Yesterday at sunset, the effect of your absence from the island, on my own experience of existence, became clearer to me.
I sat at Zen Beach by myself and realized, again, that I had no interest in anyone’s company this evening. The brief occasional eye contact with people who are passing by on the beach is enough for me, I have no will to have any further contact, with anyone.
I also realized that my daily routine walks to the beach for sunset are in a way a daily visit I do to the “people world”, and that I might unconsciously use the setting of the sunset as some sort of protection from the risk which the “people world” holds for me.
Because I don’t resonate with most people’s energies, in every encounter with the “people world” I risk being caught into an interaction with any of them, an interaction I commonly find challenging, but the setting of the sunset makes sure that no matter what will happen, and who I’ll meet, the sunset will always be there, making whatever happens worthwhile.
Trying to understand why is it that I usually suffer from these interactions, I reflected upon the types of intentions my perspective finds common for most people to have a dialogue with some “other”, and reduced them to three.
The first and most common is the (unconscious) intention to sweeten the pill of this existence, and when I say “this existence” I mean the experience that unfolds itself usually when one is truly “present”.
The experience of existence, as ‘I’ perceive it, reminds an itching sensation. One that does not let you rest. (The analogy is amusing in light of the fact that since I arrived on the island, I have been dealing with chronic physical itching…) .
This itch feels to me like a constant request for something without any hint regarding what this something is. Like a baby who cries and cries after he has already been fed, slept, been changed. Everything, and you just have no idea how to get his crying to stop.
I find people’s overall tendency ‘to move’ is related strictly to this itching sensation. People move from one occupation to the other, from one thought to another thought, from one plan to another plan. So many ‘moving’, so many ‘efforts’, and all this in order not to encounter this itching sensation.
I remember that once when I shared with you a similar feeling of mine, you said that maybe there are people who don’t feel like this, that for them existence is a fun and wonderful thing. I cannot deny the possibility that there are people who experience existence as you described, for I can only vouch for myself, based on my own experience, But from the same experience, I take the assertion that suppose it is impossible to give validity to any feeling that a person has regarding his existence before he gives himself a chance to experience it cleanly. And in ‘clean’ I mean no action, no thought, no plan, just breathing.
Why most people at the end of a vacation are happy and sometimes even eager to return to their daily lives?
What is this day-to-day life but a succession of “To Do’s” that one finds oneself thrown between- from one ‘to do’ to another. Supposedly imprisoned but in fact, achieving the enormous gain of not meeting the relentless itch of one’s own existence.
Any attempt to sit and not do, nor to give any name to your non-doing (for example ‘meditation’) will reveal the unbearable feeling of itching this paper is relating to.
The second reason I find common in people’s intention to speak is using speech as a tool for strengthening the sense of the imagined “I” that people cultivate. That avatar with which each of us walks around the world as his ‘game tool’ and most of us think it is really them.
In this motive sits a strong need to show the “world” and that imagined “I”, to show “all” who “I am”. Some, to feel their existence, need a world that will acknowledge them and by that acknowledgment will give their existence validity. Through their perception, without someone to see them, there is no proof of their existence. Like the tapir, which was already discussed in Koh Phangan – visitor’s guide post the root of the imagined “I” comes from the tapir type of consciousness and this is only an unequivocal confirmation of the assumption that lies at the base of the ‘Cheshire Tapir theory’ – which claim that every Cheshire necessarily carries a tapir within him because no existential experience is possible without passing through the illusion of the “I”.
So, I sat on the beach and felt at peace with my unwillingness to be a trash can for either of these two motives. People can easily find someone to help them pass the unbearable itch of existence or to strengthen within themselves the feeling that they have a valid “I”.
“I” am here for something else. which is rare to the point of non-existence, but I don’t really care. This is the third type of intention and this intention I get to feel with you. I call this intention – the desire for truth, curiosity for the truth, whatever ‘truth’ may be.
In the face of the sunset, I made peace with the fact that today I will probably spend another evening at home alone and that tomorrow I will most likely again have to bear this whole existence, moment after moment after moment. And I knew that despite this knowledge and recognition, I have no temptation to spend my time with anyone.
By the way, it is dynamic like everything and is not under ‘my’ control. Sometimes a place inside me is more prone to have a conversation from the first motivation. I am less open to taking part in strengthening someone’s imaginary “I”, nor mine, consciously. But to join forces to convey the unbearable feeling of existence, this certainly happens, sometimes even consciously.
It sometimes happens between us too, for there are moments when something in me can’t take it anymore, it’s just too much. This reminds me of when one is mindful regarding food, but still once in a while, one truly enjoys eating ‘trash’.
This document, by the way, in my opinion, reflects part of the dangers of investigating the “why” (one intention). A risk I already shared with you… as more motives are revealed, the ability not to give these motives energy becomes wider, and as a byproduct one overall ‘doing’ becomes less and less… reveling in that most of our actions, (if not all), originate from motives that do not “serve” us, at last not the ‘us’ referred to in this paper….
When I say “serve” I refer to progress toward a cleaner, more ‘accurate’ experience of existence, free from external templates, and more aligned with the “truth”.
what is that ‘truth’ I will never know, but I know how to spot a lie…
And the truth? That’s what’s left.
