Hello everybody!
Psilosopher? said:
That term. "Second-half". I don't like it. Sounds like one cannot attain completion on their own, and must be attained with the assistance of one other person. I want to attain completion, or at least strive to attain it, on my own. When i say "on my own", i don't mean that in the literal sense. I want to learn from others, ruminate on their teachings, give my thanks/help in return and then be on my way. The life of the monk appeals to me. Dharma, Buddha and Sangha.
I tend to disagree with you. I think that a person is incomplete as is. There are two main routes one can take in order to attain the fullness of being. The first route is through the forming of a deep, romantic relationship with an another human being. This is the most common way, which is employed by the vast majority of people. The second route is through the devotion of your life to God (e.g. becoming a monk). Without going into the detail about the definition of God, I would like to say a few words about the technical aspect of being a monk and why it might not be the preferred route for you.
I see that you want to move a lot, do something and then “be on your way” and “disappearing with the wind”, while the life of a monk is all about staying at one place. It implies daily interactions with your follow monks and total obedience to the leadership of the monastery. And it is not a small feat! I myself spend 2-3 weeks every year at an Eastern Orthodox monastery and talk to the monks there. And I have learned that it is a heavy life, definitely not suitable for everybody. It is refreshing and relaxing to stay at a monastery for a limited period of time, but to stay there for your entire life asks lots of devotion. If your primary motivation to become a monk is a broken heart, the bitterness of unrequited love, a way of permanently dealing with the love matters, you will not be able to stay there for long I am afraid. Of course, you can become a wandering monk, but it is even a harder route. You might think that you can handle it, but can you really? Won’t you get bored after some time, become burdened by a constant lack of such basic things like food and a shower?
My point here is: deal with your unrequited love addiction first and then see whether the calling to become a monk still persists. It might happen that the calling will disappear as soon as you deal with your addiction.
Psilosopher? said:
And every "hypothetical" simulation i think of, i have the same response to her. I dismiss her. I don't interact with her. I make it painfully obvious that i was hurt, and that i want nothing to do with her. That was my way of coping.
This sounds familiar. In the beginning of my stalking “adventures”, it was about smiling at my love object (Melissa), joyfully greeting and hoping in this way to show my love for her and win her love. However, at some point I realized that it was pointless. She would not fall for me no matter what I do. But addicted as I was, I kept stalking here. But now, it was all about looking at her as contemptuously as I could. I spent many hours walking and looking out for her, and constantly playing a simulation in my mind of how I would give her a cold stare, telling her with my eyes “you hurt me sooooo bad, but I am OK without you” and keep walking without even stopping for one second. At this period in my life, I felt that the most important thing I could do was to stalk Melissa and give her this really awkward look, and then walk away from her as fast as I could. And then to repeat this same action on a daily basis: stalking – giving this awkward look – walking away.
Psilosopher? said:
No hard words at all! It's something i need to hear. I think a lot of guys are guilty of this, turning their crush into a deity like being. I don't actually want to be in a relationship with her. Even if she rocked up at my doorstep, with a tearful apology for causing me hurt, and devoting herself to me for the rest of time. I would turn her away. She caused me too much hurt.
People often say that from love to hate is just one step, and Thomas Fuller elaborated it into a saying that “The greatest hate springs from the greatest love”. This is exactly how I felt then. At first, in my imagination, I turned my crush into a beautiful angel and then into an evil bitch. Both images were equally incorrect. But that realization came much later, when my unrequited love addiction moved away and I regained the ability to look clearly and objectively at this matter.
So, returning to your personal situation, I would say that it was not her who caused your hurt (how could she? she barely knew you!), but it was your silly, unfounded fantasy about her that caused your hurt. Once you realize this, the pain will subside, you will become amazed how you got fooled by your own fantasy, basically living in an illusion all this time. “It is an easy task to build castles in the air, but hard to pull down” applies to unrequited love matters very well.
Psilosopher? said:
Dayum. There are some things to think about in this paragraph. But i still hold unconditional love higher than anything else.
Don’t get me wrong, unconditional love for everybody is indeed the ideal you should try to achieve, no doubts about that. But what I am warning for is the
illusion of unconditional love, which might look like the real unconditional love, but in reality is an egoistic, self-centered, conditional love-like feeling: “I love everybody, but only if they don’t command me, don’t irritate me, don’t talk trash behind my back, don’t say unkind words towards me, don’t smell like rotten eggs, don’t cheat on me, don’t punch me in the face, don’t steal from me, don’t rob me, don’t rape me etc”. The list of conditions people need to have in order to have your “unconditional” love is pretty much endless. It basically boils down to “if people behave nice towards me, I will love them back”.
You can spend your entire life meditating, doing psychedelic drugs and following a hippie lifestyle, truly believing that you reached the blissful unconditional love status towards everything and everybody. But what will happen, if you would be walking down the street and some thugs would beat the crap out of you, breaking your spinal cord with a leaden pipe, making you an invalid for your entire life, never be able to walk or move your arms again, completely ruining your life? Wouldn’t your unconditional love feeling be completely gone, leaving you lying in bed all day long, crying from hatred, sorrow and unfairness that happened to you?
The point I want to make here is that if you really want to cultivate the unconditional love towards all, you should start small. Your romantic partner is the ideal candidate for such a practice: you have to interact a lot with your partner and you will stumble upon thousands of things that irritate you about your partner. You have to break your ego, dampen your pride and become very humble in order to form a deep and lasting relationship with a person, who causes so much quarrels, troubles and discomfort. This is the true breaking of your ego, which takes many tears, sweat and time to accomplish, and not the illusory dissolution of the ego that you can experience on drugs or meditation, that goes away as soon as you return back to your everyday reality.
Psilosopher? said:
I thought that i should think about her a lot. And think about how crap that relationship, if it ever bloomed, could be. I'm kinda convincing myself that she is not a good partner, manipulative and deceptive. And, i can't believe it, it's actually working. Every time i think of her now, my first reaction is "ugh". Which is a lot better than "whoa". And because my first reaction is "ugh", i'm thinking about her less and less. I'm becoming more possessed by my hobbies, self improvement and learning different skills. And that feeling of spite is almost entirely gone. She is a becoming a fragment of a memory. Fuckin' finally. This burden, this shackle, this tether. I'm becoming free.
What you are doing here is changing the polarity of the feelings from ‘+’ to ‘-‘, while you need to lower the frequency (how often you think about her) and the amplitude (how much distress they cause) of the feelings. Every time you think about her, tell yourself: “this is not real, she is not real, this is a silly fantasy, I refuse to attach myself to this silly fantasy and fantasize about it”. This is hard work, you have to become an ever-vigilant gatekeeper of your own thoughts, filtering out the thoughts about Cat as soon as they enter your mind, refusing to play with them in any way. Remember: it is not your goal to realize that she is not the One for you (you already know this for a long time), but to see her for what she really is – a silly fantasy, an addiction, from which you want to get de-attached.
Psilosopher? said:
I just saw this in my Youtube subscriptions today. I think it's a sign.
You changed the polarity, but your attention is still bound by your addictive thought patterns about Cat.
RAM said:
If nothing is going to change your mind and you truly want to eliminate your sexual desires and urges, have you considered castration?
And if somebody told you that he has a pain in the arm, would you suggest to just cut the arm off, because no arm = no pain? Isn’t it much wiser to find the root of the pain and fix it, instead of simply cutting it off? Additionally, the problem with unrequited love the topic starter experiences can effectuate an enormous spiritual growth, if he deals with it correctly. Don’t deny him such an outstanding opportunity to grow.
TheAwakening said:
I realized something though, sexuality is one way to access a very unique but powerful part of ourselves and I should really work on the hurt/trust issue instead of trying to transcend sexuality. Its the source of a lot of motivation and inner fire and can be cultivated to maximize a persons health and vitality, this is also a daoist idea I have since learned. This isn't to say you should spank the monkey everyday or something like that. Spanking the monkey generally leads me to feel tired and unmotivated, particularly if it's done often. Sex with a partner is invigorating in a very unique way. For me it was feeding the demon I was trying to slay.
Agree. “Transcend sexuality” is a fancy term for running away from your problems with love partner(s). One should not be running away or deny the problems, but face them and work to the best of your ability to solve the problems. In this way, there are no problems, but only opportunities to grow. Masturbation is definitely not a solution, but a quick fix, akin to getting drunk in order to forget your problems. It works as long as you are drunk, but the hangover is inevitable.
TheAwakening said:
I hear you on what you say about the whole other half thing. I think it's a phrase which has multiple levels of interpretation and after all meaning is something of subjective experience to a large degree anyway. I would say that by becoming whole is integrating/harmonizing ones inner landscape to a certain configuration, its complete but not in a terms of a finality we are forever growing beings and even in a relationship our wholeness continues to develop and grow. For me this was in ways i likely wouldnt have or had a much harder time doing so if I was alone. In my experience I relate to this more as coherence of connectivity than wholeness. Wholeness is something I always am, even if I feel broken.
As we shape our inner landscape into a form of coherence and come to different levels of integration/awareness within ourselves we start to attract a compliment. So when one says "you'll find your other half" I think what should be said is "you'll find your compliment", they don't complete you but together each is enriched and strengthened.
Your romantic partner is the best opportunity in your life to humble your pride and break your ego, stepping away from a self-centered lifestyle and starting to live your life to serve others instead of yourself.
dragonrider said:
By trying to surpress your feelings, you will be just as much a slave of them…
Surpressed feelings are like vengefull little demons inside of you. All they need is one weak moment to retaliate…
Couldn’t agree more. However, the topic starter has no feelings for a real person, but for a silly fantasy about that person. And having feelings for a silly fantasy is…silly
woogyboogy said:
I cannot say that I fully understand why those feelings towards one single person are that intense and that rare, and feel that unique like a once in a lifetime thing, but what I truly feel is that it is merely a mirror of something inside of us.
I think this is a thing some people need to experience in order to grow. If there is one thing that such experiences can teach us, it is how little control we have over our own imagination and how easily we can get tricked by our own fantasies. The growth here is to learn to control your thought process, filtering out unwanted thought forms.
With kind regards,
A.
