For the past few months I've felt like I'm bursting from the seams with love… I just can't contain it. That's why I've hosted as many people as I could. Lately I can't even find satisfaction with art anymore and I spend most of my time on 7cupsoftea. I feel like I've been getting prepared for something, and I'm almost ready. You arrived at just the right time, just when I opened up enough. I've been feeling this sense of destiny since I fell in love, as if everything's falling into place. I told S her unconscious mind is like a God, and she thought I meant only hers. But where else would God live? In the clouds, or the sea, in dumb matter? Our brain is the most complex thing in nature and nature is divine — the universe recreating itself level upon level, until it came here to the level of our minds.
I'm not sure if I've ever felt jealousy. The thought of S being with other men always aroused me… I can't imagine love as anything else but a fire that's passed on from one person to another. There's a quote of the Buddha "A single candle can light a thousand others and its light is never diminished." It's just that you remind me of the way she made me feel, and make it grow stronger. I'm so glad you say a little pain never hurt anyone, that's what I mean when I say every experience is valuable, although of course that doesn't mean you should forget about balance.
What happened with S is a long story, but the short version is that she thought I wouldn't accept her and I thought she didn't accept me. The long version is this: S had told me how awesome Taos was and invited me to come over after she'd move there. When she was moving in she told me to wait, as she felt like she'd have to "entertain me". During my last trip I thought back of that and couldn't stop laughing, but I understand: she didn't get the love she needed as a child, so she thinks love is conditional. I told her she didn't have to and went anyway, because tickets cost more in July and August, and by September there wouldn't be much work for stay anymore. I sensed her insecurity, so I confronted it: she'd said several times that she felt bad about manipulating people, so I said I'd sensed that all along and that I liked that about her. But my pride was hurt when she'd called me dumb earlier when X didn't go well for me (she thought I'd blame her, but I'd been wanting to use it for years), so unconsciously I took on a humiliating tone ("gotcha!")… She doesn't really feel fully accepted by anyone, so it was hard for her to believe that I did, and she must've thought I was being sarcastic. From her reply I now felt like she didn't accept me, so I fired an ultimatum, upon which she broke off contact. I sort of forgot about her for a while, probably because the hangover from X made me fall out of love. When I recovered, I woke up one day knowing what was going on, and you'll never guess what gave me my epiphany: https://youtu.be/G5FUH3eoizc?t=14 .
It's like S made a crack in my shell, and made it easier for you to make another crack on top of the first one, and the same light shines in through them all. Everything we know comes out of the universe and by ourselves we are nothing, so we are really just a reflection of the universe, and I just love people who are themselves because their reflection is the most faithful, and they most embody the universe.
Please don't worry about being upset, you can express that too. I want it all, I want to feel as much emotion as possible. I want to fear losing you. I want you to fear losing me. We should be, because nothing is certain, and even if someday we'll always be together we won't feel connected every moment. I want us to be mindful of that, of how all there is is contained in a moment of awareness or else does not exist. There's only one thing I don't want, and it's to feel nothing at all…
I did have one flaw in my acceptance before: I didn't accept inacceptance. That wasn't why we broke off contact: I think it's because we knew that it wasn't the right time for us. Still, I felt like she was crossing the line with what she said, because I equated that to inacceptance, and it just begs the question what "unaccepting" is… All that matters is that I accept what I feel (and what others make me feel), but it's not up to anyone else to accept someone in their place. And even if she doesn't quite accept who she is as entirely as I thought, it changes nothing about how much I do love her, because for the most part she is still herself, not a hedge plant like most, but a fully grown tree, maybe with just a few lopped branches.
Back in 2008 I hung inspirational quotes all over my wall to try to make me feel better. One of them was by Freud: "One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful." He was right. For quite a few years I actually missed that depression. It's really hard to describe, but it was so intense that it put me into some sort of trance in which pain and pleasure blurred together. It was as if it was so hopeless that I had no choice but to completely surrender myself to the way things were, and once I did, "bad" and "good" lost all meaning and I only saw my sensations in themselves, as pure beauty. It felt like dying and being born again. Actually this also happened in the aftermath of being madly in love… I think it's the most transformative force there is.
I don't think acceptance means you don't help each other to grow. You can express your emotions at wanting things to be other than what they are, and I will allow whatever those emotions do with me to change me, but I can't force myself to change and I will accept myself as I am while I am in the process of changing. What I mean when I say I accept everything is that I want to keep connecting no matter what comes through the connection: it's more about accepting experiences than accepting behaviors.
Oh I'm going to need you to pinch me really hard indeed. This is already hurting, and I wouldn't believe this if I weren't still so certain of my love of S after all that's happened. I know now that anything we do that's authentic will lead to good. Even when S and I fell out, it somehow felt so right. It was a catharsis that I think we both needed. Perhaps we had to prove to ourselves that we'd be ourselves at any cost. All I know is that up to this day, it's been enough to unleash my emotions like an eruption. I didn't know why, only that it had to happen, that I had to express what I was feeling. But our unconscious always knows what it's doing. We were worlds apart and I had to collide into her with all my might to break through. But I won't have to do this with you, because we're not each other's nemesis like she and I.
Before I saw her, I said I could learn from her open heart and she could learn from my open mind. I feel like I have learned a lot: all my life I've been asking myself whether people accept me or not and what it would mean if someone I truly cared for didn't. I was always expressing myself but I always had to push through an inhibition to do so, so that it felt really forced and I didn't know what I really needed to express and where to stop. Now I knew that even it doesn't matter, that even if that happened I was still going to be myself and it wouldn't be that bad. Years ago I had a dream in which I was turning to stone and quickly found a stone slab to write "unpetrify me" on it. She pounced at me with her tigress claws and destroyed the layer of stone.
Up to a point I believe you're right, or we'd all donate a kidney and be glad to have a slightly lower quality of life to save someone's life. Still, I think it's a matter of perspective and the truth is always very nuanced. Just as with free will, it depends on what you define as the "self". If by self you mean our ego, then we don't do everything for ourself, but if by self you mean our consciousness, then we do, but in that case our self is made up of everyone and everything we know. I believe consciousness is all that exists and our whole universe is contained in ourselves. Everything in nature is made up of fractals, formulae which are extremely simple but get you extremely complex results because they're applied to themselves over and over, so something infinitely complex could be contained in something as finite as our own consciousness. It's all that makes sense to me, because how could consciousness just come out of nothing? We must've always been here. We're all Gods who dream each other into existence, but we have no control over it, because our will arises from the dream, and not the other way around. Everyone is a part of me to the extent that I'm conscious of them, and outside of my consciousness, they don't matter to me because out there, existence is infinite: out there everything exists infinitely many times over and nothing will change that.
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