Table Of Contents
Introduction
Welcome. Like many moderns, I’ve sought out a love or two in my time. Coupling to those pursuits, and often in response to hardships as well, I’ve studied theory after theory. Whether it be psych studies, institutionally legitimate or “pop psych” and unintentionally fraudulent—we’ve all been exposed to those kinds of armchair relationship advice. This peculiar ability for love to exist among all people, no matter the preference for activities, makes it tough to put a descriptor (a final say) on the topic. It increasingly becomes autobiographical in nature like we are urged by some primal voice to command others to not only listen to our exploits but the “good” or “evil” that it has brought. Take a look near the dedications and introduction quotes of books—no matter the fiction or non-fiction story (especially the theorizing ones)—to find a strange, vulnerable remark; you’ll see a loving note to a spouse, a mother, a child. The ones who’ve supported the work. They call it a dedication, but it is also a movement to usher us all in the same moment of gratitude, of thanks and community. This collectivization of love in its mire, myrrh and smoke and mirrors, is the closest we come to human love.
My reasons for writing and compiling this work are multiplicitous, I suppose. Ultimately, unlike all the vulnerabilities and beautiful gestures I’ve outlined just now to you, I came at it relatively mechanically, in a sense. How would I make suppositions on some new knowledge and wisdom about the subject of love if I had not, on some level, still expressed a vulnerability? So, I’ll outline this, as it was spurred on by a few lingering projects:
Creating notes and finishing (and implementing the techniques in) Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga.
Committing to understanding more of Sloterdijk's work in his Spheres opus.
Drafting out a pervasive category in history.
The furthering of my theory of agency, as addressed in my previous article.
Submitting more data to the Generative Anthropology community and their researchers.
The emergent concerns to the state of love in a consumerist economy of attention.
Even, now, while in the moment I’m remiss to admit, there is my dedication. All of what I’ve quoted and sublimated hereafter will be in some sense emergent from those, and a deep loving respect for each of them.
The main theory I will employ, gestured to above, is the one I’ve created in my previous article: a theory of agency grounded in transcendental and relative modalities. The main idea behind that is essentially, consciousness is similarly identical to both morality, power, and intentionality; that consciousness is transcendent in its mode, and a primarily relative description (one that cannot admit it uses its own power to analyze itself) cannot exist on its own.
The way in which we discover the “why” of life is identical with the most originary and primal, we could say ineffable, event. That event is the first act of agency. One can think of many of the thought experiments, where some strange being does not exist until it is thought, as a profane and dull experimentation with this phenomenon. We should rather think of it as an integral phenomena, to avoid unnecessary dilutions of our attention into rabbit holes that lead to nowhere, fast; that is to say, we should direct our own thoughts, with fervor, to those awe inspiring peoples that explicitly talk about the emergence of transcendence in the relative. They remind us of a kind of meditation. One that introduces new objects to the fundamental paradox of agency and of life; the emergence of quality in quantity, to paraphrase myself.
What makes this a human theory is one that includes a human love. But we must be honest. Many of the things in life cause us a great deal of trouble, because we are unaware, that we are unintentional. Love is a tremendous and immense testing ground and one type of element, much like fire or life itself, that makes us come to grips. To love is to open up to hate. But the opposite is not always true. We must recognize where our faults are at, by understanding the ways in which we’ve grown ignorant to our original, primal, transcendence. Our originary love.
This is the culmination of years and years of research; a manifesto to Love.
Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga
In the following, I’ve chosen some of the best quotes detailing love from Integral Yoga. A book I studied and lived over the course of, now, 3 years. I’d been aware of it sooner than that, but came to seriously appreciate Aurobindo’s guiding lights, and applied an intense dedication to the practices and ideas he illustrates.
Integral Yoga is a book, which isn't really a book at all. It is a compilation of letters from Aurobindo to, well, who really knows; but, it is organized to illustrate the categories of his thought. There are many different readings we can do of a text (one could “rewire” all of the coming quotes and sections in terms of Aurobindo’s “Divine Grace” if one wanted), especially one as massive as Integral Yoga. We will simply be approaching and then expanding the implications of a few key concepts. Those of which are useful to us, that can help us become more conscious of things we often sweep under the rug.
Relationships Between Men and Women
The only relation permissible between a sadhak and sadhika here is the same as between a sadhak and sadhak or between a sadhika and sadhika - a friendly relation as between followers of the same path of yoga and children of the Mother.
In this book Aurobindo states he is setting out a particular study and practice, that of the Integral Yoga. The “good” the yoga provides are the sadhanas, which roughly is translated to a methodological discipline to the attainment of knowledge. Think of it like daily rituals that generate wisdom. In this case, those who practice sadhana are sadhaks and sadhikas, respectively. He will marginally contradict himself and says this only, really, because so much of “regular” love is like that of regular life. Attachment, desire which leads to suffering, and so forth.
He says permissible because for many first learning the daily rituals, this can only pose a distraction. How can one know love if one doesn’t know oneself? We all have to take time to work on ourselves, explicitly or implicitly, before we can learn to be mature lovers; and, this is nearly identical to what Aurobindo sets out to teach; we all are practitioners of sadhana, we are sadhaks and sadhikas naturally; Aurobindo is simply protecting his yoga, as an institution, from lazy, immoral vagrants.
All that is needed is that the lower vital should not look in at the back door or be permitted to enter. There is often a harmony between a masculine and a feminine nature, an attraction traction or an affinity which rests on something other than any open or covert lower vital (sexual) basis - it depends sometimes predominantly on the mental or the psychic or on the higher vital, sometimes on a mixture of these for its substance. In such a case friendship is natural and there is little chance of other elements coming in to pull it downwards wards or break it.
Here, is something you will hear from Aurobindo, quite a bit. That is, there is an almost demonic nature to forces out of your control. He considers, in much of his dialogues, for the lower chakras to be much harder to sublimate.
You can think of it like so: these lower forces are much more entrenched in our being, so how exactly does one, through only the existence of a physical form, realize transcendence? Most mystic manuals and esoteric guides can’t really give you a deep description on how to bring down a consciousness or intentionality to the entire system of molecules in your body; they prioritize divine acts, thoughts and eating patterns, etc. These are easier to control.
Psychic love finds itself wholly when it is the radiation of the diviner consciousness for which we are seeking; till then it is difficult for it to put out its undimmed integral self and figure.
Again, he is espousing this idea of first understanding the divine forces, first, as well as the primarily social (a dim form of the psychic) understanding. What is the soul but a conscious realization that we as individuals belong to a system of people, who have inherent meaning, morals and power beyond simple nature?
Family Ties
What you write about the family ties is perfectly correct. It creates an unnecessary interchange and comes in the way of a complete turning to the Divine. Relations after taking up yoga should be less based on a physical origin or the habits of the physical consciousness and more and more on the basis of sadhana - of sadhak with sadhaks, of others as souls travelling the same path or children of the Mother than in the ordinary way or with the old viewpoint.
All sense of attachment other than the practices, the sadhanas, to organizing your levels of being—the material, the vital life forces, the mental anguishes, and human connections and so forth—are firstly useless to the Integral Yoga.
What is tricky here is that he at once decries purely ignorant loves, and supports its continual attention. Aurobindo really wants to purify what you focus on, not destroy it. I’m aware of many people who have taken the maxim, “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the waters of the womb,” so strongly into their hearts, you’d believe they’d came up with it themselves! In a way they have and for good reason. Some families and humans grow petulant in age, they cannot see the harm they cause their children. The direct, intentional ways they want their children to grow—even if they don’t consider the possibility of or even want to hurt their child—their tough-love and willful ignorance does so anyways. How can we say, that is not a kind of evil? Is it not that most real tragedy and evil in love are unintentional or misguided?
Friendship Affection and Love
Human love is mostly vital and physical with a mental support - it can take an unselfish, noble and pure form and expression only if it is touched by the psychic. It is true, as you say, that it is more usually a mixture of ignorance, attachment, passion and desire. But whatever it may be, one who wishes to reach the Divine must not burden himself with human loves and attachments, for they form so many fetters and hamper his steps, turning him away besides from the concentration of his emotions on the one supreme object of love.
This is perhaps the most useful and illustrative points of Aurobindo’s thought. Think to many of your relationships and how much they fall into the categories of: “this person is physically stunning”, “sexually enticing”, “hey, let’s go share something to eat”, “I just want to be in the same space as you”, “don’t worry, love, here’s something to cheer you up,” “that’s adorable.” The list goes on. You can pull many more examples from video sharing platforms and just people watch, as the algorithm tries to compete for your attention; it will give you more and more distilled versions of each of the above. Try to imagine what social process is being gestured to, behind this video, or action? Am I just being led unconsciously?
There is a love in which the emotion is turned towards the Divine in an increasing receptivity and growing union. What it receives from the Divine it pours out on others, but freely without demanding a return - if you are capable of that, then that is the highest and most satisfying way to love.
Doing what is best is not doing what is easy. Only through the donation of relativity through the transcendent can we come to grips with the suffering of letting go. On a personal level I can attest the turmoil of this quote. Such a simple saying, a clean nice directive; yet it is the moments of forgetfulness that strike us down. We all mean well. Hindsight is both trauma and love.
(The point to the Integral Yoga is recognizing that all loves are emanations, ignorant manifestations, of the transcendent pole; the Divine…. This is the Supreme Love; Aurobindo is a cartographer of methods of the gnosis of the Truth.)
Aspiration
Aspiration takes a strange place in this compendia of terminology. He says frighteningly little in the actual sections but mentions it profusely throughout the text. You can intuit he means this a central process the natural born human can use to become increasingly conscious.
Aspiration
Personal aspiration is necessary until there is the condition in which all comes automatically and only a certain knowledge and assent is necessary for the development.
Aspiration is a call to the Divine, - will is the pressure of a conscious force on Nature.
Aspiration is to call the forces. When the forces have answered, there is a natural state of quiet receptivity concentrated but spontaneous.
The difference between will and aspiration
Hardly anyone is strong enough to overcome by his own unaided aspiration and will the forces of the lower nature; even those who do it get only a certain kind of control, but not a complete mastery. Will and aspiration are needed to bring down the aid of the Divine Force and to keep the being on its side in its dealings with the lower powers. The Divine Force fulfilling the spiritual will and the heart's psychic aspiration can alone bring about the conquest.
It is first characterized as a want, again, something that we dedicate ourselves to. One can think of most of love as a mutual dedication of some sort, to becoming the Other. A mutual aspiration, where both lovers have an ideal of “perfect love” that they each play to each other. Aspiration is first, then we have the willing and bringing of the aspiration into the lower natures, the forces of Nature. This is one of the seeds of drama, as we will dig into later.
Aspiration and Desire
Aspiration should be not a form of desire, but the feeling of an inner soul's need, and a quiet settled will to turn towards the Divine and seek the Divine.
Again, a common theme in love is mutual dedication. That “quiet settled will” is exactly the focused element of such, and the ultimate value or object of the matter is the Divine.
All men of action, discoverers, inventors, creators of knowledge proceed by faith and, until the proof is made or the thing done, they go on in spite of disappointment, pointment, failure, disproof, denial because of something in them that tells them that this is the truth, the thing that must be followed and done.
And, those that have an even greater trust in the discovers and inventors are their support network; the ones who have an even greater faith in those men of action on the principle of their identity.
The Mother
Finally, we will touch upon a specific tool in Aurobindo’s armoire, the Mother. He actually has an entire book about the subject. First here is the description of Her whereabouts and place in his cosmology:
When I speak of the Mother's force I do not speak of the force of Prakriti which carries in it things of the Ignorance but of the higher Force of the Divine that descends from above to transform the nature.
The Mother's Force is not only above on the summit of the being. It is there with you and near you, ready to act whenever your nature will allow it. It is so with everybody here.
The Mother, the work and the transformation of the lower being
It is not our experience that by meditation alone it is possible to change the nature, nor has retirement from outward activity and work much profited those who have tried it; in many cases it has been harmful. A certain amount of concentration, an inner aspiration in the heart and an opening of the consciousness to the Mother's presence there and to the descent from above are needed. But without action, without work the nature does not really change; it is there and by contact with men that there is the test of the change in the nature. As for the work one does, there is no higher or lower work; all work is the same provided it is offered to the Mother and done for her and in her power.
What he is establishing is the richness of human experience and in this the Mother, which is rather elusive in this book, begins to take shape. All morally good, or increasingly Divine, work is a dedication to some higher supportive consciousness. One can think of the Mother as a godhead which has the goal of—what may seem to us, in some ways like a teenager, as humiliating you—providing the actual descent of higher-minded-ness. The Mother is always there to help, and never to hinder, to set their kin off into the world—not to deprave them of it.
Overall, the forces aspiration (or open, mutual dedication to a collective Ideal) and the forces of the will (as the enactment of the Ideal into reality, the genuine work needed for change of ones nature) are the two major theme’s that run through Aurobindo’s love. These ways of becoming conscious of increasing field of intent—where you may watch and wait for the arrival of some higher being’s support (through the Mother, or Aurobindo’s other useful dialogues on the Witness)—are the foundations of his integral yoga. Those that seek the Integral Yoga practice a sublimation of the lower powers, while recognizing their initial, illustrious, seductive almost, temptations; they do this through the aspiration to the Divine.
This is as well the primal directive of a yoga of love. To be in love is to be in a state of aspiration and direction. The deeper the love the more the work, the application of the will into life, becomes the transformation of the inner depths of ones being; never is this for the lover, themselves, but for the mutual assurance and descent of the Divine, the good, moral and self-evidently awe-inspiring into daily life. Anything less entraps us into smaller, less conscious attachments.
There will be much more to come, but this is a good thing to keep true to where your heart lies. As we go along I will continue to offer other variable paths that better illuminate this truth—the Supreme Love, that is—in the other increasingly complex ways we become ignorant to that (and feel justified in it, too!). The only problem is that the Integral Yoga, while it’s method is true, cannot, immediately and powerfully, help the dejected girls and boys the Mother is supposed to be to there for.
The rhetoric simply comes across as another religion of a different flavor, but this time, vastly more universal and updated to evolutionary organization and esthetic contemplation—reminiscent of man’s ideation of the star. We once looked to the heavens dreaming constellations and we had named them in a fervor, gave myths to them, detailing tragedy and love. Where did that go? What is so dramatic about ordinary life, compared to the blissful resolution Divine Love emanates to us?
As mentioned in my theories of agency article, the goal is to engender agency which facilitates converting relative modes of theory into transcendent ones. Let’s take a look at some more “profane” detailings of couplings.
Interlude:
“Desire, i’m hungry…”
“…and I hope you feed me”
“How do you want me?”
Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles (or Microspheres)
Preliminary note on Bubbles style:
Peter Sloterdijk’s magnum opus, his Spharen trilogy, is at once a metaphysics, a media study and cartography of ecstatics. His argument is much in the vein of mystical manuals; the readers persuasion is based on associations and the reader assuming the identity of the writer—that is to say, that the reader and writer, themselves, are oriented to the same object. One could simply read the entirety of this book in that way. He would find it easy to describe as an exercise in a particular ‘disciplining of the self’ in intersubjectivity—as the linguists would say.
Think of it like a scientific experiment (albeit one where we test language and particular signs); then, the methodological procedure involves us using the power of language to continue to faithfully substitute the ideal behind our words (creating a schism between the singular word behind the many referents, and the referents as words as well), to prove its eternality—the reality of the Sphere, as a metaphysics, is not dependent on its actuality, really, but the readers own commune with the writer. For the writer is the operator, he takes upon himself a dual episteme; both the saying of words, which now act as technology to him, and the issuance of a “primal” schema behind them. As Sloterdijk writes the book he interjects imagery along side the text, and in fact, this is fundamental to his “argument”. We should rather, in this case, replace argument with envelopment; that is, his way to reach into more primal states, previously unconscious and to make them lived-in and intentional.
Where the problem lies in is that many of these “metaphysics” rely on obtuse measurements. They, “based” in reality can, indeed, take us far from it. Sloterdijk, in my eyes is a special case, as he prefers “the absolute localization” of existence. Rather than, get caught in backwards abstractions, he simply wants us to continue to realize the importance of life as a Nietzschean would; to be an affirmation, a transference and a love.
What is different is that his writing is as he states: a fusion of Nietzsche and Deleuze. Each excursion he makes, much like an adventurer, allows the reader to see the many objects that hold his attention—that we, too, should take upon a life-affirming attitude, when we direct attention to his words. That is, he is a philosopher of transference and love. Whether he is discussing historical dramas, literature, the arts and so forth he begins to categorize them as he goes along. We have this undergrowth, the rhizome, and then the trees that grow out of that. For Sloterdijk you can hear in his rhetoric the many associative portmanteaus of this; “psycho-acoustic”, or a primarily psychological and acoustic entanglement; “scientific-hypothetical”; “media theorist Marshall McLuhan […] pentecostal phantasms”, where one gets this sense that the only true argument we can impose on Sloterdijk’s self-referential and self-aware categorization is what belongs as a subsidiary of some grander process. In other words, would entertaining his rhetoric mean are we are missing something? Kind of similar to a physicist who forgets to include friction in his diagram, and gets a “true” but unreliable resource for us.
Here, is a fairly succinct quote to illustrate this:
It drives agents to limit themselves to small, malicious arithmetic units; the greedy of recent days no longer ask where they are as long as they are allowed to be someone, anyone. If, by contrast, we are here attempting to pose the question of “where?” anew in a radical fashion, that means restoring to contemporary thought its feeling for absolute localization, and with it the feeling for the basis of the difference between small and large.
Chakras, Sheaths; Immortal Love
A theme we will expand on lies here:
What recent philosophers have termed forgetfulness of being [Seinsvergessenheit] is most evident as an obstinate willful ignorance of the mysterious place of existence
I originally called Sloterdijk a cartographer, that is a map maker. While, he likely considers himself more than that—given I initially got that categorization from Michael Serres whom Sloterdijk has his own thoughts on, another category in his schema—I still believe this to be true. In the last portion of Bubbles he initiates a retrospect, outlining the 7 micro-spheres he views of importance.
We are in a microsphere whenever we are
— firstly in an intercordial space
— secondly in the interfacial sphere
— thirdly in the field of “magical” binding forces and hypnotic effects of closeness
— fourthly in immanence, that is to say in the interior of the absolute mother and its postnatal metaphorizations
— fifthly in the co-dyad, or the placental doubling and its successors
— sixthly in the care of the irremovable companion and its metamorphoses
— seventhly in the resonant space of the welcoming maternal voice and its messianic- evangelistic-artistic duplications.
The reason I call him a map-maker is that all micro-spheres I will, now, term as emanations of a single spheric-thought-field. That is, if we consider love an electricity, then he notes the differences or sheaths of charges. Love, as the Divine shining-through existence, in Yoga, demarcates these boundaries as the various chakras of the body. The next sheath is always a complication of the previous.
You can think of it like the consciousness becoming cognizant of its physical, base, primal form; the form of others and, then, the sharing of the physical form, introduced, between them, like that of the navel or that of the appetite; next, we take the situation of multiple beings, introducing a common consciousness of being—much like the center, or heart chakra—and such and so forth.
All metaphysics of sufficient complication are simply the increasing significance of other elements on a primal ideal (that is to say, an object of meditation or esthetic contemplation); because we have thus begun to be conscious of many of the other things already “proven to us”. At first, these resemblances aren’t initially identical to forgetting. In the beginning, we were simple cave men who found profound love in a common object, then we began to privilege other relationships; other objects of intention (and attention), then we started having pride in the procuring of those intended objects of attention, and finally that of another’s intent and so forth; eventually, this continued until all these culminated into a common goal; revealing the next and then the next, and such, or that is to say, abstraction. One where we repeat the same theory of politics, the holding of another’s intent, but on a meta-level. Once we begin to command objects of an abstracted quality, we forget the first, originary meditative act of commune.
The problem of modernity, as Sloterdijk suggests, is indeed in the willful forgetting; that the only way we can even gesture to these invisible objects, distractions and ideals is through the commanding of another’s intention; that is, that we are always in a microsphere-thought-field (even if we pretend we aren’t) where we are imbedded in some kind of ecstatic-topological-immensity (and perhaps, Aurobindo would say this is the Mother, underlying and facilitating the descent of higher rings onto our forms). His construction of a philosophy of ecstatic affirmation in rhizomatic-attentive-referents is a way of re-capturing the primal.
It is through the intellectual recognition of this and then the convicted practice of it (the yogic sadhana) that we begin to bring a principle, a nesting of referents, into the rings or sheaths of our being, and then into the broader entanglement that we—through the nature of being born human (gritty and dirty boys)—are indebted, dedicated and directed in. In this sense, we achieve an immortality of our souls. To entertain the idea that our intentions, our agency, can be absolved, into the void, is to participate in the Seinsvergessenheit of modern-man.
Aurobindo begins to see a different way around this through starting at the top, the crown, and working his way downward. This ensures that he is not unconsciously creating new levels of being, but simply integrating them into a common whole. What we introduce, here, with Sloterdijk, is where we can begin to see the collapses of being, the collapses of entanglement, or being in love. Since Sloterdijk begins at the base, he must always deal with the integration of the new ring or sheath of attention, one that must—inextricably and irrevocably—provoke thoughts and fears of its eventual demise. Modernity is the attempted prediction of it, while the real truth of the matter is it can only truly rely in a reliable love and sustaining aspiration of an ideal that, irrevocably, brings it into reality.
The Siren
As far as the ancient Sirens are concerned, it remains peculiar that for an entire millennium—from Homer to his late Hellenistic commentators—barely a word was written about the material reason for the death of the men on the Sirens’ island. It seems that all recipients darkly accept the connection between being honored in song and having to die as a given.
This is one of the dualisms we are always confronted with. If one person is speaking another cannot. This dualism is the asymmetry of speech (and of which, so much of love is talking, now, is it not?). You only need to spend time to look at the institutionalized referents of the male and female principles (whether one looks to Evola’s Eros—a book I will be unable to discuss at the moment, but will get to in due time) to see this connection applied to a positive Yang, as speaker, and to the negative Yin, as hearer—as a harmony to this asymmetry.
If we take this audio-vocal act of intimacy as the criterion, then Christian evangelism also partakes in the siren effect in several ways: the angelic greeting […] the mystical sermon [commanding] the individual to become pregnant […] in its vital functions, the Christian message generally has the intention of raising up dejected life[…] When the siren religiosity releases intimistic and mystical tendencies, in precarious cases also sect magic and suicidal madness, the muse’s religio leads to communal integration and the coherence of the people’s church, but at its dangerous extreme also mass psychoses and belligerent chosen offensives.
[O]nly in here, the stream of speech, is the mother-child space connected to the stages of adult myths and the arena of political quarrels over right and wrong.
A process here is the disintegration of normal communities and their micro-spheres. That is to say, the speaker begins integrating fears of our collapse; much like the sirens. The Christian message massaging our doom through its evangelic ideals; the self-afflicted siren, however, may obtain the power over “spiritual death”. When both of these engagements, siren-like or Christ-like, become dissolved from the speakers hold over the hearer, and into the realm of meat space, the physical, we begin to see as Sloterdijk mentions, legitimate forms of destruction.
The self-afflicted suicide only really presents a problem in the inability for others to enact their will upon you. Realistically, it is moral universalism, the ideation of every ones beliefs—even people whom careless in their virus-like disintegration-techniques pose a problem to you—that is, the privileging of the relative modes of agential theories over transcendental, that leads to fear of death.
What about the noble who charge valiantly through-and-in-death, because they understand the immortality of their rings of being, of the spheric shared love-space? That they are, and were, indeed, real and entangled in others; and that their last act of agency may bring about the continued prolongation of others ability to assert themselves? That is not cowardice and an escape from reality. Whether it is immoral is whether it is done stupidly or not. One shouldn’t die for nothing.
Illiterate Truths
And there is nothing to suggest that she might one day become inaccessible, as long as the sufficiently good, sufficiently edible mother takes the side of the cannibal’s longing for her. […] The mother-eater is always right, and is right to be right: its drive to absorb is based on an immemorial biological truth relationship […] [A] child […] acquires the proto-religious faith that an eternally valid pragmatic equation is in force between calling and drinking. This conviction forms the core of the child’s belief that is can perform magic[…]
The most grotesque response of males in modern times has been the “motherization” (all mothers are really inadequate to the Mother, herself) of actually normal girls. How many women, really, desire to hold the male principle of the speaker unto their own mate? It seems kind of ridiculous.
Take a gander, here:
This was especially evident at the Berlin Lover Parades of the 1990s […] These communions with the audio gods […] are based on the same truth model as post-Freudian psychoanalysis […] [those] [recommend] that [their] clients develop a strict individual rhetoric of mourning […] while integristic music therapy in the streets relies on drug-assisted group euphorias that may advance flirtation with absorption into a spheric primal body […]
Anyone who has lived any kind of normal life, or knows it through resentment, understands the reality of this “primal sphere body”; the men dance upon the women, but not in the way the women dance, as if, they are taken in by the men. This is why it is flirtation; not through the equality of beings, but through the difference of beings; that there requires a submission, a flirtation of hearer, speaker (the held center and the holding, to borrow from Katz’ Generative Anthropology).
Anyone whose been in sexual entanglements also knows this truth or primal agitation as a kind of flirtation and calling of Truth. It signals to the other lover, that, indeed, they are loved; for how could they not when ravaged with a primal beast?
[N]o psychoanalytic treatment would ultimately be possible without an orientation of the desiring subject around […] an illiterate transcendence […]
The prospect of literacy itself, brings about a new ring of being, but we must organize where it occurs. If we forget that we sign to things, that our agency depends on their localization, the capacity to hold or be held, then we simply forget what makes us human in the first place.
Now, this drama and dialectic can be as much a drama as a harmony; whether the relationship subsists is dependent on only that; its localization, a flavor of illiterate transcendence.
Sexual Intimacy
If de facto intimacy comes into play here, it is only through the transference of closeness relationships from real intimate scenes of the kind listed above to genital or athletic duels or duals. Such transferences distinguish human sexuality from animals.
Again, the theme throughout all of this work is simply unconsciousness. While, of course, the primal is indeed the truth and the originator of all truth; we always come into contact through unconscious desires that, on their own, can never hold a candle to the type of original love that is exemplary in the powerful, moral and collectively entangled.
This can only be drawn from the reservoir of transferable closeness memories from elsewhere […] [N]othing shows more clearly that humans are condemned to intimate surrealism than the fact that most of the time, even their genital interactions have to be arranged on a virtual inner-world stage.
World Love and the Hearer
The classical theories of strong relationships therefore have no place for the idea of the self-determined individual […] [I]f one wanted to design societies on the model of the icon of the Trinity, the result would be […] a spectrum of communes […] [with] the homogenous outside-less world state as the final communal structure—as recently dreamt up by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan in his pentecostal phantasms of the electronic global village.
The fact that McLuhan became a prophet of the internet age speaks to the inherent power of an intelligent speaker; one that knows, all too well, the technologies of his era and the cultural usage of those technologies; that is in the ability of hearers to usurp speakers.
Transition / Conclusion
It is the nature of life to be entangled in spheres of influence, in sheaths of being, and a milieu of desires and attachments. The goal of any serious seeker of love beyond the unconscious will increasingly find ways to sublimate the lower desires; through a descent and aspiration and dedication to the Divine. Why we have begun, in modernity, to privilege and pride the higher attitudes is a degree of forgetfulness; and perhaps why those who pride the commodification of the lower forms as, another, degree of unconsciousness. That is to say, we’ve become locked into Seinsvergessenheit. It is the new rule, for those of a degree of maturation to study all forms of sublimation; whether they live them or not, all they must do is hold that capacity to allow their existence in others, not to forget them.
The most common form of forgetting, and now fear among moderns, of which, is the political and mass institutional subversion of earlier communes. Ones that, to the new sheaths of being-in love, had seemed outrageous; vile and repugnant. Part II will detail this, not in exact detail but as enough of a necessary excursion and adventure through how the speaker-hearer dichotomy became polluted by un-Divine intentions. Why and where did we lose sight of an integral whole? Here, lies our foundations. Love in purity and love as the choice to engage in drama and harmony. There, we will find where we’ve mobilized inattentiveness to destroy what was once a kind of morality, too.
I’m right behind you.