”Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet." (St Augustine)
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We have been told that matter, the body and desire are 'evil'. We have grown under the pious illusion that, by repressing needs and desires, we would be considered 'good' and therefore worthy of love.
Matter, at most, can represent evil in an ontological sense, if we see it as the highest degree of estrangement from the freedom of the spirit, whose manifestation it nevertheless is. Certainly, the denser matter is, the more constrained, binding and capable of offering tenacious resistance to the creative impulse of the Idea.
The body and its drives are also necessary and necessitating, yet they can be transfigured and sanctified. An example for all: merging the animal sexual impulse with love and dedication for a single partner already implies an alchemical process that redeems the beast and seduces the angel.
Finally, desire is the inescapable engine by which life comes into being and explores itself. One can easily observe how a person with little desire falls into apathy and inertia. This powerful energy can be tamed to some extent, if not even raised from the purely quantitative to the qualitative level. It thus becomes a sublime instance: the impetus towards true knowledge and towards a less contaminated love that makes us noble servants of Life.
The greatest Zen masters say that 'every day is a lucky day': if we develop attention and awareness, we realise that every moment is different from the previous one and it is potentially full of gifts. Even a 'negative' emotion is a gift: it is still energy, a movement that can push us to investigate, to seek ourselves.
One does not become complete until one has integrated all the colours of experience into this dimension; one does not become authentically divine if one has not first become fully human. Those who avoid acting or 'getting their hands dirty' because they only aim at perfection often become entangled in a mental idol, algid, static, sometimes deadly. On the contrary, the intrinsic imperfection of life is continuous endeavour, warmth and motion that create an ever new and unprecedented possibility of beauty.
That is why in the film 'The Last Samurai', Katsumoto, after spending his life searching for 'the perfect flower', at the point of death acknowledges that "everyone is perfect". In a final farewell, the separate and separative mind dissolves, admiring how all beings are the irreplaceable notes and timbres of the unique, unrepeatable symphony that is life, now.
Per prenotare un colloquio di Counseling contattatemi attraverso il mio sito Le Vie per l'Armonia.
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