Metaphysics of Love

dreams drugs and delusions

If the “mother goddess” of psychedelics and dmtheads is genuinely the master of this world, and the psychonauts are right about everything they say, that “we are all one”, and Buddhism is just a primitive enlightenment liberalism, and India was just waiting for thousands of years until pasty nerds showed up to finish their system and turn it into a system of manipulating dumb women into having sex, and grow dreadlocks, THEN, I have met her. But unlike those guys, sober, and I can confirm that we live in hell and all of this is all torture, because she hates us, and every attempt at peace, wisdom and love, is a cruel trick, meant to humiliate play with our hope of release.

Zizek’s famous “love is evil” monologue I take as a great example of the Great Mistake.

He describes what he calls “the logical conclusion of quantom physics”, which is that the world is a cosmic mistake, and that we as humans are agents of evil who perpetuate the mistake, ultimately concluding that Love is Evil, because it is in conflict with the natural state of the universe.

This all rests on an implicit assumption, that True Good is the desire to “merge” with the All, to “become one” with the universe and lose your personal idiosyncrasies and become an indistinguishable part of the Whole. To re-enter the womb and be unbirthed, and become one with Mother.

I’m sorry to once again invoke Neon Genesis Evangelion, but if the shoe fits

This is what is reported in the psychedelic experience, and some near death experiences. You “merge” with the universe and feel a loss of identity, total identification with the Totality of Existence, and people describe this experience as “a feeling of total love”.

However, the great mistake: That’s not what love is. Much has been said about the distinctions in greek between types of love. I am no expert in ancient greek yet, but to this point I am referring to agape, the highest notion of love, which is also the word that in christianity is translated to “charity”. “the love man has for God and God has for Man”. That is not, and cannot be, the kind of love reported in such experiences, and it cannot be the kind of love that Zizek describes as being in conflict with the nature of the universe.

What all the Greek Love’s have in common - except for one - is that it is a relationship between two parts. It is explicitly distanced. Between brothers, between father and son, between lovers, etc. The contradiction is, if you experience total ego death and merge with the universe, then there is no one to love, and nothing to be loved, and the euphoria can only be self-love: Philautia.

The desire in a man to shred his ego and “become one” with nature, is no act of love, as we today use the word. It is a desire for self-love. Narcissism. Love requires distinct person-hood. If we are to describe it in psychological drives, then the desire to “merge with nature/the mother goddess”, is not “love” but more like “hunger”. It is not a desire to give yourself to the world, but to eat it.

If you become one with the universe, and feel total love, then you can only be loving yourself. It is, rather tragically, the feeling of love without a subject; the total absence of Love. Love requires a subject and an object, and in the zizek-quantom-physics universe, he perversely says the very act of distinction into subject-object, is a violation of nature. His purpose is something like, saying “look, there are fundamental contradictions in our most basic worldview, but if we just acknowledge them formally in language as absurd, then we can informally get on with our life and just not worry about it and enjoy liberal democracy.

Much like people use irony to articulate real problems they have, but hypnotize themselves into thinking they have resolved them, by saying them in a snarky voice, or in an ironic tone.

Hallucinogenic drugs are a spiritual lobotomy, and the enlightened psychonaut who experiences “oneness with everything”, is a housewife who was cured of hysteria.

I set out as a young man to save love. That was my goal when I first sat down to write anything. I couldn’t integrate any notion of Love with life as I had experienced it. I was heartbroken, and had broken hearts, and I was determined that the most important thing in the world, was to somehow find a way to save the idea of, mainly romantic, love, from what I saw as the materialist deconstruction of it in our era.

I wanted to make love possible philosophically, prove it was possible, render it possible. Only to discover it was never in any danger, you just can't have it while also being Orange Goo. You can't have both. You can’t be “one with the universe”, and have love. To have love you must be prepared to become Truly Alone, or, said another way: a whole, real person. And that was my blind spot - I couldn’t even conceive of this possibility, because the reason I wanted to save Love in the first place, was because I wanted to Merge with it, and be liberated from loneliness.

As a first principle, distrust euphoria.

There are worse things than suffering justly.

Pain is the sister of euphoria, not it’s opposite, and should not be trusted either. Suffering is equally disorienting. But shame is a shadow, it could not exist without a light source, and you can choose to either focus on the shadow, or use it to find the light.

Love without a subject, for the sole pleasure of loving, being the lover, is no love at all.