|
|
The degradation of love and the fallacy of reason.
Chapter
6
All this talk about freedom,
ethics and morality is all very well, but are we so free as all this, is
it possible to be free to know oneself? What about when a person is
driven by fear, obsession, an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, pain,
punishment or abuse (often at the hands of a brutal and sadistic partner
or parent)?
We each carry an inner voice,
critical or reasoned, chattering away all the time. To check out whether
such a voice is operating right now, the reader should close their eyes
and pause briefly. The voice I speak of is the one that is saying,
‘What’s he talking about?’
This inner voice can either be a
good friend or a vicious enemy. It is the voice of our reason, and it is
through this voice that we assimilate our world and make sense of it.
How we make sense of reality and maintain it in a sensible fashion
inside is through past experience. We are vast storehouses of
information, much, if not most, of it is maintained in parts of our
minds that are sub-conscious. We are not aware all the time of all that
we have learnt from life; we call up relevant bits as we go along. The
problem is that if the information we carry is abusive, negative or
plain destructive, unless we find a way to challenge that information it
remains a real and vital part of our sense of who we are and how we
relate to the world and ourselves.
If we grow up in an environment
that teaches us fear and self-loathing, then that is the normality with
which we embrace the world. Our reality is composed of that information
and we remain essentially unaware that it might be a twisted or
distorted view, or that there might be a possibility of a different way
of being. After all, from what has it become twisted or distorted; to
what are we to relate it to? Where is there a bottom line of normality
against which we can measure our grasp of it, or lack?
There is no one cohesive
reality, to even begin to think such a thing is ludicrous. There can be
absolutely no sense of a common reality between, say, a beggar on the
streets and the Queen of England. Whilst they may physically live in the
same organic world, there is no co-relation between their subjective
experiences of it. This extreme is merely used to persuade the reader to
examine any two people; anything other than the most cursory glance will
reveal that we each live in our own separate reality, vital and unique.
No matter the extremities
suffered or imposed there is within each of us a vital spark that,
despite abuses and torments, demands life. No matter how poorly
expressed, whether in bitterness, rage, jealously, obsession or numbing
dislocation, still the spark will not be silenced. In a world driven by
the excesses of capitalism, discontent remains and abides as individuals
sense, though perhaps never reach to empower that sense, that there is
more to life than mere survival, or work, or fear, or abuse. As we reach
to empower our inner being, in so much we embrace freedom.
|