I had obtained the object of my continuing desires that would have changed everything and as they say "familiarity breeds contempt". I deliberately avoided familiarity so as to maintain the purity of things, I know I get bored and cynical and i want to believe I would have kept her in such high esteem for life, but also maybe I wouldn't!

And after the last post on "acting" I am realising that this is exactly what I was exploring with her. I used to stand in Clapham Common odd hours of the night and recite poems and Shakespere to myself because I felt that I had become an actor in a delightful divine play. I knew that: I used to ask, why do we have to face reality when we can live out our dreams. Love struck fool! Death made a mockery of that quick enough! We are all actors already, just we choose to act out dull and boring plays like "national identity", "personal identity", "authority", "wealth",
"marriage", "ownership", "career". How dull and I was trying a new play which was profoundly beautiful. I realise this week all plays are to be scorned, or at least when we forget that they are plays...

NOTE: In novel 2b: Alexandria, this is the key point that the world is a huge play that we forgot we are playing - especially regarding notions of "actual"

existence and rules.

So hopefully "Reality" will win and my dreams of what could have been "real" will be seen as dreams both as they are today and as they were then.

An escape plan which always works is from a favourite film "Fandango", 'the only way to get over a girl is to get another'... also another good line ... love is mostly thoughts, mostly (said with pathos for a girl he lost but actually quite true!).

However if that general dream (rather than the particular dream
of "my muse") which has kept me going so far can be shown to be as unreal as the specific then maybe I am free for good, and "my musings" will have been fruitful.

All the world is a stage.. or is it? 2/2

Fiction depends upon the power of agreement!

Image we watch a Sherlock Holmes play. It only works when we accept the roles and characters in the play. If the actor called John is playing Sherlock Holmes it is no good sitting there and complaining that there is no way that John can have an assistant Watson and trying to solve the case since he is just an actor with no crime solving skills.

The fact is that we accept the rules of the play. We accept that there is a crime, accept that Sherlock Holmes is a master detective and we accept that Watson is his assistant. This is the ontology of the play and within this ontology we play along with the "logic". Of course is Sherlock Holmes decides that Watson is not his assistant, or decides that someone who was not even at the scene of the crime was the perpetrator we would argue because the play is challenging its own logic and foundations.

It all depends upon "agreement" between actors on stage and the audience that we will accept the rules of this play for its duration.

Indeed this central power of "agreement" to create fictions is of astronomical prevalance in the human world. Almost everything we do is based upon some fiction which exists because of agreement.

We agree to accept "sterling" as the unit of currency in the UK. If people studdenly stopped accepting it in favour of the Euro it no longer means anything. We might try to exchange our sterling for Euro but there must be an exchange mechanism which depends upon an agreement. If there was no agreement there would be no demand for sterling and our life's saving would be worthless. If I was to print my own "money" it would only be valuable if there was agreement that it was exchangeable. The reason that money exists is that once-upon a time it was given by the Royal Treasury in place of gold on an understanding that it could be redeemed at any time for gold. This doubled the Treasury's holding and they could fund a war of the time (nothing changes ;-). Gold of course is another thing whose value comes mostly from agreement.

The problem with agreement by itself is that it creates a "believeable" fiction. If everyone believes in God that is an immense force that makes Him seem real. If everyone believes in money that is the same. These days you are unlikely to be able to redeem your money for gold because of "fractional reserve banking" (pages on Wikipedia). A run on the bank will mean that you will have nothing. Its only by agreement and the rules of the exchange mechanism that money has its meaning and value.

Theft is the most obvious thing we can do to totally invalidate the meaning of money. If we just take things then what use is there in money? If we were to believe in a "generous society" where people gave things this simple change in rules completely destroys the Sherlock Holmes fiction of money. Power in general is the same. The Nazis were only able to do what they did because people believed in their authority and did what they were told. The same in any government, it only works because we believe it and behave as though it was real. This is the power of mass belief to create believable fictions.

Generally we believe that these fictions are based upon some substantial Reality. But actually substantial reality looks completely different. In our example consider that you can watch Sherlock Holmes on stage but you can't take him out for a meal! The real world exists outside the logic of the play. In Reality you can't take "money" or "government" out for a meal ... as is famously noted you can't eat money and I add... farmers are better than government at farming!

Substantial reality is that we were born, we live and we will die. We eat, we go to the toilet, we sleep. We get ill. We have sex. We struggle for what we need and we fight but we prefer peace and we like love.

That is actually about it for reality, just look at the animals with a small brain and they do the reality thing perfectly. The big brain enables us to create fictions that is the difference.

Some might say the big brain enables us to survive better and dominate the world. Well bacteria were here before humans, they will be around long after humans and they dominate the world in terms of biomass also (see my home page in the links) so their survival is unchallengable.

No the big brain has evolved because humans are bastards to anyone who can't play in their games. Auto-selection for big theatrical social brains. But then is evolution any more real than sherlock holmes - leave that to the reader to decide.

Buddhism has a lot more to say about all this because it would even challenge some of the things I've taken as "Real". Its like the layers of an onion (except in this analogy I'm not peeling but looking outwards to find the outer skin)

If you look around you in life you will see that everyone is totally stuck in a series of co-existing plays... pretending to be certain types of people with really important things to do, learning their lines and acting out their scripts. Yet they are not aware that it is just fiction. Terrorists are brilliant - they are acting out some mad script against a bunch of people in the West who are acting out their own mad script. Can you take a "member of the free nations" to dinner any more than you can take a terrorist? Of course not, just people reading from the same script, which is the new play called "terrorism", written by the Bush family in Afghanistan with their long time co-star the Bin Laden family. Makes great TV doesn't it ;-) bring back Reagan at least he said he was an actor!

The sad thing is that abject poverty (which is real) only exist because we believe in the system of property and exchange which keeps the rich rich. The rules of the current system have been adapted over the years to make the poor a bit richer and the rich far far richer. But its just a play and we don't have to play. Altho as commented above people are bastards if you don't play their games and so the games do infringe on reality when they threaten to kill you unless you play correctly.

Bit like Watson being told you as an actor might be able to see that it is just a play, but you must accept that I am the great Sherlock Holmes and you must play the bimbling Watson otherwise I and the rest of the cast will kill you.

Which gives me an idea for a play. Like "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" which is an amazing play, but where the play breaks out from the inside not the outside to infect the lives of the actors. Maybe a Nazi play where the main actor starts believing that he is the character and not the actor and fiction starts to destroy reality.

All the world is a stage.. or is it? 1/2

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Must note before I move on ... I notice a signature of "my muse" in this:

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

this meter is hers, very nice to see.

ok see next post...

Recognition

So much of what we do seems to be goverened by recognition. Normally we note 2 types of recognition, acceptance and refjection.

We do something, or we live a life, so that we get positive recognition from people. We shy or are in fear of negative recognition.

There is a third which is the most common which is neutral recognition. Simply people don't notice or care. This is actually very good cos we are free to follow our hearts in this space.

Recognition only exists because we seek validation from others. Actually validation from others changes nothing, we don't need it, tho in a social game it is important.