Judy2

"Still, our Steppenwolf has at least discovered a Faustian duality within himself, has found out that no unified soul inhabits the single entity that is his body and that at best he is just starting out on a long pilgrimage towards such an ideal inner harmony. He would like either to become wholly human by conquering the wolf in himself, or conversely to renounce his human side in order at least to live an integrated, undivided life as a wolf. He has presumably never observed a real wolf closely, otherwise he might have seen that animals too have no such things as unified souls; that the beautiful, taut frames of their bodies house a whole variety of aspirations and states of mind; that wolves suffer too, having dark depths within them. Oh no, human beings are always desperately mistaken and bound to suffer when they try to get 'back to nature'. Harry can never fully become a wolf again, and if he did he would realise that even wolves are not simple and primitive creatures but complex and many-sided. Wolves also have two and more than two souls in their wolves' breasts, and anyone desiring to be a wolf is guilty of the same kind of forgetfulness as the man who sings 'What bliss still to be a child!' The likeable but sentimental chap wih his song about the blissfully happy child would also like to get back to nature, to his innocent origins, but he has totally forgotten that children are by no means blissfully happy. Rather, they are capable of many conflicts, a host of contradictory moods, suffering of all kinds. There is no way back at all, either to the wolf or the child. Things do not begin in innocence and simplicity; all created beings, even the ostensibly simplest, are already guilty, already full of contradictions. Cast into the muddy stream of becoming they can never, never hope to swim back up against the current. The road to innocence, to the state before creation, to God, doesn't run backwards, either to the wolf or the child, but forwards, further and further into guilt, deeper and deeper into the experience of becoming fully human. Nor is suicide, poor Steppenwolf, a serious solution to your problem. You will just have to go down the longer, more onerous, more difficult road to becoming truly human. You will frequently have to multiply your two selves, make your already complex nature a great deal more complicated. Instead of making your world more confined and your soul simpler you are going to have to include more and more world, ultimately the entire world in your soul as it painfully expands, until one day, perhaps, you reach the end and find rest. This, in so far as they succeeded in the venture, is the path taken by Buddha, by all great human beings, some knowingly, others unconsciously. Every birth entails separation from the cosmos, enclosure within limits, isolation from God, painful self-renewal. Returning to the cosmos, overcoming the painful experience of individuation, achieving God-like status: all these entail an expansion of the soul to the point where it is once again able to contain the whole cosmos within itself." Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

"What i have found to be unanimous about people is that they guard and act like they don't want you to touch the places inside them that they are the most desperate for you to touch." ~ Teal Swan

"The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." Paradise Lost, i.254-255

"She heard him calling and didn't answer, herself lying out in the garden under the beeches, brave and green and rustling their new Spring leaves, whispering without cease over her head that was buried in the grass while she lay and thought. A little insect ran over her hand and she hated it, but it mightn't disturb her for this time at the least, nothing might do that, she lay so certain and still because of this thing that had come to her. She felt neither gladness nor pain, only dazed, as though running in the fields with Ewan she had struck against a great stone, body and legs and arms, and lay stunned and bruised, the running and the fine crying in the sweet air still on about her, Ewan running free and careless still, not knowing or heeding the thing she had met. The days of love and holidaying and foolishness of kisses - they might be for him yet but never the same for her, dreams were fulfilled and their days put by, the hills climbed still to sunset but her heart might climb with them never again and long for to-morrow, the night still her own. No night would she ever be her own again, in her body the seed of that pleasure she had sown with Ewan burgeoning and growing, dark, in the warmth below her heart. And Chris Guthrie crept out from the place below the beech trees where Chris Tavendale lay and went wandering off into the waiting quiet of the afternoon, Chris Tavendale heard her go, and she came back to Blawearie never again. But she did not tell Ewan, not that night nor the week that followed, nor the weeks after that, watching her own body with a secret care and fluttering eyes for the marks and stigmata of this thing that had come to her. And she saw her breast nipples change and harden and grow soft again, the breasts that Ewan had kissed and thought the wonder of God, a maid's breasts a maid's no longer, changing in slow rhythm of purpose with the sway and measure of each note in the rhythm, her belly rounding to plumpness below the navel, she looked in the glass and saw also her eyes changed, deeper and most strange, with red lights and veinings set in them. And in the silences of the night, when the whit-owl had quieted out by the barn, once something moved there under her heart, moved and stirred drowsily, a sleeper for dreams; and she gasped and cried and then lay still, not wakening Ewan, for this was her rig and furrow, she had brought him the unsown field and the tending and reaping was hers, even as with herself when she lay in her mother's body. And she thought of that, queer it seemed then how unclearly she had thought of that aforetime, shamed, indecent and coarse for a quean to think such things - that her mother had once carried her as seed and fruit and dark movingness of flesh hid away within her. And she wakened more fully at that, lying thinking while Ewan slept at her side, turned away from him, thinking of mother, not as her mother at all, just as Jean Murdoch, another woman who had faced this terror-daze in the night. They went sleepless in the long, dark hours for the fruitage of love that the sower slept all unaware, they were the plants that stood dark and quiet in the night, unmoving, immobile, the bee hummed home and away, drowsy with treasure, and another to-morrow for the hunting his. So was the way of things, there was the wall and the prison that you couldn't break down, there was nothing to be done - nothing, though your heart stirred from its daze and suddenly the frozenness melted from you and still you might not sleep ... But now it was because of that babble of words that went round and around in your mind, soundless and scared of your lips, a babble of hours in the hills and loitering by lochs and the splendour of books and sleeping secure - babble of a world that still marched and cried beyond the prison walls, fair and unutterable its loveliness still outside the doors of Blawearie house, mocked by its ghost, a crying in the night for things that were lost and foregone and ended. It quietened away then, morning came tapping at the window, she turned and slept, sleeping exhausted, rising with white face and slow steps so that she was long in the kitchen." Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (pp. 175ff)

Truly, this was a fascinating place, with its changing element of distant water, its great plain lines of pasture, its ordered vistas of foliage! The passion for beauty lay deep below the tossing, driving impulses of Felmington's nature, and it rose up now as he stood on the yew-edged terraces of Balnillo and gazed before him. For the moment everything in his mind was swallowed up but that abstract, fundamental desire for perfection, which is, when all is said and done, humanity's mainspring, its incessant though often erring guide, whose perverted behests we call sin, whose legitimate ones we call virtue; whose very existence is a guarantee of immortality. The world, this crystalline morning, was so beautiful to Archie that he ached with the uncomprehended longing to identify himself with perfection; to cast his body down upon the light-pervaded earth and to be one with it, to fling his soul into the heights and depths of the limitless encompassing ether, to be drawn into the heart of God's material manifestation on earth - the sun. He left the garden terrace and went off towards the Basin, with the touch of the elemental flood of truth into which he had been plunged for a moment fresh on his soul. The whole universe and its contents seemed to him good - and not only good, but of consummate interest - humanity was fascinating. His failure to snatch the map from Ferrier's hand last night only made him smile. In the perfection of his transcendent creation all was, and must be, well! Flemington, Violet Jacob (p.80)

"abashed the devil stood, and felt how awful goodness is." Paradise Lost, iv.846-47

"Dark still it was, but she saw him laughing at her, and then she put down the lantern and somehow resistance went from her, she hadn't wanted to resist, he was holding her close to him, kissing her, her cheeks and the tip of her nose because he couldn't see well in the darkness. And then he waited a moment and his lips came to hers and they were trembling as her own were, she wanted to cry and she wanted to laugh in a breath, and have him hold her forever, so, in the close, and his trembling lips that came into hers, sweet and terrible those lips in hers. There was a great power of the honeysuckle that year, the smell of it drenched all the close in wet, still weather, it perfumed the night and the kiss." Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (p.136)

Sometimes i'm really tempted to give you guys a random number just to see how many of you would look me straight in the eye and call me a "low quality woman" and tell me i'm such a whore.

@Proserpina thank you:) and no worries, feel free to comment or ask questions.

▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪ Intimacy Spectrum // different attitudes towards Life - suicidality. you can't move an inch closer towards Love. you are terrified. you'd rather die than see more of your own self, of Life in all its rich manifestations, of your shadow. you are fearful and selfish, which is understandable and valid. staying alive is your real death, because it means that you have to open up to previously avoided or unwanted aspects of Reality. 'suicidality' may be overt or covert, in a more subtle and less clinical sense of the word. it is unnatural in the sense that no one is born finding themsevles at this end of the spectrum, but experiencing it can be a gift as it shows the downsides of the avoidant 'holding back' attitude towards life in its most extreme expression. as a result, one becomes aware of the whole dynamic of intimacy (...) and can consciously decide to commit to Life (God and Love), acknowledging the truth of what this means. - holding back. you're okay with being alive, but feel hesitant and are looking for compromises. typically you'd hold onto hopes, expectations and "shoulds", fighting a battle between good and bad, right and wrong. you may perhaps even see that Love is inevitable but can't open up to it, at least not fully. you are fearful and selfish, but again, this is understandable. i would guess that most people enter this part of the spectrum in their early childhood years and experience subtle variations within it, but mostly stay here for the entire duration of their lives. alternatively, a person may become so fed up with the constant disappointments that one will approach the lower end (unconsciously) or the upper end (consciously) of the spectrum. - all in. you are fully committed to Life, "Life is Now", you know that Love is the only way and are fully committed to this path. Not only do you think of Love as your highest value, but you embody this knowledge and live in accordance with it. Being selfless is to love yourself as deeply as you can, with no excuses and nothing in the way. Whatever seems to be in the way, you love that, too. You love all of yourself, all of Life, and see everything and everyone for what they truly are. you are selfless and courageous, even when you are terrified and wish you could escape this task. this is the path that leads to God. *important note: an "attitude" describes an energetic tendency, a centre of gravity that your dominant perspectives and actions(!) are directed towards. this does not mean that one cannot feel scared while acting with an attitude of "Love". an attitude of selfishness and fear is not "evil" or "aggressive"...it grows from loving intention, but tends to be corrupt and untrue in its reasoning (...). ........................................... i hope that no one here takes this as a personal insult or anything of that sort. this is just my understanding of the different phases and attitudes i can find myself in and i thought i'd share this for those of you who can relate. there aren't any exact boundaries to these stages, it's more like a spectrum that one can learn to perceive or pay attention to. note that your relationship with and attitude towards Life directly translates into your willingness to be "truly intimate". personally, i have gone through various phases of each stage (not in the order indicated above!) and have a feeling that this is an important pattern to be aware of. there are numerous counterintuitive ways in which you can transition from one end of the spectrum to another, you can go full circle from the lower to the upper end, and then time may pass and you fall back to a 'holding back' type of attitude, etc. The mind is sneaky and will try to corrupt this knowledge and trick you into all sorts of rationalisations though. For instance, trying to get to the lowest low because you know that you may potentially go full circle there and suddenly feel ready to love unconditionally is not the best idea. Your thoughts tell you one thing, but the underlying energetic attitude of avoidance can't lie. my apologies if i'm not doing a good job communicating this. this is just a rough outline and not a perfect or complete explanation. ▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪