Farewell

Dear friends,

As time passes it is getting harder and harder for me to keep the English part of my blog. I will therefore have to stop it here. Thank you very much for reading it and commenting. Special thanks to Meow, ersi and James for their insightful inputs. It was my honour to receive them.

I wish everyone all the best,
C.

Not our fault

I had to write an article on Lacan for a Greek magazine recently. In the past couple of months that I’ve been reading all related literature, I was impressed by the way Lacan tried to solve the riddle of human psychology. At the root of every want/desire that we feel, he said, there is a primary want which can never be met: the want to re-connect with our mother, like when we were in her womb. Now, this primary want cannot be met, so it changes faces all the time (like with metonymy in language). But, alas: even if some individual wants are eventually met, we can never feel satisfied and fulfilled, as our primary want will never be satisfied…

Besides wants, there are fears too. Our utmost fears are those of pain and death. What has threatened our security, our individuality, our attempts to meet our wants in early childhood is destined to be our companion forever, changing faces all the time, just like our wants do.

Now, both scientists and esotericists agree that the personality of a human being, which is the sum-up of our reaction to what is happening in the present moment, in our endeavour to satisfy our desires and/or avert potential threats, is completed around the 7th year of age. This means that our childhood wants and fears are its key determinants: we shape our personality in just these few years. After that, we are like a CD player, playing the same CD over and over again. Overwriting is possible, but it takes huge amounts of conscious effort.

The catch in this whole mess is that there is really nothing we can do. It’s not our fault. Even under optimum conditions, a child will always find something to be dissatisfied with, to be let down, will undergo a traumatic experience or will feel threatened – if not by anything else, by the comparison of sizes alone (his/her little body compared to the adults’). And all these determine the quality and depth of the fixation: how fearful, how weak, how incapable of loving we will become. It’s just how it is. And it’s not our fault.

Happiness super market

I’ve been into the triptych “love-beauty-enlightenment” since I was 18. I’ve tried many methods, among which: the Emin Way, Reiki, SRT, channeling and divinations of sorts. I’ve read tons of New Age books about spirituality, enlightenment, immortality and so on and so on. I boasted that I knew things that others did not, thought of myself as something extraordinary and waited to be adored by all creation in return. Every day I uttered deliberations to bring prosperity, love and happiness my way. I believed in my co-creator powers. Thus, I engaged heavily in meditation and visualizations – and was very sharp, if not downright rude, if someone had the nerve to interrupt my important engagements. I thought I had become enlightened, you see, that in some sense I was in this world but not of it.

There is no safest way to the rosy clouds. When putting yourself in such a situation, you essentially put it at the center of the world. Everything and everybody else just orbits around you as if of secondary importance. In a way, you become your own sun and get blinded, as a consequence. It’s a little bit like holding a lantern. You allow yourself only a very limited view: your body and just a few inches around it. And then you become so absorbed in what you see that you are convinced there is nothing else. In reality, you are holding a lantern in broad daylight, somehow like the Hermit card in the Tarot pack.

I would have stayed in this trance forever, if it weren’t for a series of hard jolts that brought me back to my senses. They actually forced me to lift my head and look around. And what I saw just made me gasp. Life had eluded me all these years. I thought I was living it to the maximum, but what I was really living was a self-delusion. I had even come to the point of lifting my shoulders in apathy when learning about other people’s hardships: they brought it to themselves, I thought. They are paying for old or new sins; they have no idea how things work.

Well, it turned out that neither did I. I thought of life as a big happiness super market and of world as a place of infinite joy and pleasure. I clang to it like babies cling to their feeding bottle, shut reality out and felt free to criticize everyone and everything. Such a fool that I was! Life was passing me by all these years that I spent in meditation, in contemplation of “beauty and love”, in certitude that I was enlightened.

Well, the world holds many things that are plainly ugly. We humans are so imperfect as a species and so predictable that it is almost alarming. But it’s OK. Even if the world is both ugly and beautiful and me imperfect and transparent, it’s OK. I’m still alive. And, at least now, I have the chance to begin to understand humility…

Test your EQ!

I am going on vacation for a week, but I’ll leave you with a little test which is supposed to measure the EQ:

There is a woman and a man, who love each other but live on two different islands. The man shares his island with a savage. The woman seeks a way to get to the man’s island, because she loves him, and the only way she finds is to go by boat. There is only one boat available and the boatman tells her that he will take her to the other island, if she takes off all her clothes and goes on board naked. The woman is puzzled with the boatman’s request and goes to the wiseman of her island to ask him. The wiseman’s advice to her is: “Follow your heart”. After that, the woman decides to take off her clothes and go on board the boat naked, as the boatman requested. The boatman keeps his end of the agreement and takes her to her beloved’s island. When she arrives at the island, however, the first person she meets is the savage, who immediately rapes her. At that particular time, her beloved arrives and, seeing her with the savage, breaks up with her calling her a whore.

Who do you think is most responsible for this outcome?

You’ll have to wait for the answers until Monday 26 July. Stay well and have a good time till then!

Predisposition

For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, the soul had something that was called “fora”, meaning direction. In other words, the soul was thought to have taken up, long before the birth of the body it inhabited, the direction of good or evil. Thus, man was considered to be born good or bad.

Quite some time has passed since then. Meanwhile, psychology has sustained that hereditary elements account less than behavioral ones for a person’s conduct. A person turns good or bad, according to the conditioning s/he receives during childhood.

Notwithstanding that, my late grandmother was certain that it's what people are made of that is of importance. No matter how many hardships one runs into in the course of his life, if he has a good soul, he will keep his goodness forever - and vice versa.

If this is so, however, how guilty is someone who commits murder? What if he is (genetically or at soul level) predisposed to do so? Can he be found guilty for his genes or his soul’s predisposition? How can these be his fault?

What do you think?

Is there such a thing as soul?

Much talked about, much used, the concept of soul has nowadays turned into a chewing gum, especially when put in the context of reincarnation. The truth is that the concept of soul has been tackled by both philosophy and religion since antiquity; this should account for the dozens of definitions there are. The soul is also connected to immortality, as it is widely believed that it’s the one and only component that survives physical death. In connection with the body, the latter is seen either as its prison or its shrine.

In terms of etymology, the word soul is linked by some scholars with the word sea, probably reflecting early Germanic peoples’ beliefs that the bottom of the sea was the place where souls originate and return. The corresponding Greek word psyche literally means a “gasp of air blown into”.

Do I believe in soul? Well, I used to. I am not so sure any more that the concept can be of real use; on the contrary, it can be misleading. People talk about the soul and reincarnation, as if it is their personality that will survive; a grave misunderstanding. Soul and personality are not the same. If it exists, the soul is the underlying layer where the ingredients of personality (thoughts, emotions, sentiments) softly fall upon or, by contrast, achingly leave their burning etchings on. It is the sum-up, the end result of a person’s tendencies, virtues, vices, ethics, codes of conduct, etc. It is the “therefore” of one’s life.

If there really is something of the sort, it should be likened to a processor and personality to a piece of software. Thus, “real” love for example should translate into love of the processor rather than the software.

And then there are other questions. Is soul restricted to humans? In other words, is it only humans that have soul? What about animals, plants, minerals? Is the animistic view to be ruled out as total folly?

What do you think?

On koans

The purpose of a koan is for the person who engages in it to realize the difference between the mind (which manifests itself as a flow of thoughts) and consciousness (which is the space that contains the flow of thoughts). Always the issue is to understand that it is identification with our thoughts and feelings which creates the sense of “I” and that there is something broader, namely consciousness, which is common to all and within which our individual “I”s simply happen. Zen masters identify consciousness with life itself.

The paradox surrounding a koan tends to arouse the mind for long, as the mind thinks it over and over trying to “solve” the paradox or simply find an answer, more or less like a dog chasing its tale. With koans, one is given the opportunity to realize the difference between mind and consciousness.

The moment when someone realizes that mind and consciousness are two different things, he can understand that the mind identifies with his personality and consciousness with his essence; this is how the koan’s purpose is fulfilled.

Fulfilling the purpose of a koan has little to do with explaining it. No matter how many explanations a koan receives, its meaning is never exhausted anyway. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that it has one and only, definitive explanation.

Examples of koans:

- Two hands clap and a sound is produced. What is the sound of one hand?

- How can one express the truth without speech and without silence?

- If I truly love myself, I must not love myself. If I want to protect myself, I must not protect myself.

- It’s neither the flag that moves nor the wind; it’s the mind.