These are really the two emotions which consitute my sins. I really don’t feel jealousy, greed, lust which I satisfy by using people, pride beyond healthy self esteem, and I’m not lazy.
It seems to me, though, that there is a part of me which can sit behind my self, and watch how my emotions flow into the world. I watch, and somewhere in there my world, what I bring into the world, is polluted with these two emotions, which are sort of mixed in as the whole thing flows out.
I believe I have finally isolated the source of both. Now it is a task of understanding and dispelling them. Description is to cure roughly what a picture of aspirin is to ending a headache. As you might imagine, I’m no fan of talk therapy. I believe it encourages narcissism, abdication of personal responsibility, and moral weakness.
I had this dream last night, in which I was shown by a guide people sleeping, and malevolent spirits hovering over them, trying to scare them. When people awoke, they would shoot at them, but those around them thought they were mad, because they had not seen what they had seen.
What happens when we feel anger? Is it not an initiation of the mechanism by which we physically defend ourselves? Yet, normally there is no physical danger. The danger is to our self esteem, and our emotional independence.
The way I visualize this is that a ghost comes into being, one that is fighting us. We create another ghost, to counter it. We are never really seeing the person in front of us, who we would say has provoked this anger.
I’m thinking out loud, but let’s run through a concrete example, one in which anger is justified. You do some work for someone. They had promised you X per hour, but when the work is done, and it’s time to get paid, they offer you X-Y, and say that was the deal. You know they are lying, and they know that you know they are lying. But there it is.
Your task is to get paid what you are owed. Everything that furthers this aim is desirable, and everything which retards it is not desirable.
The first fact to be acknowledge is that you may not be able to accomplish this aim. If you had an oral contract that was witnessed by no one, you will have no enforceable claim in court.
You can get angry and threaten them. They may then threaten you back. A moral relationship may degenerate into a physical one, in which the stronger, more clever, more lucky man wins. Might will make right.
You can appeal to their sense of decency. Let us suppose, though, that they have none. Clearly, these people exist. You can threaten them with defamation. This may or may not work.
Let us say in the end you fail. You have been cheated. This sort of thing happens all the time. Now what?
You have created this ghost, ready for a fight, and he doesn’t go away. As I visualize it, we have many selves, and this man gets a room in your house. Whenever you open that door and go into his room, there he is, fists up, face clenched, and amped up. He is like this all the time. He is there when you sleep, and he is there when you are awake. He is always standing at your shoulder when you meet people, and perform the business of your life.
How do you make him go away? You can cement off that room. You can lock him in there, and refuse to acknowledge his existence, but every time somebody brings up that deal, he pops right through, fists up, ready for a fight.
This is a burden.
I think the only way to make him go away is to refuse to consider anger as a response to ANY circumstance. This is not to relinquish your right to demand your rights, but rather the mechanism of creating a proxy to do it. All problems have solutions. Sometimes the solution is forgetting the problem. You do this by being present in the moment, and not living in the past or the future. You let everything go, as you go. If you travel light, you will travel far.
I find I laugh a lot more when I can’t remember who I “am”. What sort of person am I? I don’t know. I’m standing here, though. Would you like to go have lunch somewhere?
Is this a way to live? I don’t know. I coined a term for this a while back, though, called “forgession”. This is the process of actively forgetting, forget plus progression. I suppose it should be forgression, but I like the other one better.
To live otherwise, it seems to me, is to live in a wax museum, filled with all the ghosts you have created over the years. Sooner or later, they crowd you out, and you are left walking a narrow path that is mapped out for you. You are unfree.
Some people live in the past. They remember the affronts with which their grandparents were afflicted. Such is the case, for example, with the grandchildren of those Arabs who chose to leave Israel during the war in 1948. They can’t forget, because they want to be prisoners. Their rage is their identity. That is not a very good identity.
Sadness, it seems to me, is the consequence of that ghost feeling defeated. You have another room where someone sits, unvictorious, his head in his hands, moping. Often he drape himself on your back, and asks you to carry him everywhere, since he doesn’t have the energy. If you like, you can ask anger to kick his ass, reenergizing you, but you have just exchanged one problem for another. In neither case are you free. Your “home” is not your own. You have guests you invited in, but who now refuse to leave. Every time you want to go out for some fresh air, to enjoy the sun, they drag you back in. “Don’t leave us”, they tell you: we are afraid we might die.
And so we cling to outdated, unnecessary reactions to things that happened many years ago. We all do this, I think, to some greater or lesser extent, which in large measure depends on the extent of the affront, which becomes larger proportionately to who hurt you and how early.
We-I-carry burdens which are unnecessary.
I would add that bitterness is when the two get together, and decide to destroy your home, the place where you should be able to rest and seek shelter. The bitter person can never rest. They hate the world because they hate themselves. They hate who they have become, but refuse to see it.
When the early Buddhists set off across India, they did so as itinerant beggars, who rose early, and never ate after noon. This would seem a hard life, but it would seem to me what they were trying to build were palatial, airy, sunlit estates, completely free of permanent guests, and therefore open for companions whose company they found pleasurable, easy and free.
I don’t have all the answers. All I can say is that I trying to find them.