Edition #17
Rio de Janeiro, 2011
“DKANDLE weaves swirling multi-colored vibrant unearthly soundscapes, blending fuzzy and reverberating Shoegaze textures, mesmerizing Dream Pop meditations, sludgy Grungey tones and moody Post-punk strains, heightened with soul-stirring lyricism and pensive emotive vocalizations”
WHY IS THE IDEAL OF
AN EVANGELIZED WORLD UTOPIC?
What is a blessing? For a Christian, being blessed means having all problems removed from life. There is no greater blessing than feeling like part of the "chosen people," who will forever inhabit a Paradise of delights where there will be no more "gnashing of teeth, no death, no pain," and everyone will be eternally happy, perfect, and without conflict. But why is the ideal of a Paradise in eternal beatification utopian?
We live in a dimension of duality, where opposites must exist so that what is can be, for I can only be what I am in the presence of what I am not. This is the dichotomy of life. That is why we will never "get there" in the sense of saying, "There, now nothing affects me anymore," because if we were to reach such a condition, we would annihilate progress. The negativity that Christians wish to eliminate entirely from their lives does not necessarily signify something bad. The negative is positive in a different context. Often, to reach a goal, it is necessary to first go through its negation, and only then will its authenticity be recognized. There will always be a polarity between Good and Evil, Pain and Pleasure, Light and Shadow, Apollo and Dionysus, Rational and Intuitive, Concept and Metaphor. Life demands this balance. It is not possible to eliminate all bad things, just as it would be harmful if everything were perfect all the time. Many people can confirm that "too much happiness can be depressing." Spending a few days on a paradise beach is wonderful, of course, but what happens if life is reduced solely to that Paradise? Soon, we become bored and disinterested.
Our perception follows this rule of polarity: shadows, eternal companions of light, are necessary to highlight the illuminated parts. If everything were completely dark, we wouldn't see anything, and existence would not be possible; but if everything were completely illuminated, we wouldn't perceive contrasts, distances, or spaces without the shadows. A similar process happens with hearing: without sound, we wouldn't hear anything, but without the silence or pause in the rhythm of music, it would be flat, a constant and unbearable noise.
For these reasons, the idealized world of Beatitude by Christians could not be further from reality, as it completely rejects shadows and confuses "holiness" with "dulling of the senses." Nietzsche considered Christianity the mortal enemy of "worldly wisdom." The world that Christians aspire to (whether on Earth or in heaven) is an evangelized world, a world of eternal beatification, where everyone is perfect, without mistakes, without doubts, without agony, without contrasts, without divergences, with everyone eternally worshiping the same God… (Oh, mortal boredom).
Schopenhauer said: "Having placed all pains and sufferings in hell, to fill heaven they found nothing but boredom." The problem is that there is no room for metaphor in a Christianized world, because there, what is not the Concept (Jesus) is secondary, dirty, sinful, diabolical, and must be destroyed... And in this way, the possibility of spiritual growth is eliminated because the Christian removes the dialectic from their life and lives in a world where everything appears "flat," without dimensions, without contrasts, which are only possible with shadows. Contrasts are necessary for the image to present itself as it should. To say there is only one way is to atrophy the mind, the intellect. Every path — every single one — is valid. All suffering is caused by us, in our minds, preventing us from seeing that every problem is a help, not an evil in itself.
CHRIST IS 'CRYSTALLIZATION'
Each person is shaped in life according to their own peculiarities. Everyone has their own path, their own life line. "When all wills become equal and all desire the same thing," said Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, "when legal and political order is understood as a means for dissolving conflict between individuals, then the conditions for the triumph of nihilism will have been created. (...) Life, from its simplest to its most complex forms, is a dynamic of imbalances and tensions, a continuous process of creation and destruction, a constant struggle of perspectives vying for supremacy." The world is a place of contradictions. It would not work if everything always went "by the book," with everyone in unison worshiping the same God, without sin, without pain… You only find solutions by looking from another angle. If you always look from the same perspective, you won't discover anything beyond that comfortable and secure, but incomplete, viewpoint. If you remain only in beatification, you will become a walking mummy.
Everything that happens in life has the potential to teach us, even negative things, even sadness, even pain, even loneliness... Sometimes — in fact, many times — we emerge much stronger after a painful experience. If we hadn’t gone through it, we would be alienated, like the mindless masses who confuse alienation with happiness... Happiness is only possible by accepting everything that happens in our lives. But this process will always involve both sides of life, Good and Evil... You cannot completely eliminate the Bad, and it would be equally harmful to have only Good. Life truly requires this balance. Eternal Paradise or Eternal Hell are impractical. Heaven and Hell have always been present simultaneously (just ask anyone who is bipolar…).
What brings agony in the modern era is the attachment to absolute success: one must be the Greatest and the Best at Everything, to be Infallible, Unattainable, Flawless... But poor are those who believe they can be happy by projecting this image all the time, always wanting to be on top... Those who act this way experience hellish suffering when bitten by a mere mosquito because they have lost the habit of feeling what it is like to live in the real world. Pain serves to warn that if you don't change your direction, it will increase... It's not that we should desire pain — we generally want to avoid it — but we should not rebel against it either. Pain educates. This is the courage we need to be who we are — to learn from what life offers and make the best of it. (The point is: saying this is very easy; but in practice... That's where things get tough... Well, at least with this awareness, the chances of standing firm will be greater).
Even the sea becomes rough, and this always happens from time to time. Wanting to annihilate suffering is like expecting all the world's beaches to be calm forever, with no more tidal waves. But is the rough sea necessarily something bad? The ecosystem becomes unbalanced because the air is in constant flux: the Sun generates the winds by heating the air in certain parts, creating air currents — this is an eternal process, so the sea will never cease to be rough now and then. It is part of nature; that’s just how it is. But it's important to emphasize, a rough sea is not an evil in itself; it is simply a way that nature finds to try to rebalance the ecosystem. In other words, it is a "necessary evil." Why shouldn't we have turbulent seas within us as well? How could this be eliminated? Should it be eliminated through pills and asceticism? Asceticism is renouncing the pleasures of the world; but dasein (existence) only exists in experience. Without inner anguish and storms, you have no sense of what serenity and calm really mean. How can you know what peace is if you don't know its opposite? To be purified, you must first be impure. To find yourself, you must first be lost.
But a Christian might argue: "The point is, purification comes after sin, but the end is always purification." Yes, but the Christian believes that once saved, all negativity in life will be eliminated. However, nature does not function without the balance of opposing forces. It is simply unimaginable to have a way of life without the negative aspects of things. Everything needs an opposite; therefore, a state of eternal beatification is an unattainable goal, at least in this world, and this is where we live, so that’s what really matters. If in the "Father's house" or the "astral planes" of Krishna there is no duality, great, but we humans inhabit planet Earth, just to remind you…
Is there an Eternal and Unchanging Truth? Yes! But we do not have access to it... However, humans feel abandoned, they need answers, they need something to cling to, they need to throw an anchor so they don't go with the flow because they don't know where it will lead. So, they must invent and internalize that they truly believe in it, because it's the most plausible answer they’ve found, and then their opinions and beliefs become extremely rigid, for only their Lord saves, so everything else is demonic. And then they create a host of prejudices and live a limited life, true slaves to a religion that claims to have the revelation of the Eternal Truth, but it is all fiction.
"Water opposes nothing, and nothing can oppose it" is a poetic way of saying that everything is in flux. Duality, for the Chinese, is a non-dual duality: Yin activates Yang and vice versa. What exists is the middle ground, which is the result of the dynamic articulation of everything. Life is a mysterious balance, the result of contradictions inexplicable by reason. It is impossible for a homogeneous society to exist where everyone follows all the rules in eternal beatification and purity. That would be against nature, an aberration that would lead nowhere.
What really matters is transcending what everyone does: it is renouncing the habitual standard of behavior. What truly matters is hearing the inaudible sounds, experiencing the invisibility of colors, the visibility of sounds, the audibility of colors...
Do you believe in
heaven and hell?
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