Love 3: The sweet compulsion of generosity

To continue the blog series I inadvertently started, embracing love, even to the tiny degree I have managed, brings one a vibrant new life. Identifying oneself as primarily a part of something bigger is so incredibly liberating. Acting out of self interest and selfish desires seems hollow now, like a bewitched tree that will only bear rotten fruit. American culture beats utility maximization, money-seeking and selfishness into our heads and claims they will make us happy. Go shopping to make yourself feel better. Eat to get happy. Watch TV to escape the emptiness you feel. Well, these are false logics, I tell you, they are merely a pain killer and fail to address the real cause of our anguish. In fact, it is our faith in these prescriptions and the soul-sucking lifestyle of America that have caused our pain.

Librating ourselves from this pain is surprisingly easy. Generosity springs like a fountain from the embrace of love. Love makes generosity inevitable, a sweet compulsion that brings the gifts of happiness, secruity, strong social bonds with people, and a fulfillment that is so glorious it is hard to describe. Indeed, the life of generosity is the life of happiness. A quote from "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran comes to mind, " And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue; They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space." That quote has been stuck in my mind for over a year, one of those puzzles that my mind runs circles around... and it finally clicked while I was writing this. It is inherently human to give, an inescapable aspect of our nature. You might try to escape the compulsion to give my being selfish, but your reward is always anguish. To try such is like the myrtle in yonder valley not breathing its fragrance, it is contrary to its nature and it would probably suffer from it.

I have started looking for opportunities to give. Not just give from my meager possessions, but give of myself. This mostly manifests itself as helping people. I try to help whenever I am asked. But the gems of the experience are when I can help someone without being asked, through understanding what is going on in their heads and lending a hand. It really makes people feel good.

But many of us flee from this kind of risk. Because it is a risk, to attempt to give as a way of life. There is always the fear of rejection, and the fear that we are missing out on something. Fear of rejection is understandable, many people do not like to accept generosity. But the fear that we are missing out on something is much more insidious. It is akin to the idea of "opportunity cost," and has the nasty habit of eating away at our joy while sowing the seeds of nagging doubt. This fear is the sickened finger of selfishness trying to tear us down, prevent us from embracing love fully. Another great line from The Prophet reads: "Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, thirst that is unquenchable?" Fearing that we will not have something in the future or that we don't have the best of something is a sign of feeling insecure and entitled at the same time. Watch out for this, it has destroyed much good in my life and I would hate to see it happen to you.

Love 2: Conquering Death

Building on the last post, I think that our culture's pernicious fear of death comes from our lack of embracing love. For, if we truly love, then we do not see ourselves as a sea of individuals but as a single ocean. A hand with fingers as opposed to separate fingers. As one cell among trillions in a multi-cellular. If I claimed that each of my cells was independent from the other cells, people would call me crazy. But, they are as independent of each other as humans are from each other and the rest of our environment. The fact that we do not see that is but a cultural blindfold.

Love is our cellular bond. It is what drives people to see themselves not as one individual that has a finite existence, but as part of a community that has existed for millions of years, and will be around when everyone we know is long gone. If we see ourselves this way, we do not fear our own death. Our identity is vested in something immortal instead of in our flesh and blood.

Accounts I have heard from soldiers, rescue personel, police and fire fighters makes me think that their subcultures are closer to achieving this than most of Western culture. Their job is to protect and help others (debatable how well the violent ones achieve that, but that discussion is for another day; the point is they see this as their job). They have embraced a love of their community and are willing to sacrafice their lives for others.

Now, this is not to say that people should not fear immediate dangers to their well-being. What I am talking about is the philisophical fear of death that makes people wish for immortality. It is this fear that caused people to develop the idea of an after-life; as an attempt to quell the thought of non-existance.

I remember when I was in middle school, I was deeply troubled by the thought of death, and I never found the idea of an after-life all that credible. Years of contemplation followed and slowly transformed into my attempts to explain the universe. I did really like the idea that heaven existed and it would be this paradise with all my loved ones, like one giant endless party. It would be pretty nice, but it felt wrong. It felt like false hope. This triggered a thought in my head that is very hard to put into words. I started to question the very idea that I was a singular unit. The idea of a soul, of an individual, of a person, is singularity. I was told by my culture that we are a single static being with neat boundaries and a single soul. My whole world came crashing down, slowly at first, while I still didn't realize that I was breaking down the foundational belief our cultural point of view is built upon. That is bound to have a tumultuous effect on one's mind. So sophmore year of high school was kind of rough.

Reality pushed me to see myself as something dynamic. The following is a summation of several years of contemplation from my adolecense: "I was certainly bigger than I used to be, and generally calmer. I have changed over time... I am not static. My cells turn-over at a fairly fast rate, I intake and expell lots of material. I am greatly affected by everything happening around me, absorbing ideas and behavioral patterns from other people. Maybe the boundaries of my individuality are not so clear cut as they are made out to be. I am as dependent on them for food, shelter, protection and love as the cells of my body are to each other. All this conflicts with the idea of a person having one soul. Why should each cell not have a soul, and I am just a conglomeration of the souls of my cells?" And that last question did it. BAM! My concept of individuality was in ruins and I was left a directionless 14-15 year old. But the seeds of my new framework were there. The best way I can put what I have settled on is: that I am but one small section of strata of a continum from the small to the large in the oneness of everything and everyone. And, without love to glue it all together, none of us would exist. Embracing love has allowed me the contentment of knowing that death is just a reordering of my strata, not the end all be all; I will still be around, because there is no destroying the unity that I find myself to be a part of.

This old saying is true in so many ways:
"Love is truly the only way to conquer death"

Love

Love is so magical. It manages to intertwine such pure joy with such a deep melancholy quite seamlessly and all the while it emanates a strong sense of sacredness. The versatility of love is astounding, it can generate any mix of emotions. The deepest hatred arises from the death of a loved one. The harshest anger can come from the same, as well as a rejection from a loved one. The most concentrated happiness from those rare perfect days spent with loved ones. The keenest sense of helplessness and apathy when we feel unable to help those we love. The deepest depression when we fail to feel loved. And the most overpowering fear when the possibility of losing a loved one arises.

Many people may consider love to simply be an emotion among many, but I think it is more than that. I think it is the root of everything, a force of nature that is all-powerful. It reminds me of gravity, something you can fight against for a time, but it will always win in the end. The prime effect of it is to bring things closer together, as if they longed for a sweet embrace.

Just as the foundation of physics is gravity, I think that human society is based on love. We humans are glued together with a collective longing to be together, to do good to each other and to be taken care of. We are united in our search for happiness and we seem to only find it with each other. I can think of no better word to describe that than love. The root of what makes us human is love, and those without it begin to become inhuman (I would note that in Harry Potter, Voldemort did not know love. Of course, I would venture to guess that this is because no one risked truly loving him).

I read someone say that love is like slavery. When in love you do whatever you can for your loved one. But it is a joyful slavery, one that is completely voluntary. If fear, greed, and selfishness prevent one from completely embracing love (something I have been deeply affected by, as well as seen and experienced), then we may start to long to be free of it. And that is as deep a loss as anything I have experienced, from both sides of the equation.

For most of my 4 year relationship with Ingrid, I was able to fully embrace love. I would not trade that experience for anything. My whole life bent around her, probably a third of my thinking time was devoted to her, and I would spend hours fantasizing ways to simplely make her smile. I molded my behavior to bring myself emotionally close to her as well as to bring her joy. I studied her ways because I wanted to fully understand her. I ran a 4 year experiment on our relationship revolving around practicing "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," which was probably the most informative experience of my life and a major reason I was able to dive into the relationship so whole-heartedly.

Fully embracing love was overpowering in the most wonderful way imaginable. I can see how embracing love caused an emotional spring in my heart that has never left me. Atleast once a month I am moved to tears. I let myself be moved, scared and riled up by movies. And I no longer hold the reighs on my emotions so tightly for fear of a lack of control. It has been both liberating and deeply meaningful. I find a mysterious pleasure in the melancholy feelings of loss I have been experiencing these past 6 months (since we broke up). It might be because I feel so in touch with humanity and what it means to be human when I feel that way. It could also be because I know that I can replicate it with my next companion.

Of course, toward the end of my relationship I realized that Ingrid was unwilling or as of yet unable to fully embrace love the way I had. So I tried to get distance from love. I am generally able to exert control over my emotions, thoughts and feeling; with stubborn, lengthy effort I can usually manage to change them. But try as I might, my feelings of love would always rear their heads in my mind. I know objectively that this is a good thing; if there is one thing I am unable to change about myself, I guess it is good that it is the perserverence of my feelings of love. And while it might seen easier to try to suppress or excavate them, I have not found that to be the case.

I targeted a great deal of anger and angst toward Ingrid in an attempt to disentigrate my emotional bond to her. It kind of worked for awhile, but I almost feel like I was trying to cut a jet of water with a sword. Of course I can cut through it in a moment, but the force of the water will always keep the jet whole. I know I am unable to turn the jet off, nor do I want to turn my love off... it seems that the only choice I have left is to try to redirect it instead of cut it. It has been an interesting experiment on love, one I hope not to repeat, because it has not been particularly fruitful. It caused me more pain than anything and did not have the effects I wanted it to.

I hope everyone manages to fully embrace love in their lives and relationships, it is the best possible outcome even if you eventually get burned. Not embracing it is a painful, guilt-ridden path to lonliness, something I hope Ingrid realizes one day (and everyone else for that matter). Without love, we are not complete, our human-ness makes us yearn for it. For it is the root of our lives, the foundation of human society, and the glue that keeps us together.

Nature of Money

The nature of money is something i spend way too much time contemplating.

It is the basis of capitalism: liquid, imaginary capital that eases the process of trading goods and services. Western civilization is not the only culture to have developed the concept of money either. I remember learning about a culture in a class in Anthropology that I took at Brown. The culture used certain types of rocks as money. Some were small enough to be handled, but there were also boulders that were in circulation. The larger the stone, the more it was worth. Needless to say, they would not move a several ton boulder when it was used in trade. Everyone just REMEMBERED who owned it at any given time. No one could steal it, because it wasn't just a giant rock, it was an cultural meme and a consensus on whose it was. You cannot steal something when in reality it is just a consensus among a group of people. Money is such a weird concept.

In my mind I have defined it in many different ways... it can be a representation of labor, a representation of power, a kind of score in a weird competitive game, a cultural status marker, a representation of a good, and even a representation of consent. But, it is always just a symbol, something people think is important. When that consensus falters, so does the economic system that is built upon the it. It is ironic that the entire capitalist system, which happens to be very secular (if not in name than de facto), relies on faith. Faith that money does represent something more than a number on a screen or a piece of cotton paper that has no functional use. The only reason money has value is because we believe it does, the same reason that boulder was the proverbial pot of gold. The consent and faith of a large group of people gives things value. If people stopped believing that those boulders had value, or consented that one person "owned" them, then they would be as worthless as any other boulder.

Right now, I work because I need to increase an electronic number, that I can check over the internet. I distribute a quantity of this number to others to get various things like food, housing, and electricity. This signifies both my faith that increasing my number is worth spending 50 hours a week at work, and the belief of others that they want a quantity of my number enough to give me things I need to live. This just strikes me as weird arrangement. It reminds me of the story of the a guy who sold his most of his stuff to buy a virtual space station in an online computer game for $20,000. He is now a millionaire because he turned the space station into an imaginary shopping mall where people buy virtual goods for real money. It is just decreasing your number to buy an idea, and that idea ends up increasing your number because lots of other people like to interact with the idea. Then you can use that increased number to buy real things.

I was reading some money the other day and every bill has this phrase on it: "This note is legal tender for all debts public and private." This statement is meant to reinforce the belief that money has value. And it is an authoritative message, coming from the organization that has the consent of the general population. (Non-sequitor: This also signifies the value we put in printed documents and writing. If something is written down, it is generally considered to be more powerful. Ex: Written vs verbal contracts, religions of the book vs other non-text based religions, use of documents to prove stuff like your identity.. etc.). The point is that institutions have put effort into maintaining and reinforcing people's confidence in money, it is not natural or inherent in humans, it is a cultural meme that has been maticulously constructed and maintained in the minds of the general population.

To sum up...
Money is a multi-faceted symbol of faith, it symbolizes the fact that billions of people put their faith in the idea that money is something real. Belief has made it real and a power in our current culture. Money has value because we all agree it has value. That is the power of consent, the power of belief. It can make a useless boulder or a worthless piece of cotton paper into valuable items that people seek to possess. If anyone doubts the malleability of human culture, they should take a long deep look at the idea of money. When people claim a social system will not work because of X, Y and Z, they are really just writing a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course it will not work if we think it will fail. In truth, we can have any kind of society we want, we just have to believe in it.