Emoticon The people who write the script for the 21st Century, whoever they are, the GP in advertising slang or the general public - the politzbureau of emotionality - have decreed that when something happens - terrible, monumental or ecstatic - you must feel something. Emotion is catharsis, emotion is good. When a plane disappears in the ocean, a bomb goes off in a public square, or when your sports team wins - whatever horror or pleasure moment massages your retina - it is your personal responsibility as a good citizen of planet earth to bring forth an emotion, to feel pity and compassion, and not only that, to project that emotion far and wide, throughout all internet and space, a great cry of distress. Well, yes. A great cry of distress is appropriate. Our situation is dire. The house is burning. Why pretend it isnt? You actually feel better when you admit how bad it really is. Then you can actually do something. When the horror of the situation, as Gurdieff puts it, becomes apparent, finally a fire is lit in you, finally you can begin to resist the drift and ennui, to begin your arduous task on earth of undoing the gorgons knot, to battle with those unconscious forces, to find a way to give your own special gift of liberation to the world, whatever that might be. But first you have too see it, admit it - the horror, the horror. Only then can you see that small blue flower, in the midst of a charred battlefield of corpses. The beauty within the horror. Life is poignant, tragic, terribly beautiful and heartwrenching. But then there is emotionality. It is a drug. Its crack and cocaine. Its what every Holywood movie tries to do. Overstimulate you with emotion, so that you feel nothing really. You are completely absorbed. There is no space, you dont exist anymore, you are completely raped with emotionality. Rape is a strong word, but I think it is appropriate. I dont think you can get around it as metaphor for what is happening to the ecological, meta-ecological, material and spiritual landscape of the planet earth. The worst thing is, even though you are being harmed, you keep asking for more. You actually like it on one level, although in your heart of hearts you know its an evasion, a form of secret sadomasocism, a betrayal of the sun and the moon and the stars. Emotionality is actually an escape from pure feeling. You represent your emotion loudly. You dwell in it and wrench it up and go over it again and again until it becomes something detached from you. You make a lurid movie out of it, with a whole cast of characters, friends an enemies - who are actually just different parts of you. You externalize everything because you dont want to actually inhabit your own tender vulnerability. You make everything a war between the darkness and the light, because, more than anything you dont want to inhabit those misty regions, those mysterious vistas, of which you are really made of. The other extreme is called rationality, objectivity, which asks us to ignore our emotions, to put them aside. How else could one actually go to war, or drop bombs on innocent populations, without being objective, without looking at the facts and figures? We do the necessary evil, because of our so called objectivity - we cant be swayed by emotion. The bad weeds are to be rooted out and burned. We need to build and multiply our killing machines and drones, make more secure prisions, put up endless surveillance cameras, secures ourself from those darker forces, police ourselves against predatory, malign violators. But our so called rationality is merely another kind of emotionalism. Ism always means being removed from the particular, into generalized abstraction. It means that we are feeding secretly on fear. Fear of the other, fear of chaos, fear of the messiness of life. We dont look at whatever arises with open feeling. Our whole being contracts, our eyes become cross-eyed, we become furious and righteous, we feel a perverse and feel strange sense of power in the grips of our sentimental rationality. We love our country and will kill for it. When an emotion arises, question the source. When an emotion arises, it may be the most abject stupidity, it may be totally borrowed from idealism, it may be something entirely inherited, extrinsic, an alien force. Question, feel, go prior to that emotion. What is its texture? What is the most subtle root? Does it make you divide the world in dualisms, dichotomies, extremes. Is it an evasion of that delicate feeling, aroma, complex nuanced tissue of life?
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:19:32 +0000
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