I desire to save you needless and undesirable trouble by firing your way a heavy dose of reality to spur your contemplation. Don’t stroke a fallen angel as she’s perfectly able to make you feel singular, momentous, appealing. They say, don’t they, that you should never fondle with the devil if you don’t know what the consequences will be – to avoid playing with the captivating blaze of women driven by madness. This is harder than you think. For like women, men too like to tend to danger with an open fist. And where sexual desire is concerned, more so. When we gaze at the devil, that clever and illusory rogue, what we see are not the out-turns of yielding to her tempting double-dealings, but the high prospect of furnishing our urges. Our bigotry is doing the talking for us, and what we hear is but a figment of imagination. She has led you on so carefully, as she delicately laid down the snare and pulled the wool over your eyes.
Does it matter at that point whether your eyes are unlatched or closed shut, you’re fancying grand portraits of amusement, indulgence and stimulation, and you don’t feel regretful for having been sweetly bamboozled into a contrived manner of thinking that keeps you on edge, hopeful, but ultimately thwarted and defeated. And you know, don’t you, the perils of hope, and how ruinous its effects can be in the midst of tragedy and tribulation. Hopefulness succeeds only when it is casted under the light of mindfulness, and if you grow too dim, no amount of hope will recover a situation you don’t truly see or care about. To live in expectancy is to await disappointment, for to anticipate is to assume you have sufficient knowledge and total certainty of what lies in wait. More often than not, that chronic expectation is mingled with a shudder of fearful doubt, and so to give up your expectancy would demand that you part with your anxieties. But what makes you think you’re ready to stop trying, to renounce the vanity in worry and live so freely, so honestly, that none of life’s horrors can phase you? Such a freedom comes at a cost, however, and that cost is often disorientation or a loss of one’s bearings.
Kafka says, “I am free and that is why I am lost.” In other words, the liberty many earnestly seek has unforeseen outcomes many decide to leave unnoticed, and man being so miserable in nature, he many a time can’t put up with a way of life so unconstrained that it leads him off course and into sin. On the one hand, man is anxious because he’s frustrated by obligation, longing for relief; yet on the other, when released from his chains, he’s confused and wretched for a different reason – moving from one edge to another, he can’t determine where the congruous centre lies. Thus, he incessantly knocks around, swerving and getting lost in an attempt to find himself, even though he doesn’t know how himself looks like, which always leave him wandering around with a sense of poverty. His life becomes a heavy digression, for he starts to notice for himself that whether he is handcuffed or undone, he is still cursed by a feeling of discontent. When you furnish the damned with too much liberty, you don’t make them happier; only more miserable. A wretched can’t be on the loose, unconfined; you worsen his shape and heighten his misery. Don’t be so certain that freedom is a universal cure, for doing so is presuming that everyone bears enough composure to keep it under control and reap its benefits. This is not the case, and for most people, it grows into a shameful agency that loudens their decadence and further dilutes their already pitiful shape. Perhaps for the herd, subjugation is more worthwhile than liberty, and liberty more worthwhile to the anomaly who, by his righteousness and solidity, can wield his independence to serve not only himself, but those who stand in need of his influence.
Maybe your object should not be to keep a tight rein on your anxiety and desperately try to abolish it. The truth can be more subtle, in that you learn to capitulate your necessity to preside over it, and instead allow it to transpire as it may. Then your life is not one constant grapple with a feeling you can’t ever keep up with – then you can learn to play the witness who, among the confusion, can watch without drawing half-witted, baseless suppositions that determine his leading sentiment. Impressions come and go, but your perception does not. Adapt yourself in such a way that passing impressions don’t hold enough right to unsettle you. In my estimation, this is what good judgement is all about; accurately distinguishing the empty from the solid without reducing yourself to a poor bastard in the process. Often, it is that illusory sentiment of emptiness that arouses anxiety, for you are not absorbed in anything, distracted by copes. You are simply there, with yourself, and nothing else. That lack of content troubles you, because you remember that you have been running away from yourself, trying hard to keep yourself busy, so you leave behind your desolation and find some restfulness in the amnesia that comes from conscious interference. We are all perpetually interfering with ourselves to bury our disquiet and immerse ourselves with as much leisure as possible.
Boredom is both the fiend and the genius, for it haunts our delusions and preys on our timidity, but it too opens up a door to he who is forbearing and eager to know about stillness. The monotony of boredom is rather riveting, for it can turn out to be a most creative and original endeavour if carefully attended to and looked closely. First it is accompanied by feelings of intense inconvenience, but once lived through, by feelings of genuine strangeness and tranquility. This is partly why remaining still in solitude is a confrontation with discomfort for most people, despite the practice being free from hardship; it is precisely by our inability and unwillingness to sit, do perfectly nothing and be fond of it that we are so unsettled within ourselves and have the insistent craving to do something. How about you learn to revel in nothingness for a while, so that somethingness doesn’t drive you away from yourself? Most people look stable outside, but are faintly and hopelessly wobbly within, as they have never searched for inward soundness through attending to their highly strung inclinations and aversion to boredom. If you desire mental soundness, you require inward silence, and the way you accomplish the former is by accustoming yourself to exploring, patiently and without making a lot of noise, the wilderness and backwoods of your own inward awkwardness.
That’s exactly why tedium is concealed insight, it has a brilliance to it that first confounds you, then astounds you. If we are to seek higher knowledge, we must be prepared to suffer quietly the ramifications of our own inessential distates, that have, more often than not, added extra flesh to our difficulties and embroidered our concerns to such a degree that no amount of rationalization is sufficient to extricate us from their hallucinatory force. What I am pointing it is basic in nature, but a society driven by serious abnormalities must turn back to its roots to find out how estranged it has come to be. For once the individual is alien to himself and others, he’s everlastingly running into himself and nurturing a bitter hostility. This unending inward disagreement makes him loathe, by a menacing distance and projection, the people that encompass his environment, irrespective of how worthy and moral their natures are by comparison to his own. What he sees is not what they are, but what he is – if it is hatred that drives his impulses, it is that which tinges his perception and spurs him to unearth that one abominable quality about them that makes them fallible.
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