Sunday, December 10, 2023

The Sub-Rosa

Believe it or not, I only post my most accessible thoughts here, muddled though they might play.

But for the second time, I will indulge myself by posting something completely unrelatable because it uniquely answers a very thorny and existential question plaguing and persecuting a certain rare type of person. The last time I posted one of these, I explained myself thus:
As I grow up, I feel more and more compelled to toss certain esoteric thoughts out there among the 180 quadrillion web pages in case they’re helpful someday - even if they’re of scant current interest.

In a lifetime of finding myself ahead of curves (that's a complaint, not a boast), I’ve noticed that once crowds catch up, my voice is rarely necessary - or even heard - amid the torrent. But in certain realms, where I'm extra ahead, there are chunks which might remain missing. So I’ll risk confusing and exasperating regular readers by occasionally posting such chunks for the possible (if unlikely) use of other people in another time. Which is to say: you may well want to skip this (if only because it’s long!).

We have never been a profound society. For all capitalism's innumerable advantages and benefits, such a system fosters briskly superficial interface with one's world. In pursuit of more and more, we're perennially busy.

Until recently there was, at least, vague cognizance of unplumbed depths. They're out there! And once I finally win whichever game I've decided to occupy myself with playing, I might explore them! Maybe I'll buy a book on mindfulness meditation!

Even in medieval India - one of history's most spiritual societies - crowds were hardly flooding into ashrams and temples to live contemplative lives. Rather, people would ply careers, and then, in late middle age, perhaps "go sannyasin". It would not have seemed particularly strange to learn that the tobacco vendor from your corner kiosk had closed shop, peeled off all his clothes, and gone to go live naked in the woods.

My point is that, even back then, that side of things was approached only once one finally found the time. But right here and right now, a tipping point has been reached where most people aren't even vaguely aware of deeper territory. It's not something to delay paying attention to, or even to ignore. It's simply not there.

Which is not to say, of course, that we're content with the here-and-now. In fact, we're increasingly discontent, persecuted by myriad trifling shortfalls. Like all aristocrats ever, we're deranged princesses hysterically scanning for smaller and smaller mattress peas. And it's reached a heightened point where we no longer entertain the notion that the problem might be with our own perspective; a skew of inner expectation rather than of worldly outcome.

Our desire for gratification, having been stoked into an entitlement, produces an unquenchable thirst for perfect outcomes. Lost in righteous indignation at remaining bits of suboptimality - failure of the universe to fully and perfectly accommodate every single wish - we are, like hungry golden retrievers, fixated on our feed bowls. Eye on the prize, we are brusquely disinterested in pondering how we came to seal ourselves into this ridiculous Skinner Box in the first place. Shut up with your speculative hooey, and explain why I'm not winning!

The Game has clarified into a sharp-pointed undertaking: climb the upper reaches of the curve of declining results toward the most perfect wealth and comfort (what I term "liberal materialism"), with the same valiant moral fervor previous generations applied to the battle for basic freedoms and entitlements. A fool's mission. Lemmings off a cliff, alas.

To review: our relationship with deeper and more profound issues has gone from "I may concern myself with all that once I've raised my family" to "I may concern myself with all that once my career is a raging success and I'm living in a huge house with a paid-down mortgage" to....airless, soundless vacuum. Blank nothingness. A neutral snow-blindedness where all that exists are one's thermometers monitoring the numerous parameters which must be optimal to feel even remotely alive for one goddamn moment.




Centi-millionaire, international celebrity, and sex-symbol Mick Jagger seeks satisfaction.


The alternative routes - more profound considerations and less self-destructive modalities - are entirely off-screen, except insofar as they've been reduced to comic book panels. A bearded sage mumbles confusing platitudes. Hot room yoga for a firmer butt. Namaste, asshole.

But in this arid late-stage landscape of howling self-victimization, piqued entitlement, hysterical stress, and ceaseless busyness in the most comfortable, safe, indulgent, and leisured society the world's seen since the demise of Eden, where nothing deeper exists even as a speculative possibility, how do people respond when they face a bona fide advanced yogi?

What's the reaction to someone coming from the other side of things - the off-screen side - with some wisdom, a palpably tectonic vibe, and acting from motives which (not being hard-wired to relentless self-serving) seem unfathomable? How do people receive the warm intensity of bhakti; the crackling electricity of truth, just on the mere human interaction level?

Easy one. Sex. It feels to them like sex. 100% sex. That's now the only Other Thing; the sole remaining sub rosa realm*. If it's not about The Game, then it's about that.
* - Outside mental illness, anyway. The paranoid, unspurprisingly, will find you threatening; control freaks will feel you're angling to control them; depressives will find you depressing, and the anxious will grow anxious. Etc., etc..
So how does it actually play out? Well, if there's no mental illness on their end (and there often is), and if you check enough fuckability boxes, then it seems, to them, like a titillating invocation of sex. If not, that sexual invocation seems creepy and repellent (and patently not a function of anything going on on their end). Even if - especially if! - it has nothing to do with sex for you.

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