I’m sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything. (Fernando Pessoa — The Book of Disquiet)
everything is different when it snows. you are forced to move in and through the world in a different way, everyone does, slowly, carefully and it affects the relationships between the humans.
i had to be out in it because i had to get someone from the station. i can never get someone from the station without experiencing waves of affect because of the times i … oh never mind.
i parked the car and, waiting inside the station, stood watching the humans. i didn’t feel seperate from them. i felt neither hate nor desire. and i was moved by them, their innumerable different shapes and sizes and attire, their ways of moving through the world, their coming and going, their need to be somewhere where they were not, and their emotions, as they were reunited with an other or separating from them, their coming together and their coming apart.
i’d been thinking on and off about separation and the state of being seperate, which is also about the state of a relationship which no longer is, say when you are not yet divorced but separated. the relationship is no longer, but one’s current state is still defined by it. and nearly four years later i am divorced but i still experience the state of being separated.
becoming separated is something that overcomes you, it happens to you, you are subject to it. your agency disappears and something which was rock solid, a building of a complex construction and architecture, with many spaces and doors you could open, other doors which were still to be opened, crumbled in front of your eyes. and there was nothing you could do about it.
once i was not seperate from someone and now i am. i’ve spent a lot of time and energy since trying to undo that feeling of separation, by becoming joined to something or someone else — and now i am thinking, is it also possible to not be seperate in a different way?
i’d been thinking about separation becomes somehow or other a text fell into my lap, as they do, which referred to the yoga sutras. they date from the 3rd or 5th century, opinions differ as to when exactly, which seems weird. they can tell from the bone of a dinosaur that it lived 170 million years ago but they can’t tell you when a text was written? i suppose when you’re talking dinosaurs a hundred years more or less makes no difference.
apparently in the yoga sutras there are five truths.
the buddhists also have truths, although they only have four, but they are noble! mind you it’s somewhat of a sleight of hand since the fourth noble truth is actually the eight-fold path. i don’t mean to be picky but that makes 12, or 11. also, not all of them are interesting. ok we suffer because of the ego, and because of desire, but how? why? and what is the solution? this is why they have the eightfold path which can essentially be summed up as ‘do the right thing.’
one set of truths is more or less a variation of the other and no one knows which came first but for mine the yoga sutra’s truths are of a much higher standard than the buddhist ones : in brief, one, humans forget as soon as they are born where they have come from, which is the oneness to which they also return after they die. two, they are born into a split, dual world where they have to develop an ‘i’ in order to survive. three and four : when they are separate, from each other and from the world, they suffer, from hate and desire. you’re getting two truths for the price of one there. hate is what they want to get out of their system and desire is what they want to put into it.
beautiful!
and the fifth …?
ha ha well the fifth truth is your old friend, and mine, and it is as old as human consciousness itself, it is the fear of death.