There exists a person who finds that what people (generally) proclaim to be love, is a concept, feeling, experience, and emotion that is nearly synonymous with and virtually indistinct from what we describe as feelings of lust, passion, pleasure, possession, and even its inverse, pain. This person finds all of these emotions to be very base, very primal emotions humans feel which rarely, if ever, transcend the boundaries of their own self-limiting definitions.
Can the person who looks at love this way truly ever love another?
The Gods of antiquity are imperfect, and always have been, for they are we, we are they. The Universe's chaos has always reflected what lies inside of us, chaos and swirls of archetypes that have fashioned themselves into patterns when we apply the snapshot of space and time and attempt to read significance and meaning into existence as opposed to simply being and existing. we wanted to understand our "selves." things like ego, language, technology, cosmos, mythology, religion, society, civilization are all by-products of this yearning for understanding.
from my perspective, there is irony in the concept of love. it feels to me like a state of perfection and one-ness that we cannot achieve, because the illusion of ego gets in the way, and the ego is all about self-gratification. humans are woefully ironically imperfect and we are constantly striving, longing, searching... but never quite striking at the "it" that we seek.
and love is nothing but another one of those words, like the word word or perfect or mind that abstracts itself to the point where it defines itself, never able to reveal its own true nature, like how the mind is never quite able to get at or think through itself to reveal its underlying essence. in that way, it seems like we can only withstand intermittent doses and highs of love, dulled or paused by pain, its anti-, its counterpart, its yang. True Love, in a broader concept of the term, would be too much to experience in its full intensity, to its max like true Pain, its inverse. To experience true Love without ego in place, without the element of self-gratification, would be to die, the releasing of our spirits back into the Oneness of the [uni/multi]'verse's womb.
So this quote from Schopenhauer sort of expresses how I feel, in a way:
"Our existence is based solely on the ever-fleeting present. Essentially, therefore, it has to take the form of continual motion without there ever being any possibility of our finding the rest after which we are always striving. It is the same as a man running downhill, who falls if he tries to stop, and it is only by his continuing to run on that he keeps on his legs; it is like a pole balanced on one’s finger-tips, or like a planet that would fall into its sun as soon as it stopped hurrying onwards. Hence unrest is the type of existence."
But with some differences, I think. Being that I dont really believe that theres anything beyond a present moment, that future/past are non-existent, I dont think the present is ever-fleeting or that it ever really changes. At least thats what I believe for right now, which is the irony. It may "change" tommorow, my "beliefs". But there is no tommorow, because there is no time, so no change, etc. Follow that logic out if you will. i think the illusion of change is somehow responsible for the "emptiness of existence" that schopenhauer speaks of, but i need to think that out further. i'm really diggin his philosophy this quarter.
[also want to think about later: Someone (cant remember who) described the relation of mind/body as the brain being the vessel through which mind expresses itself through the human. Those are my words in a summary that doesnt really cover the hypothesis, but thats the gist, I think, and I dont feel like flipping through my books to find it. This concept is resonating, though.]
