Fourth Form of Madness

Since I was 19 and read “The unbearable lightness of being” I’ve been wondering if I would ever know what the hell that book was about. I’ll be honest, I read it so I would have plenty to talk about whilst hanging out around the trendy, arty coffee places I used to frequent between clubs. I may have had plenty to talk about discussing Sabina’s hat, Tomas’s adultery and Theresa’s big child like eyes but I didn’t realise there was a whole different conversation going on in that book, one I couldn’t hear. However, the title stayed with me and intrigued me over the years.

I am always amazed what depths of passion awaken in me when I read philosophy. I liken it to the feeling I get when I am on the mat. Philosophy and yoga seem to decipher this world, this existence to me in a language that speaks directly to my subconscious, a land of strong symbols and mythologies shared by all of us, that does not ask our permission to be members of it. Enter my latest philosophical unit, “Existence and Freedom”. I have been waiting a very long time to do this unit. I have purposely not read Sartre as I wanted to be a place where I really understood what he was writing about and not merely reading words and hoping to pass a unit. I think over the years my life education, yoga and reading hindu philosophy had brought me to the bottom of a staircase, ready to take the first step up his body of knowledge.

Anyway, before Sartre comes Soren Kierkegaard. SK and I go back a long way. I was pulled to his writings when I was an atheist, to be fair I was just an intellectual atheist, my heart was never in it. I was lazy and it was always easier and trendier to argue that God didn’t exist than to take a leap (that’s borrowing from SK) and have faith and argue for God’s existence. Now I don’t want to get into the nitty gritties of what is God? I don’t want to know the unknown, I just want to love it and have faith in it. Whether you believe there is a kindly elderly being up there that hears your personal prayers and choices to favour you over and above the rest of humankind, or you see God as a impersonal almighty force, and energy that isn’t really bothered about your personal whims or fancies but rather what energy you are contributing to the collective, I don’t really care. It’s how you arrived at that belief that I am interested in, what backs it up. And here I don’t mean only the thinking behind your decision, as you will never arrive at these truths by purely thinking your way there. Thought must at some point, take a leave of absence and let nothing replace it.

But how does all this come back to “The unbearable lightness of being”, which I watched again today in film form. SK gave us a beautiful description of the stages of life (there are several) but here we will focus on the aesthete. The lover of pleasure and art, the seeker of fun and frivolity. At all costs avoiding responsibility, commitment anything that would weigh them down, bring weight to their soul. Tomas in unbearable lightness of being is a beautiful example of an aesthete (I’m not just guessing here Milan Kundera said that he modelled Tomas on SK’s aesthete). Tomas could continue with his aesthetic lifestyle, his lightness until Teresa came along. A woman that admitted to finding life heavy (ethical) and who demanded to be loved with such weight. Throw in a dash of Friedrich Nietzsche, who had a theory that life is eternally reoccurring that is every joy and every sorrow, every moment of your life just keeps on repeating continuously though out time for ever more. Nietzsche used this as a gauge to how you had created your own life, own person. If you shuttered at the thought of your life repeating, then you weren’t living out your own goals and desires, if you didn’t then you were. To me now, Kundera seems to argue in this film that even if life is a straight line and not reoccurring it is our decisions our choices that bring weight to our lives and that the unbearable lightness of being in this context is that if you continue on as an aesthetic and never develop to the ethicist stage, that is truly choosing as the aesthetic never choses they always go with what they like, life is unbearably light not because it is by nature but because it is by lack of choice.

If I learn nothing else in this unit, if I fail to understand Sartre, at least I got to finally get a chance to delve deeper into understanding this haunting title, “The unbearable lightness of being” . I’m happy with that……for now.

For the last three weeks I have been suffering with a dodgy eye. I have a flickering eye lid. Okay so maybe that isn’t the correct name for the condition but it feels like my eye lids is continually flickering. I keep on hearing myself explain to people that I am not winking at them but have this condition. Eventually this week I went to the doctor as it was starting to drive me mad. The appointment restored my faith in natural alternative medicine.

I haven’t been to keen on “modern” medicine for a while now. I suffered a neck and shoulder injury that hung around for 2 or so years. At first I was perplexed by the pain that I couldn’t get rid of. I couldn’t sleep, walk, sit or breath without pain. This was a whole new ball game for me as nothing had ever caused me such discomfort before and changed the activities I could and could not partake in. I went into a bit of a meltdown as the pain started making me reflect on various aspects of my life and being. During this time, I visited various doctors, specialists, physiotherapists and had a battery of tests done. All of them focused on the symptoms but not the cause. All of them treated me like a physical problem to be solved not as a holistic being enduring the many trails and joys of life with a psychological and spiritual side that are also susceptible to damage. I’m not even sure they may have considered that there may not have been solely a physical cause to the symptoms presenting. I felt a big disconnect between what modern medicine was offering and what I needed.

Returning to my present dilemma, I arrived at the doctors with my eye flickering in all it’s glory and after I gave him a detailed account of how long it has been going on for, how my eye feels weird like there is some kind of pressure problem, the fact that I have a reoccurring eye condition that attacks my eyes and causes damage if not treated immediately and effectively, he goes “Do you look at a computer screen?”. I wanted to say, “Of course I do, 99% of us look at a computer screen at some point in our day”, but my continuous flickering eye had worn the sass out of me so I said “Yes”. “Great” he says “That’s what it will be”. I started to express my concerns again about my eye but the look he gave me thinly disguised the fact that he thought I was a drug seeking crazy lady making another attempt to score. I snatched my $60 bill and made a dramatic exit by not saying “thank you”.

Then yesterday I was given a beautiful session of reflexology by a friend. My eye was still flickering but as I found myself relaxing into the session, I found my eye flickered less. This session was followed up with gong therapy at the Quiet Cone. I love gong therapy. There is nothing like lying back in a teepee, covered by snuggly blankets with the odd crystal or two strategically placed on the body and absorbing the beautiful vibrations and sounds of the gongs. There were big gongs, small gongs, deep gongs, high pitched gongs and gongs that sounded like crystal bowls. As the vibrations lapped against my body I found myself in a deep state of relaxation. Occasionally my body twisted and jumped of its own accord. My knees seemed to keep spontaneously spasming upwards. I was too relaxed to care and it was dark so I was guessing no one else in the teepee cared either.

Driving home that night I was amazed that all these memories kept coming up that I hadn’t thought about for over 15 years. The real amazing thing was that I felt exactly like I had at the time of the memories, the feelings were like the situations that the memories were based on had only just happened. I began to wonder if I had been carrying around these feelings/memories stashed somewhere out of the way in my psyche for all this time. Only problem with stashing memories/feelings is it is like listening to music with ear plugs in. If you don’t hear it, you don’t eventually get sick of the same old tune and turn the damn thing off! So on the way home, there was no need to play the radio to keep me awake. I had a whole bundle of repressed memories and feelings to acknowledge and to keep me awake on the long road home. That and my flickering eye, which amazingly isn’t flickering today.

I’m a people watcher, always have been. I loved observing people, people just being people, their actions, reactions and quiet moments. I remember in my final years of high school, when the guidance counsellor asked me what I wanted to do, I said if it was left up to me I would sit in a park, on a street, in a shopping centre, or where ever and watch people interact. He said there was no such job and recommended teaching! I do often wonder why he never mentioned being a sociologist or a philosopher but I guess I found that path myself. Anyway, the other day on the train I looked around, looking at the faces, the body postures, the tension each of us holds in the various parts of our body and man, we were not a happy crowd. Everyone looked exhausted (with good reason it was 6am), lifeless and like they had all just lost their iPhones.

Now I know life isn’t all about the good times and kicks and giggles but on that train that morning we all collectively seemed to be only connected to the never-ending struggle. To be honest, life is hard. Life is the abyss, the unknown, the uncontrollable, the never ending roller coaster that takes a lot of strength and courage to experience the ride. But what if life is not about the external but more the internal. What if a constant could be reached where no matter what happened externally you were able to maintain a constant state of being within. No not as a zombie but as a fully functioning, aware being that still sees the reactive states but actively choices not to partake in them. Full participation in life including exercising your choice to react or rather interact or dance with life in your selected manner. Take for example anger. Someone does something you don’t like, you feel a fire begin in your belly, a tightening of our throat and buzz in your head. Your thoughts start thinking of a million witty or cutting things to say that will engage you with this person (or with life) in a dance of anger. Usually these things spill out of our mouth, or through our actions and we feel vindicated or validated or whatever for whatever amount of time. Rewind back to the feelings that first started to arise, by becoming aware at this point of what you are creating, you can pause, examine the feelings and thoughts, pause some more, maybe do a little breathing, and see these arising feelings, thoughts, emotions as creations. Intangible creations. Not concrete, not absolutes but just creations. Then you have a choice. Act out your anger, or contemplate it, breath, work your way past it as you see it as a self made creation, and move on. There is nothing to resolve or control in the external world, only the internal and that’s a relief because trying to control the external world is as futile as trying to touch the sky.

Not always easy. One major road block stands in our way and it’s a big one! Ego. I’m not sure we all fully grasp what ego is. It’s such a misunderstood unseen yet always present significant part of you. Ego is kind of your friend and guide and kind of your Judas. One minute it will be saying “Yeah go this way, it’s the way to go if you want to be significant” and the next it kissing you on the cheek and revealing to you what an unauthentic being you have become by following the status quo. Tricky business, yet ego has usually stood up well before anger is felt in your stomach or your throat. It is the one leading your mind to the statements that will rip apart your opponent and it is ego who whispers seductively in your ear that you need to strive and compete with other beings. Yet by it’s very presence it is highlighting areas that you need to look at within yourself and thus is your guide.

Life is a process of learning this stuff and it’s continuousness. It’s a process I guess of becoming more conscious of your inner life and then letting the outer life flow. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it all the time. My journey involves many many missed opportunities to exercise my own advice. Just ask the lovely ladies I went to lunch with the other day. I was stressed at work and I proceeded to snipe and whinge and hold my angry space rather than choice not react to it and fully enjoy their company. As I said life is a process of learning. Being open to the learning is a start.