Subtlety, Intimacy, Motivation II

As compared with philosophies such as Hegel's idea of making progress by transcending paradox, I can remember being young enough to feel that there was just love and the desire for love as the entire fundamental basis of human interaction. Sure, this could be an idealization on my part, an inaccurate memory, but the feeling remains as something simpler or more basic than any emotional-intellectual paradox. In the same way, Buddhists talk about how no individual-composite thing is an entity separated from any other, Adi Da talks about the illusion of separation, etc. It's possible, then, that there is no paradox or separation or dichotomy between me and anyone else, between any one ego and another. I believe traditions that emphasize the difficulty or iniquity or "illusion" of ego actually support the illusion as central or important. It's the same as maintaining fear in a devil or evil which one cannot find as actually existing and then using that fear as justification for evil actions against other people. Yes, the iniquity ends up existing, but it is constructed rather than fundamental. We literally "make it up" AND it's very real--not one or the other. The same can be said, and has been said, of ego.

Just as insisting on the reality of evil on a group level (as religion or critical political analysis or whatever) justifies conflict and maintains a feeling of separation, insisting on the importance and limitation of ego maintains intrapsychic conflict--the flipside of conflict between people. Essentially, we end up feeling something like anger or threat and then end up overinterpreting the genuine feeling. When allowed its place but not more, the fundamental feeling ends up being a genuine connection to other people and the world around us. By the time we begin learning language (communications), though, we begin learning interpersonal interpretations of feelings (culture and philosophy). Every single culture has limited interpretations of universal human potentials. And those limitations eventuate in some very interesting--all fundamentally unnecessary--conflicts. While some very motivated individuals have been able to establish that simple fact (that conflict is unnecessary) within themselves, we have only begun to play with communicating this fact.

It's an interesting situation, and we all get to question whether we want to be interested by intrapsychic and interpersonal conflict or whether we can actually be motivated and interested in something else. Eckhart Tolle said this by remarking that people either move towards peace or drama. Interesting, He seems to include a lot of what people generally consider to be emotionally "positive" in his understanding of "drama"--like noticing how closely love and hatred are related. As a global group, we have so far acted as if we prefer drama, partially because we have not agreed to make this question explicit. So far, it's only sort of a global topic in the same way that most individuals consider peace briefly but do not necessarily pursue it. Somewhere along the line, things seem to get very complicated. Well, this complication is our cultural heritage; it's made possible by our evolutionary (metaphysical and/or biological) propensities. In Abraham Maslow's words, "Capabilities (such as the human capability for creativity) are needs." We have amazing capabilities.