Behold

August 13th 2007

A few years ago I borrowed my grandmas Bible, and I had noticed that throughout the entire book the word "behold" was highlighted. I told her today that I had always wondered why she had done that and she just smiled and asked me what the word "behold" means. I thought about it and replied that I didn't know, but I suppose it means "to listen." She nodded her head and said, "To listen intently."

I've always been a person who admires language, and when I come across a word I find to hold a particularly strong sense of meaning, I tend to write it down. "Static" has been one of my favorite recent words because I love to think about all the different meanings of the word. This time I had written the word "behold" down on a note card and propped it up on my desk because I realized what great meaning it had.

It is well known that any person appreciates a good listener, as we all want to be heard. Many of us however, have a difficult time becoming good listeners. I personally, am not- it has taken me a lot of effort to train myself to be so, though I am still not the best. I did realize something tonight, and that was that being able to effectively listen to other people is important, but there is something far superior to it- being able to listen to ourselves. I do not mean just hearing what we are saying, or knowing what we are doing, but listening for the purpose of understanding. We need to learn to let go of blind reaction, and instead strive to understand why we react in such a manner.

There was a period of time tonight where I felt like I was being suffocated with anxiety. I had a great deal of thoughts and feelings running through my mind, but they were so jumbled and disorganized that I couldn't comprehend them fast enough to make sense of them. I tried to ignore my distress. I tried to talk to someone about it. I soon realized that neither of these would ease my worries. Instead I wandered off and ended up lying in a dark empty parking lot staring at the sky. Whenever I have felt anxious or distressed I have always found comfort in two things, death and nature. When I say death I mean that I enjoy cemeteries and visiting graves. Some people might think this is grotesquely odd, but they aren't looking at it from the right perspective. Placing myself in an atmosphere of death and nonexistence demands me to contemplate purpose, and that contemplation aids in coming up with remedies to my problems. Tonight however, I instead found comfort in nature. I laid in a dark spot in the middle of the city and stared at stars, and caught glimpses of some of the occasional meteors streaking across the sky. Whats therapeutic about nature is its enormity. As I laid there all of my aesthetic and ethical problems that make me human began to fall away. I felt so small but at the same time found myself feeling closer to something large. I didn't feel like just a small fragment of the universe, but I felt like a part of a functioning whole. There is something great about not necessarily attempting to comprehend the vastness of existence, but instead peacefully coexisting within it.

When I got up and began to walk again my distress began to reemerge, but this time in a lighter sense, I was calmed and ready to sort it out. I still kept glancing at the sky and thought about how every meteor is a metaphor for the tears of Saint Lawrence. But then I wondered, why would St. Lawrence cry? Was it the physical pain of his martyred death, or was it something more. Could it have been uncertainty? I thought about the other martyrs of the past who not only lived for God, but willingly died for him as well. They sacrificed themselves, but for what purpose? This made me begin to think about what it is that I live for, and what purpose I give my own life. And in this I thought about the question Aristotle famously asked, "How should we live?"

Lately I've been finding myself really putting effort into attempting a more rational thought process. When we feel an emotion, we react to it- oftentimes out of instinct and sometimes just plain ignorance. Now when I feel something strongly I interject a series of questions between the initial feeling and how I choose to act on it. I found myself feeling a series of emotions tonight that I haven't felt in quite a while. I felt (to some extent) upset, jealous, betrayed, and foolish. Also because of recent inexperience, I felt afraid. My anxiety was so intense because I was really struggling to dissect everything that I was feeling. I began to separate each feeling and asked myself, "Why do I feel upset? Why do I feel jealous?" And so on. My favorite chapter of the Tao came to mind, and the specific verse, "In acquiring favor, so is the fear of losing favor acquired...these things confuse and dismay us, because they are the same ailment." In Donnie Darko, they did an exercise where they were supposed to place a situation and its resulting action into one of two different categories, either love or fear. It was argued that you could not take the entire spectrum of human emotion and lump it into two categories, as things were not that simple. I agree, but at the same time all emotion is based on love and fear. We as human beings see love as the highest attainment of human emotion. The only difference is that this "lifeline" of love-fear is not actually linear. When you take the quote from the Tao and replace the word "favor" with an emotion like love it reads, "In acquiring love, so is the fear of losing love acquired." There is more of an arc between love and fear, and in between lies a broad range of human emotion.

In order for me to feel unhappy, means that I had to first be happy. In order for me to feel betrayed, I had to first feel some sense of loyalty. I felt foolish because I had previously felt content with my decisions. Next I reviewed the events leading to my current situation causing me distress and ask myself if I was mistaken, or maybe had made a misinterpretation. Basically I was asking myself, "Are my feelings justified?"

I started to feel a little more at peace the more I began to sort out my thoughts and attempted to interpret my feelings. Now the only thing left to do was to assess the options of reaction, and also the potential consequence each will bring. It is inevitable that I am going to be making a sacrifice, either by sacrificing my better judgment and faith in my own intuition, or sacrificing something that I value, or the subject of my distress in the first place. Whats interesting about this entire thought process of dissecting emotion is that many people see small altercations such as this to be minuscule. To me however, it is on a much larger scale- every small choice, action, and reaction I make will have a far larger effect on my own life. If I choose to honor my better judgment I will save myself from the possibility of further despair, but I also may close myself off to a realm of possibility which may actually bring me a greater joy or happiness. This range of possibilities is nothing more than my own freedom, and it does indeed cause me anxiety.

The reason that life proves to be so complicated is that it is a game. And the more emotions involved in this game, the more value we have accumulated in determining our next move. I sat on a fountain tonight writing down most of this blog in a notepad. Soon after I went back home and read some more of the book "The Fundamentals of Thought" by Hubbard. One of the first things I read was a passage which I found ironic because it completely relates to everything I had wrote down earlier in the night.

"One could say, then, that life is a game and that the ability to play a game consists of tolerance for freedom and barriers and an insight into purposes and power of choice, are the guiding elements of life. There are only two factors above these, and both of them are related to these. The first is the ability to create, with its negative, the ability to uncreate, and the second is the postulate. This is the broad picture of life, and these elements are used in its understanding, in bringing life into focus and in making it less confusing."

Furthermore, I also found this passage which essentially is describing the very process of thought I'm utilizing. "The analytical mind combines perceptions of the immediate environment, of the past and estimations of the future into conclusions which are based upon the realities of situations." This passage right here, to me, is the key to rational thought.

One of the things I have found most difficult in the way that I perceive situations, and the way that people in general perceive situations, is the lack of restraint when we are inclined to feel resentful. When situations arise that I have experienced in the past that did not end positively, so do the the negative feelings that accompanied it arise, and also with that the fear of acquiring those negative feelings again. Resentment is the main obstacle we must overcome when faced with similar situations of the past. Managing this portion of the mind which harbors resentment is difficult, as it is an emotional defense mechanism that comes to life when we feel threatened, afraid, or vulnerable. It is a method of fight-or-flight. Something that certainly all of us have felt is the apprehension of forming a relationship when a prior relationship has hurt us more than it has benefited us. The way we react to anything is instinctual but also custom to every individual- based on their own personal past experiences. For example: I have loved before, and I have lost that love. I am afraid to lose again not because I am afraid to love, but because I am afraid of its counterpart, the loss of that love. Most importantly, I have a fear of investing in an idea or person-a fear of disappointment. I consider every action and choice in life to be an investment. In this case investing trust, time, and love into another person comes with the faith that we will acquire trust, time, and love in turn.

Life is undoubtedly a game, it is the survival of the fittest. And as Darwin himself said, "It is not the strongest that survive, or even the most intelligent, but it is those most responsive to change." Currently I have invested some element of faith, loyalty, and a general fondness into this game. I guess technically you could say that life and love are the same game, as a main objective to the life of a human being is usually to find love (not being just amorous love, but also acceptance and recognition). Unfortunately despite my quest for rational thought, love is oftentimes not a game of strategy. Love is a game of roulette. Life and love are a game of chance. After all, someone did once tell me that love is self destructive. I've realized more than ever that he is right. Maybe our attempts at love, are futile.