Part One
CrossChrono: It has been a while since I wrote as I’ve gone thru a roller coaster of feelings and have come to a more calm and stable place. Of course it had to do with love but it gave me the impetus to move forward. Seeing and experiencing constantly that it does not work in bringing about a personal and interpersonal peace. I’ve also been hesitant in writing as I don’t like to write when I’m feeling not so great but maybe that might help in getting out of it too.
Hi CrossChrono,
Welcome back. What an excellent and rich report about your discoveries and insights!
After I wrote my previous response I had begun engaging in ‘nipping it in the bud’ of all the loving and related feelings that I came across. I started doing it as it seemed that was the only course of action. I had already seen and experienced that it brought much suffering. Due to this I started experiencing feelings of meaninglessness, desolation, and bleakness as far as the ‘eye’ can see. What it revealed was that love was a way to cover up my loneliness. ‘I’ created an imaginary version of another person based on a dream and how ‘I’ intuited them to be and then essentially pretended that ‘I’ could be in union with this imaginary ‘other’. An instinctual movement towards assuaging the essential loneliness. When I become vulnerable thru trust in love, I am hoping that this other person will reciprocate this state of vulnerability. But in the process, I am revealing my fundamental loneliness and aloneness. If this other does not match the dream of love, then I feel it more deeply than I have ever felt before. The whole process is illusionary. The other person that ‘I’ am dreaming of does not exist. They can never match the dream. And vice versa as well. A sad state of affairs. This is further compounded for me because it has occurred to me that many people actually ignore or pretend that the ‘bad’ side of love does not exist. People will tell me that ‘I’ am too focused on it. But I cannot ignore it because it’s always there. Something is off with the whole business of relating with other people. And it is from this, my genuine desire for peace springs forth. My desire so far has been to uncover everything I can so that it can be in plain view. I also feel a fear behind this of ‘who do I think I am’. Like an authority telling me to sit down and shut up.
In order to successfully ‘nip in the bud’ it’s essential to have understood the underlying patterns of the occurring feelings you want to ‘nip’. Obviously there is still some remnant investment in love, which is not surprising, as it is considered the highly-prized cure-all for loneliness and the mess of the human condition in general.
You have made some significant inroads into understanding love, especially knowing that it has a ‘bad’ side.
The key ingredient for feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ was, when ‘she’ investigated the pining aspect of love, ‘her’ childhood-inspired romantic dream of belonging to a man and therefrom having an iron-clad identity as a woman (A Bit of Vineeto, #love). Seeing this fact, thus abandoning the romantic dream, and reclaiming ‘her’ autonomy, was only the beginning of a longer process of weening ‘herself’ off the whole maze of female identity and man-woman relating in general.
You say “The other person that ‘I’ am dreaming of does not exist. They can never match the dream.” It goes further than that, love itself can never fulfil the dream it inherently promises – it’s an empty chimera and will never bridge the separation so longed for by the lonely isolated identities who fall for love’s glamorous promise.
If this fact, that love will not solve your problem of aloneness and loneliness, is allowed to sink in, as an irrefutable fact, love will lose its appeal and you can regain your autonomy and dignity as a person in your own right – and simultaneous recognize your partner’s own autonomy and dignity. It also dispenses with pining and jealousy in one fell swoop.
With autonomy and dignity restored you can then naively relate to your fellow human beings in an increasingly intimate way, unilaterally. I know from experience how much a woman can appreciate intimacy, even though she may not know that this is really what she is looking for when she says she wants love. You will find out yourself when you proceed interacting with your partner in an intimate rather than loving way. (link)
CrossChrono: Anyways, I continued this process and due to this desolation I thought my partner would also start feeling the same way. They did not as far as I know and I actually kind of preferred this way of being over being in love. But nonetheless something else triggered possessiveness when my partner was talking with another man. I started feeling jealous and it put me in a state of muddled thinking. I nipped that in the bud. But then my partner brought up wanting to hang out with this other man and their partner. This again triggered the same feelings. This time it caused much suffering and it took some time to claw my way back out. Talking with my partner helped and they confirmed that it had been my own reaction which was making things seem the way they were. So I asked myself if I am repressing something. I genuinely wanted to know if I was but I kept going over and over thru the same old feelings. Then it became clear there was a missing ingredient: intent.
I realized that I would always run thru the same old feelings unless I consistently maintained the intent to be happy and harmless. I realized that it had to be an overreaching intent that had to be weaved thru my entire life for it to work and for me to not fall back thru the same ways of being. Some things I read on here and AFT website gave me clues. I had to do my part in ‘reaching’ as much as I could towards the actual. There were some clues in my everyday life as well. I would feel good when I had the genuine intent for it. The times that I did not feel good was when doubt came thru and I was not being sincere. There was some reason or belief that was in the way that prevented it from happening. I could not pretend to feel good because it intellectually made sense, I have to genuinely want it. Otherwise the instinctual ways of being will easily override any endeavour.
To have sincere intent is vital. I noticed an aspect in your report is about control, ‘me’ controlling ‘me’ to move into the direction ‘I’ think is right – and that approach is sudorific, at best. Even though the ingredient may be right, the outcome is still a serious enterprise of ‘you’ forcing yourself to be in a particular way.
Sincerity will allow you to unlock your hidden-away-during-puberty naiveté (link), to allow yourself to become more and more guileless, artless, ingenuous, unsophisticated, open, aboveboard, direct, frank, straightforward, child-like but with adult sensibilities. With that sincere and naïve intent you will see that suddenly life becomes easier, more fun, more allowing things to happen rather than vigilantly directing them to happen.
More in the next section.
Cheers Vineeto