the ill king

…
But something happened today.

I said I had sex less than one week ago. In fact I think it was exactly one week ago. And we kept in touch. And I told her I was not in love with her. Which is true.

But, you see, my father would not have acted like this. If he was alone and a woman fell in love for him, and this girl, ehm, woman, really have fallen in love for me, poor soul. He would take her. I never saw my father saying no to a woman if he was single.

Should I refuse a woman just because she is a decade older than me, has a kid and an unhealable illness. The kind that makes you die a slow and painful death. Does not attract me physically and has no language in common with me?

Yes her eyes sparkle, her smell is nice to my nose, and my energy has a nice time in exploring her body. But can the energy, the smell, and the eyes balance the age, the beauty, the language, the illness, and the kid. Yet my father would have realistically said, “Yes, go for it!” And this is why he is always in a relationship, and I am always alone.

While I was considering how to answer her last email. The desperate type of email, the one that is sent 5 days after the probing one. 5 days in which she was probably on the torture table, while I lousily considered how to answer her without harming her too much. I went to practice meditation, and I did an exercise that my teacher taught me personally. I shall not bore you with the details, just with the result. As I was moving the energy and my body as I was told, if I were to think of this issue… then the answer was clear to me:
Yes, go for it.

But as soon as I were to stop the exercise I would go back believing that ‘NO’ was the only honest, true answer that I could say and hold with integrity.

There is no right answer, we can just chose between different type of pain.

The wise man only sleeps one night in the inn of truth

or similar.

And:

There once was an old king. The king was old and with a very big illness. All the doctors have run away, fearing to be put to death for not being able to heal the king. Only an old magician have remained. He was old, and everybody believed he was half crazy. The king went to the magician and asked for a solution that would cure him of his terrible illness. The magician explained him that he had to find a man that was similar to him in all details. Exchange clothes with the man and make him king for one day. After that one day the man would die, and the king would once again be whole (healed). A request was sent through all the kingdom:
-all the men similar to the king were to go to the palace for a checkup. Failure to meet this request would bring sudden death to the men and all his family.
Male of all ages start swarming the palace. One by one they would be checked by the doctor, and he would dismiss them all. This one was too short, this was too tall, this too fat, and this had a skin dot that the king did not have. Not one met the prerequisite of the doctor. The king protested, said: you are never satisfied. And the magician explained: the man has to be absolutely like you for the cure to take place.
Not one person was chosen.
Some weeks later the kind and the magician, were walking along the banks of the river, when they saw an old man. His skin was wrinkled, his body lean. He was dressed in rugs, he was maybe the poorest man in the country. Living of rubbish, thrown away by others. And the magician said: Here! That’s him. Quick change your clothes with him, make him king and he will die at your place and you will be again healed.
-Me? What have I in common with that bum? He is of a different age, size, and height. He is also poor while I am rich, he has no family either nor friends. How can I compare with him.
-Quick, quick do it. Said the magician, for an old ill king can only be compare with the poorest man of the country.
The king refused and that very night he died.

What has I in common with an old, ill, divorced mother?

I observe that I believe in love

I don’t believe in believe. I generally don’t think that believing in things is smart. And I surely don’t define my religion by what my believes are.

But I do have to admit that there are situations where I reach a rational conclusion, while my body acts, and reacts in a totally different way. As if reacting to a different worldview. So, in a sense I have rationally accepted that what my subconscious believes is not always the truth. In a similar way in which you can see a picture and think it is a three dimensional image, only to discover that it was made of only two dimensions. There are thousand of visual illusions. Well I think that some of my believes are similar to visual illusions. Some are not. Even if you were to convince me rationally that jumping from from a great height will not harm me, my body would still oppose a serious resistance. This is what I refer to as believe. And this is what I refer to when I say: I believe in love.

I don’t believe in love because I think that it makes any sense rationally. I believe in love because I have observed my body over and over again, and the only way to explain the waxes and wanes of the pain when I am focused on a woman is by admitting that I believe in love.

What do I believe exactly? I believe that there is this connection, and it links two people, and it is symmetric. Symmetry plays a big role in my believe. I believe that you can feel it. You can lie about it, and you can even ignore it, if you are very busy, or very unclear about your inner world.

When I fall in love, it is not so much the love that I feel, but the excitment of the understanding that love is there. This is another way of saying that I act on love as a mean, not as an end. I don’t act directly on the world, but on my understanding of the world.

If I were to realise, suddenly, that no love is there, my pain disappears, as fast as when I was a kid the fear of a ghost would disappear as soon as in the ghost I would recognise the good old hanger, hanging in the penumbra. I was wrong, no reason to be afraid. And similarly, I was wrong, no reason to be excited. Or, I was wrong, no reason to suffer.

So, why do I suffer, when I suffer?
I don’t suffer when she does not love me. I don’t suffer when she is happily making love with another. No, I suffer when she loves me (or so I am illuded), and she does not tell me. I suffer when I am under the illusion¹ that she secretly loves me, but she would not tell. In this sense all the resistance that a woman might have in telling me: “look I really don’t love you”, plays against me.

And there were time, long time ago, when I would corner a woman just to have her telling me the magic 4 words which would suddenly make me feel better. They would not understand it. Neither would I. I would just use it, like you use something that you know it works, although you don’t know why.

Then I stopped playing that game.. First of all a woman who is cornered is not always truthful. Woman just don’t have the same concept of Truth, we guys have. It’s not black and white for most of them. Is many shades of grey, if not even multicolored.
And secondly I would never end up with a girl. Yeah, I would not feel pain, but I was willing to feel pain, if in this way I could get the girl.

So the whole thing changed. I started to feel that love was something that could pass unrecognised, until a person would stay by herself long enough, enough to recognise it. Did you ever had a woman tell you: I could not feel the love for you, but then I left, and as I was alone on vacation all distractions left me, and you remained. Isn’t it wonderful when it happens? Love was there even before. Surely it wasn’t the period far away from me that increased our connection. It just went on the foreground when all the rest disappeared.
Also it could grow or fade. So I tried not to solve the equation soon, but let it unravel naturally. Withstanding the pain.

And is a strange situation. Think about it:
If she loves me, and she recognise it, I feel no pain.
If she does not love me, and she tells me, I feel no pain.
But the doubt kills me.

And of course this makes me a terrible gamer. Impatient. Too sensitive.

And the worse of all is when she tells me… and I don’t believe her. And this is how I see that I believe in love. It’s an observation. If I did not believe that love was symmetric I could rest on the realization that I love her, and she did not love me. Fair enough, right?

But it doesn’t work like this, you see. The more I am sure of my observation, the more I pretend to know her feeling better than herself. Either I am wrong, and I don’t love her. Or she is wrong, mistaken or lying. The idea that love might be not symmetric is not even considered. And the fact that I assume that love is symmetric is the clear sign of my unconscious belief.

But you see, often love, and attraction is symmetric. And often woman do lie about it. I remember how surpriesed I were the first time I did a particular social meditation. This meditation involves many people, it comprises various parts. In one you are supposed to go and dance erotically with other people. Boys or girls, your choise. Of course they might move away. You chose with whom you dance. You chose how dirty you dance with them. Will you dance cheek to cheek or grope them in the middle of the floor. I have seen it all, and done most. But the fact that is ritualised. That the social element is left out. That no bond is built that will survive the end of the meditation, makes everybody more free.

I remember the girls that I liked, the same one I was attracted to, come and look for me. It was an amazing sensation. Because no one would dance with everybody. The time was limited, and so you had to chose your partners. I had girls that I liked coming and dancing with me while I was already dancing with another girl. It was an awakening experience. Revitalizing, but it made me realise how much girls are contracted. How much they lie. How much they expect you to act. But most of all how much they pretend they are not interested when in truth they are very, very interested.

I remember speaking about all this with a friend of mine who have been doing the same meditation for a bit longer. He confirmed every bit of it. “Yes” he said, “you end up thinking: but then you really are assholes”. [pretending to be that uninterested]

And this just for attraction. Chemical attraction. And if this is how symmetric attraction often (but not always!) is, my subconscious is excused for assuming that love has to be symmetric, too. Don’t you think so?

————-
1) it is a belief too, but since I have already used the word believe speaking about the general issue of love, i.e. I believe in love (that is, I believe love exists), I don’t want to confuse you guys (and our only female reader, Tasha) in calling it a belief too. So we have two levels:

1. I believe there is a love connection between me and x.
2. I believe love exists.

Those are separate claims, although the first subsumes the second. And for the rest of the entry I shall try to use the word believe only for the second case, and ‘I am under the illusion’, or ‘I feel’ in the first case. Sorry for the complication but sometimes the world is complicated, and simplifying beyond its intrinsec complexity is not the right thing to do.

Love as a mean

One of the thing that I am realising, in this autumn of my spring, is that I am not looking for a girlfriend, a companion, a femme, as an end, but as a mean. I don’t like it either, but I rather admit it than live in denial. But what do I mean, exactly. It means that I am looking for a companion to have a family. To build a family. Not to be lonely. To be able, more easily, to transform my rough sexuality into daily affection. I am not… finding a woman, and then wanting to have a relationship because I like her so much, and then wanting to deepen my relationship because I am curious, and then wanting to have kids to make our relationship immortal. No, no, no. I am putting the cart before the horse.

You might say, and you have reached half thirty to discover this truth. What have you been doing the rest of your life? Sleeping? Dreaming. Indeed I was, but I was dreaming that although I was putting the cart before the horse, I was actually able to change this. This was my dream.