5/7/07

But concerning doubts: you must surely have noticed how every attempt at 'self-realisation' is accompanied by psychological stresses of this kind, as if some part of you were desperately opposing it, determinedly trying to slam on some kind of psychic (and not so psychic) breaks that will halt the project before it is realised. It is precisely this that makes it so difficult to answer the fundamental, and fundamentally important, question of what it is you want to do, for your 'immediate' accessible feelings and reactions are not reliable - are, on the contrary, all too often deliberately deceptive (you suspect). And what seems to lie behind all of this, but what is much more probably merely its rationalisation, is the notion that at some, now obviously inaccessible, point in the past you took a wrong turning, and that as a result every subsequent step taken has only led you further astray from this path abandoned long ago. Because this point of departure is now inaccessible, there is no point returning to it: error and confusion, ever more deeply plunged into, are the only available courses of action now. Even taking what would have been the 'right' course of action in the past will now no longer rectify things, nor even significantly ameliorate them, for the time for correctly taking it is long over.
The knowledge that this notion of a jolt or a break in the course of a life that subsequently affects, infects and compromises all the events that follow it could only be illusory does not in the least (or let us say, does barely) affect its influence which persists as the reality, the context in which this knowledge is comprehended. Perhaps the only sensible course of action in these conditions must be not to ignore or reject or try to escape this reality, but to go on acting within it, not as if it were not there, but as if it were of little account. This terrible, corrosive and paralysing sense of not knowing why you are acting the way you are, not knowing your reasons for doing what you are doing cannot be escaped but must in some form be worked through, in some confidence that the meaning generated by acting this way may in time alter this perception of past events - and thereby of present events. Or perhaps indeed without this confidence, without any kind of hope at all, but only the determination that the past will not continue to exercise its tyranny over the present - and with the awareness that your own 'happiness' must be of secondary importance to this determination.