Love and Consciousness

Edition No. 13

Photo by Laura Vinck on Unsplash

This edition of The Anchor, as I have no doubt my veteran readers are noticing, is the first to come from my new Substack account. I hope you will find the new formula more amenable than Mailchimp to the ever shifting tastes of the modern, postmodern, premodern, ultra-modern, hypermodern, para-modern and meta-modern era we are apparently living in.

On this first Substack edition of The Anchor, I convey to you one of the luckiest conversations with a reader I ever got to have, a recent one, on the themes of ardor, loss, fate, consciousness and grief, just in time for you to add a more critical note to your otherwise wanton celebration of Hallmark’s most durable intervention on the commons, the ever problematic Valentine’s Day!

Enjoy and, with love, until next time,

Carlos

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CHAPTER 1

Dear Carlos.

Have you ever fallen in love? 

How do you know you love someone?

Is there a difference between loving someone and being "in love" with someone? And after all, what is love? 

And, perhaps the most important question, how do you get over a broken heart? 

Sincerely: Bruno, who arrived this Friday at the age of 21 with a fucking heart in pieces.

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Dear Bruno,

My child, I have fallen in love many, many times. And I have loved many, many times. And my heart has been broken, many, many times.

So I believe there is indeed a very big difference between loving someone and being in love with someone. Both are important, even as it is perfectly possible, if not common, to have one without the other. 

When you love someone, you wish to give all of yourself to that person. You are actively engaged in the other's well-being.

It is the sense in which love is a verb, a doing, as opposed to something that you merely feel.

You don't check your feelings to see whether it is there or not.

Instead, you prove its existence by doing, by making a cup of tea for the other when they are sick or by lending an ear when they are troubled and need to talk.

That is the act of love. 

By contrast, it is totally doable to be in love with someone and never do any of those things.

You may be in love with another and never attend to them once, even though you find them irresistible, even though you find their absence torturous, even though you can not stop looking at them and thinking about them.

Being in love is a form of illness, make no mistake, and a special kind of obsession, a glorious one, and, in many ways, an essential one. For a love that is only an action verb, only ever a motion that you make towards the other, is still missing that incandescent spark that comes only from being in love with someone. 

These moments, during which you wrestle with these forms of love and the heartbreak that is an obligatory component of their experience, are some of the most important moments of your life.

Know that you will be here again, broken-hearted.

And again.

And then again.

In fact, pray that this ordeal putting together these pieces may be merely the first of many. Savor the act as you put yourself together, for you are learning how to live, how to walk, how to breathe, how to feel, how to love. You are learning the essential condition of living, that pain is inescapable, but that it is also a great teacher.

If you can, go on walks.

Treat yourself to nice things.

Move slowly.

Cry.

Then, cry again.

If there are friends, see them.

If they are willing to listen, talk to them.

Give yourself time to heal.

Be very patient.

And a word of caution: at your age, you will be desperate to fill the agonizing hole that has been left inside of you, and you will want to do this as quickly as possible, anything to fill the emptiness.

That is perfectly normal.

However, you will see as you encounter this feeling throughout your life, that the real glory of being a human being is found not in running away from the pain but, in fact, going towards it.

The glory of living is in the act of this negotiation with oneself, of doing everything you can to stall the process of filling the cavity, of resisting the knee-jerk desire to fill the hole in your heart, to try to do this for as long as you possibly can—even as the terrified voices within you demand that you go as fast as you can in the opposite direction, in the direction of prematurely filling the emptiness left in the wake of the beloved.

There are so many ways we humans patch up our wounds in haste, out of terror of feeling the pain.

Often we do so by replacing the beloved with someone else, a new stand-in that fits awkwardly where the beloved once was, but, good enough to get the job done.

Do not do this.

Often we seek the council of some drug, a favorite one, or a cocktail of them. These trick your brain into believing you have forgotten the beloved and are healed. And sometimes they actually work in the act of forgetting, but trust that God is making sure to speed along another heartbreak for you by some new beloved which those drugs do little to prepare you for.

Do not do this.

There are so many other ways.

Bold moves.

Insane actions.

Thrills.

Geographical relocation.

Do not do any of this.

Do whatever is possible for you to resist this!

If there is one thing to tell yourself as you face the temptation to take the short cut out of the pain, let it be this: always remind yourself that the difference between the person that takes the short cut and the one that doesn’t is the difference between the inauthentic person and the authentic one.

We live in such a misbegotten era, such an insane and benighted culture full of illusion and ephemera, that the very word “authenticity” has acquired a pejorative meaning. This is in keeping with the zeitgeist’s psychopathy, the era of George Santos, an era of illusion and virtuality.

But know that this characterization is an anomaly, a horror-show vagary of this generation’s desperation and loss of meaning. Do not believe it.

When I tell you that the difference between the short cut and the long way is the difference between inauthenticity and authenticity I am telling you that it is the difference between being asleep and being awake, between living in darkness and living in light, between being a sheep and being a lion, between living what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation” and living like someone who knows who they are deep down inside.

This is what separates the boys from the men, the girls from the women.

Who would you prefer to be?

My child, you are at this young age of yours experiencing the birth pangs of a very long affair with the nature of the heart. Pray and hope that it stays as open and shivering as it is now.

You can not see the innards of that which is never rendered in pieces.

Study your heart, now that it has been torn. Learn what makes it throb, what makes it beat, what makes it burn.

Our hearts bear a signature exponentially more profound than its cerebral counterpart. Its language is mysterious, but what it tells us is essential: it is the stuff of true self-knowledge and true life.

At this moment of pain is when you most know who you are.

Take notes.

Let your tears dapple the paper.

I hope I have given you something that helps you with your pain, Bruno. I am someone who has experienced it many times and continues to experience it to the present day. It has taught me so very much. May it do the same for you.

Yours with love,

Carlos

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CHAPTER 2

Dear Carlos,

It’s the first time I feel this, it's like being sick you know? At night it hurts too much and in the morning you wake up with a bad feeling as if something is very wrong. As the day goes by you get busy with other things and that helps you not think or feel so much; life puts you in situations where you have to keep moving forward.

I guess, just like an illness, this will end. Others have told me that nothing lasts forever, that everything has to die and that even good things must end, but in moments like these sometimes I really doubt it. Does it really end? How the hell does it happen?

Bruno

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Dear Bruno,

This is the hardest part, living through the torture of those early hours of the day, wishing you could be rid of it, that when you wake up you might find the peace you got from the later hours of the previous day.

Instead, it is the Groundhog Day of hell, where the misery of your loss and your abandonment stares at you in the face in the morning, as though you’d woken up in some gulag of the spirit.

In this gulag, there are guards who, by the afternoon, take pity on you and open the gates and let you out of the gulag.

And you think, at long last, I am free.

And you run into the day, as far away from the gulag as possible, in order to banish it from your life forever. Here you are in the later part of the day, free of it.

And you find a nice comfortable place to rest and, by the evening, you are much more relaxed and you let your body and mind go to sleep.

Yet, somehow, while you slumber, those guards of the gulag, who earlier let you out, now capture you and deposit you back in the gulag, where you inevitably wake up the next morning to go through the whole charade yet again.

It is torture.

The truth is that it does and it does not end.

It ends in the sense that you move on and this happens without you knowing. It happens when one day you are sitting in a cafe reading a book and you look out at the sunny street and you people-watch and you sigh because some invisible gentle hand has alit onto your shoulder and you take it all in and all of a sudden you say to yourself, “Gosh, I am over that person. In fact, I have been over that person for a while now, only I didn’t know it. But I’m realizing it now, for the first time. Uncanny.” This is a very pleasant feeling and it makes things seem like you have finally awoken.

But do not be fooled!

For, although this realization makes you think that you’ve woken up, in reality, you’ve gone back to sleep.

You see, the pain that you are in right now is the pain of getting to know yourself better. It is the most truthful, authenticating pain there is.

The bleeding edges of a cracked heart reveal a poetry of the soul the verses of which you will never be able to read when that heart is mended.

So read them now.

Read them closely, while you have the chance, while the poetry from the blood of your heart is pouring out of you.

For after you have that awakening at the cafe, know that that is a sign that your heart has finally mended itself, so that you can go out there and enjoy your life.

However, the price of this enjoyment is a kind of sleep that belies this so-called awakening, the sleep of being unconscious to the verses of your heart.

And don’t forget: one day in the future, your heart will break again and, hopefully, you will remember to say, “Time to get my reading glasses out!”

Yours

Carlos

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CHAPTER 3

Dear Carlos,

Thank you for that insight. I have one last question.

I think we can never forget the people we love. I guess when you meet someone who ends up being important in your life, they inevitably leave something of themselves in you. I feel that there is something from each person that we loved (and love) in us, a part of them lives inside and as long as it is like that...they will never leave. I guess I could just keep the good stuff, I don't know. Is it possible that we are a construction of experiences?

Bruno

- - - - -

Dear Bruno,

I hear the distinct ring in your words of an old soul. You have no idea how well on your way you already are. When I was your age to muster the words that you have already written in your emails would have been impossible for me. I didn't have the maturity.

But you do. Your willingness to feel pain and to stand by it is proof of that. It is a true strength, never forget that.

Regarding your philosophical question, it isn't only possible but a sheer certainty that we are a construction of experiences.

And now I know you are a philosopher for you are touching on a particular thought experiment which many a philosopher has run, that being the task of thinking of an alternate existence for a person that changes nothing other than their experiences.

Only their day-to-day conditions are what’s different.

The hair, the skin, the body, the mind is the same. Many experiments on twins separated at birth have been done precisely to gain some insight into this question.

Personally, I believe that if I were to wake up in someone else’s life with no remembrance of my own, though with the exact same physique and faculties, this would be tantamount to my death.

I believe that every one of my thoughts about who I am is inextricably linked to my context and if there is another “me” in a different life out there, though he look exactly like me and have the same brain, the fact that that “me” has had a completely different life than my own makes him essentially a complete stranger. He is as close to me in that regard as any stranger is.

And yet: you would be a conscious person nonetheless, just with a different set of experiences!

And isn’t that lovely, that there is a universal Experience which might simply be called “Consciousness”?

Isn’t it lovely—who cares which set of experiences your ego is encased in?—because all experiences are just one’s experiences, but are essentially no different from any other set of experiences except simply in the arrangement?

Doesn’t that mean that when we die we will all come together, as Jung believed?

Aren’t we all now together and we just don’t know it?

And, if so, isn’t that lovely?

Ok, now to wax less philosophical and return to your questions about the heart . . . .

You are correct in your suspicion that the ones we love leave an imprint on us.

Sometimes they go so far as to brand or scar us!

But it isn't necessary during this vulnerable moment in your life for you to think on what it is that will live on in you of this person who just broke your heart. Right now, the task at hand is to build the new life this break has determined for you.

But one day you will see what it is that this person has left on you.

In my experience, it comes in the form of a memory of oneself as a person that no longer exists, someone that you have long said goodbye to, the former you, the person whose heart could be broken in that way back then, but no longer.

Along the edges of those old pieces that have long been put back together, you will see the outline of the legacy of the other within you. And you will be happy for it, for by that point you will have loved yourself so much for having those edges.

Pray to have such a broken heart that when you die it looks like the most beautiful vase that fell all the time and had to be stitched back together.

The lines along the edges of the pieces that are put back together will be like the lines in between the old stones of an old wall in the woods, beautiful articulations which you wouldn't change for anything in the world.

Peace to you. May God bless all that you hope and strive for.

Yours

Carlos