Comment from a reader on this blog post (existential kink: undoing ourselves with radically owned honesty):
“How beautiful, and humbling, for example, to have blamed a friend, who then forgives us, and teaches us about love? What a liberation from our own enlightened ego. Yes, it is also beautiful to have this process internally - and I would encourage it, if this is what we truly feel we want to do.
But if not, why not step into a darkness, fully aware of how nobody owes you, but also excited how the world will deal with it, perhaps surprising you in ways you could not imagine. Perhaps what awaits us is also bigger judgements coming back. But what if we then feel empowered by how we can survive this pain we inflicted upon ourselves and others? So what if we could radically follow our own twisted joy, knowing, if we play this game of rolling the emotional dice, the outcome will be unpredictable, and so will be the lesson. And therefore, not putting ourselves above life, but completely immersed in it. Just like we would do before. Only now, consciously.”
This proposal echoes the axiom of Thelema, as established by Aleister Crowley: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” (The Book of the Law). It asserts following your will as the highest ethical principle.
This beckons discernment: what will shall I follow? My superficial desires? My conditioned, fearful will seeking safety? The insatiable will of my hungry ghost? My need to love and be loved? Or my deepest spiritual purpose?
What direction are we heading by placing the uninvestigated will of the individual in the center at the cost of everything else? What do we become when we discard the value of care for the collective?
Celebrating the uninvestigated will risks subverting our idea of love—the will to extend oneself in support of both one's own and another’s existential development—into a kind of anti-love: the unwillingness to question oneself, following unexamined impulses, and using others as means for personal development or entertainment.
It is both illuminating and frightening to observe this "anti-love" so omnipresent in our contemporary neoliberal society. It is the motto of many highly successful managers, CEOs, and stockholders in questionable industries, as well as human traffickers, drug addicts, and corrupt politicians. It is the epitome of a society derailed by individualism, neoliberalism, colonialism, white supremacy, misogyny, and more. This is not an expression of awakened consciousness; it is a lack of it.
The unwillingness to investigate oneself precludes consciousness. To be conscious is not merely to observe attentively what is happening—that is concentration or mindfulness. Consciousness, often used colloquially to refer to awakening awareness, requires insight into the workings of one’s perception and the essence of one’s awareness. The intense consolidation of a felt sense of self, immersed in worldly pleasure, can occur with much attention. However, for most of us, this leads to a loss, not an increase, of awakened awareness.
This has implications on the slippery slope of non-dual ethics. Not distinguishing between good and bad requires a higher level of awareness. It is not the absence of ethics or care but a non-conceptual way of being in the world.
Divorcing non-dual ethics from the non-dual cosmology that legitimizes it (in my case, the non-dual Tantric Shaivist tradition) leads us astray. In this ecology of ideas, will and self are understood either as mind-created illusions and sources of suffering, or as reflections of divine consciousness that permeates everything—therefore referred to as non-dual, nothing that isn’t God. Being conscious means identifying with the latter, while identifying with the former is ordinary awareness.
Intentionally blaming another in this tradition would be like chopping off your own finger. No one would deny that much can be learned from this masochistic path. But we also know it leads to a dead end—literally.
Consciously blaming another is a contradiction: when you are conscious (as in acting from awakened awareness), there is no other.”
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Gratitude to Danielle, Jordi, & Jolanda for their feedback.
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