Quote:
Originally Posted by craig1120
OP you say you don’t want anything, but it’s more likely that you just don’t know what you want because your will has been suppressed and you’ve been told what you want rather than freely chosen it. If you focus on your will, which means going from your head to your body, you will find desires. (You’re going to need to use the aggression to go from head to body and connect to your will).
There’s going to be two different categories of desires from your will: One is justice, revenge, domination, etc. The other is status, admiration, prestige, etc. Choose the latter.
Also, talk is cheap! Staying stuck in limbo, denying the desires of your will, is as weak as the “pathetic” mindset of the “children” that you look down on!
Yes, if you really really focus on your desires and the fact you can’t have them you will become extremely uncomfortable and possibly enraged beyond anything you’ve felt before. And you are indeed likely to find a lust for power, revenge, and justice there in that anger. But that is not because these things are your essential desires or will. If you had everything you wanted would you still have those desires? If you had all of your freedom and a nice happy life?
At first glance it seems these feelings of anger and frustration are aroused by your subconscious programming telling you that in order to attain external things and achieve happiness you must act in a dominant fashion. Monkey take my banana I kill Monkey and get all bananas! These are built in mechanisms which trigger a fight response when we feel our back is against the wall. People can conflate these prompting mechanisms with desires. Power shifts from a means to defend yourself and achieve goals to becoming a reward in and of itself.
Fighting against those urges is not the reason for the extreme discomfort. Those urges cause big problems so fighting them off can be a good thing. The problems might not manifest immediately but over time they will show. From a purely functional perspective, acting on those urges causes an increased risk of having a negative experience. It’s not hard to see how interacting with others in a hostile fashion creates a near certainty of trouble for yourself. Beyond the risk of backlash, dominant and extortive behavior actually slows down progress toward making our lives easier and more enjoyable. And as you said, they can cause problems of conscience.
From a more psychic perspective there is a dichotomy between those types of urges and many of our other desires. Hence the conscience problems. We are empathetic. We want to socialize and have a good time. We want connection free from conflict. We want an enjoyable shared experience with no strain on our psyche. Our true Will is not domination or these other hurtful things. Our true Will is love and freedom.
Is it the system we have built on top the template of life or life itself that stands in such stark contrast with our spirit of love and freedom? Perhaps we feel restricted because we are so far disconnected from the way we were meant to live. It’s hard to say. Maybe the current system set into motion by us has stifled our freedom and creativity so much that we have begun to look at life as a whole as restrictive.
In my previous post I touched on the imposition of the consequential nature of this world. This could be the real seat of the extreme discomfort you feel when you focus in “from head to body”. It is the realization that you are not free. You are slave to consequence. You are a prisoner of the body. You’re restricted by time, logic, and all of the physical laws. You’re forced, by extortion, to work and compete. There is a disconnect between the imagination and the reality.
The modern idea of the hero’s journey toward status, admiration, prestige etc. is a trap. Depending on intention it could be originating from the same urge for domination and the other desires you’ve labeled in the first category of Will. Or it could be coming from what I consider to be a part of our true Will- the need to feel loved. Either way it is caused by confusion.
While vying for status is not as harmful as a no-holds-barred attack for revenge and domination it still causes a lot of problems for society. Status is relative. In order to achieve greater status you must be above another. This is especially damaging in an open system where ranking impacts the overall life experience of everyone. That is our current system. It is mostly money which determines status and money determines options along with quality of life. We see this now the disparity of wealth. It is a huge problem.
The quest for status also has a deleterious effect on the psyche of that individual. It is a “soft” form of domination often over unwilling parties. Your conscience might not differentiate between your categories of desires. It’s also a perpetual cycle of suffering. You will not feel loved unless you have x. The old “keeping up with the Joneses”. You’re like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick. You’re slave to the worldly urges deceiving you.
Rebel and sit out.