Where is beauty? If it is in the things of the world, then the more of those things I have, the more beauty I can experience. If beauty is an objective fact then I can be taught how to create it, I can read books on writing great love songs, I can go on courses and I can copy masterpieces. If beauty is out there, then science can tell me what it is; a means of ensnaring big-hipped wives perhaps, or a play of dominance, or some kind of tool of social cohesion.
Whereas, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then anything goes. Whatever I feel is beautiful, is beautiful—cars, excrement, Rooney Mara movies, rape, Greggs. There is no need to master any craft, any skill, because random, lazy, meaningless artistic productions are just as worthwhile as those that represent mastery. If you find my appearance or speech or facial expressions ugly—it can only be your problem, not mine.
Where is morality? If it is in the things of the world, those things can be measured and managed to ensure optimum morality, which means we need measurers and managers in charge of the world. What’s more, people who are good at measuring and managing must, by their very possession of the facts, be moral and anyone who doesn’t get with their objective programme or syllabus—dissidents, outcasts and thickos who will not or cannot be managed—must be immoral.
Whereas, if morality is in my self, again, anything goes. Whatever I decide is moral must be moral. If I think it is moral to be outrageously selfish, or to exclude or exterminate unbelievers, or if the group I belong to do, then your criticism of my morality is immoral. Not just that but all criticism must be immoral (angry, bitter), for no other reason than that it somehow restricts what I believe or feel is right and good.
All that can be said to someone insane enough to ask
how to get to where they already are, is ‘don’t try to leave’.
Where is freedom? If it is in the things of the world, then I can learn how to get there. I can be told. There is a path to liberation, and all I have to do is get on the path and struggle my way along it, following someone who has gone before, some kind of spiritual master or self-help guru or revolutionary leader, and do what they did or what they tell me to do. If freedom is in the external things and events of the world, then all we need to do is manage those things and events, or be managed. We can obediently submit ourselves to freedom.
Whereas, if there is ‘really’ freedom in my subjective heart, why does it feel so constrained? Why is your freedom different from mine? If freedom is within, then why is it so hard to find it? Why bother changing the world at all, if everyone is already free but doesn’t know it? Surely all we need to do is a bit of meditating, a bit of mindfulness or say a few prayers and everything will be hunky dory? In fact let’s make a prison of the world, because ‘freedom is within’ yeah?
Where is love? If it is in the things of the world, then I must get the things and people I love and I must cling to those things and people like grim death, because they might leave me, or be taken away by someone else. If love is a thing, it must be a chemical, something which the body produces for its own material ends and which can be materially stimulated, manipulated, managed and bought. If love is an object… well, it’s not an object is it, so love must be a lie, right?
Whereas, if love is all within, then I don’t need the world, I don’t need other people, I hardly need a body at all. What’s more, if I don’t feel love, then there must be something wrong with me… and yet, at the same time, if love is entirely an internal thing I can never be accused of being unloving, because how do you know? In fact how do you know anything about me? You’re the problem here. If my love is only ever here and yours is only ever there, then how can you know they are in any way the same? You can’t. We are strangers.
Where is truth? If it is in objects, then those who know the most things about those objects must be the most truthful—professional experts, for example—while those who know nothing—young children, for example—must be devoid of truth. If truth is an objective fact then if I don’t have the time or the inclination to learn these facts, I am stupid, immoral and disposable, as poor people and slaves are.
Whereas, if truth is not in the things and facts of the world, then it is whatever I want it to be and the only falsehood is being told otherwise. Also, if truth is entirely subjective, there is no way for me to know that my truth and your truth are the same, and we are doomed to contention and isolation; not just from each other, but from the entire universe (unless I am the entire universe, in which case I can move objects with my mind, walk through walls and shrink to the size of a pea).
Where is life? If life is in the things of the world—in the facts, figures, images, pictures, ideas, words, theories, memories, beliefs and physical experiences—then anyone without those thing either does not know life or isn’t really living, while the most active and knowledgeable people—Richard Branson? Jordan Peterson? Noam Chomsky? Sam Harris? Joe Rogan? Richard Feynman?—must be the most alive.
Whereas, if life is not in the world, then the world is death, the body is death, food is death, sex is death, and I must leave the world, punish my body and abstain from physical pleasures in order to know and feel life. I do not need the world, or anything in it, and I can and must withdraw into my mind (or up my arse) forever.
Where is Health? If health is something that is entirely a function of subjective well-being and if illness is a result of negative thinking, emotional turmoil, blockages and the like, then those who create a sickening social conditions are innocent. There is no need to revolt against a poisonous world, because you are the cause, and only personal interventions in the machinery of your soul can ever change that.
Whereas, if health is a result of measurable, objective facts, if sickness is the consequence of living in a sick society, then it is society’s responsibility to cure you, and you must be powerless before its material interventions, its therapies, pills and procedures. You are irrelevant in your healing, you are just a case.
Where is God? If God is a thing in the world, then either It (or He or She) is a man-made invention; the holy books which ‘prove’ God’s existence are full of absurdities, and a godless machine of the universe clearly works just fine anyway. Or God is forever beyond reach, forever deferred, like the heaven He lives in, and I must spend a lifetime struggling to get there, following paths laid down by God’s favoured prophets, without ever really knowing if ‘there’ really, actually, exists.
Whereas, if God is entirely within, then I am God and nothing you can say can gainsay me. Kneel before Zod!
Where is quality? Freedom, beauty, morality, love, truth, life and God—quality—is ultimately neither in the objective things of the world, nor in the subjective inner self. Positioning them in either leads to moral, logical and intuitive absurdities. The self creates objectivity and subjectivity—creates the difference between me here and you there. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t really a difference between me and you—obviously there is—but that difference is self-made.
This, naturally, cannot be known through the self, it can only be lived, or experienced, by something else; something which is not self, or selfish. There is no way to arrive at this panjective something else, any more than I can arrive at the room I’m in. All that can be said to someone insane enough to ask how to get to where they already are, is don’t try to leave.
It is perfect futility looking for quality subjectively within or objectively without. The only way to experience quality is to let freedom, beauty, morality, love, truth, life and divinity be, when they are, and let confinement, ugliness, immorality, hate, falsehood, death and profanity be, when they are. This ‘letting be’ reveals quality as it is, instead of leaving it to get what you want or avoid what you don’t, which removes you from what is, diminishes quality and makes an idea or a replicable, manipulable thing of it. This doesn’t mean passively accepting the situation, it means acting from the truth of it.
The further away you are from quality—the more you try to get it or avoid it—the less real it is, or seems, and the more confused and numb you become. This makes appropriate action—action which responds to what is, rather than what you want or don’t want of it—impossible. The more you let quality (or lack of quality) be, the more it is as it is, which means the more unique it is and, as you panjectively experience its uniqueness, you are, with all of your ups and downs, miseries and ecstasies, enlightenments and endarkenments. This is why the people we love most of all are not holy and good and wise, but vivid. This is why the people we hate most of all are not angry and evil and stupid, but trivial.
Have you noticed that everything and everyone is becoming the same? Children are losing their otherness, men and women their masculinity and femininity, regions and individuals their distinctiveness, accents their colour and music, songs and films their originality, lemons and walnuts their flavour and moments their uniqueness; while declarations to the contrary become more and more strident? Civilisation has, and has always had, this as its goal; suppression of the vivid. History is ending with a smirk, in a grey paste, with the suburbinisation of the soul. It’s been happening for a long time, but we’re now reaching total spiritual heat death.
Prior to civilisation man existed in panjective contact with the other. The rise of civilisation was both consequence and cause of the usurpation of experience by the subjective-objective self, which can only see reality either in terms of objective facts, a solid but soulless world, which, ultimately, means nothing to subjective me, or in terms of my thoughts and feelings, in here, which, ultimately, have no bearing on the world out there, which is thereby drained of meaning. We have been doomed to oscillate, in frustration and futility, between either-or, for millennia, between asserting ourselves and submitting to others, between superstition and scientism, between tyrannous emotionality and equally tyrannous mentation, with only a vanishingly minute number of unselfish folk experiencing a both-and consciousness which reconciles contending opposames to a reality which is now, once again, within reach.
Only one question remains; how? How can the self find its way home? What can it do? What can it think? What can it feel? What can it get? The answer is, of course, nothing, or nothing that can either make objective sense, or feel subjectively right. There can be no way for self to experience unself, nor can there be any way to literally explain—in either-or terms that the self can grasp—what unself is. Self-help is useless, programmes for reform achieve nothing, spiritual teachings lead nowhere and therapy just polishes the turd of my misery. Unless I can experience quality, as it actually is, and express it, in terms that are both objectively coherent and subjectively elusive; then my quality, here, and your quality there, become one.
We call this experience love.