When you see and feel this energy in its pure form, you want to avoid it. I want to avoid it. I want to do things where it does not come up. I want to avoid activities, like Kum Nye, like prolonged periods of silence, like long sets of rolling and stretching, where it comes up. It is unpleasant. I want it to simply disappear, in one session. I want to call out to it and tell it to go away.
But it is like a fog, liberated from one place, and now trying to envelop my life. I feel this. I feel it like the monologue at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings, where Cate Blanchett as Galadriel says something close to “The world has changed. I can feel it in the air. I can feel it in the water. I can feel it in the Earth. The world has changed.”
But I of course have not changed at all. I am simply becoming more conscious of who I am. This is a change, I suppose, but closer to an unmasking than a true change. My possibilities have increased, but only in the perceptual realm.
This morning I found myself spontaneously imagining the world as a Ring Wraith, which terrified me when I first read those books in the 5th grade. What would it be like to look at the little hobbits as prey? To feel a continual and unquenchable hunger for death and destruction?
Well, now, perhaps, I know. I felt it in me.
And I feel how arbitrary the lines we draw between ourselves are. We need tribes to feel at home, and we need violence, quite often, to reinforce the value of the tribes. And to get beyond these tribes, we must confront our own darkness, as individuals. The need to belong, and the need to reject, arise from the same place. Violence and evil arise from the same place that the need for home and hearth, and kith and kin arise from.
The man wandering the wilds as a beggar or solitary hunter can be free from such compulsions, but this, too, is not a properly human life. The way forward is for all of us to become free from the need for social bonds, then to reengage humanity as a great joy and open source of pleasure. We must all become enlightened, in important ways.
But to turn to what occasioned this post, or in any event turned me from my lit incense and candles to my computer to type this, it seems to me that historically most all violence has felt just. You do it in the service of your cause and your people. Both sides in most conflicts feel themselves to be in the right. This is a truism.
But even people working from the position of true selfishness, who simply want things, or power, or wine and women, rape and pillage–who, to be clear, do ALL the things we are supposed to reject on our shadow side, and thus in some respects become heroes to people who feel constrained by our world, and afraid–work from lies. They do not perceive, and thus do not pursue their true interest.
To frame this slightly differently, even people who do not proceed from motives of idealism and zeal fail. Their idealism is their own subjective sense of well being. Their zeal is to have and be everything possible in this world, to fuck who they want, eat what they want, experience what they want, go where they want, to never be told no.
Even this is a failure. Even this is Duhkha. I feel this.