RESPONDENT  No. 81: For the longest time, I had a great problem with questioning love. I seriously considered going Sufi because I couldn’t bear the thought of living without love, of having a life without love; it was the absolute for me, I guess you could say.

At the root of my desire for love was the persistent, erroneous belief to which I was clinging – ‘I have to have love/be in love to be happy.’ I eradicated this belief by realizing that it was, after all, a belief, and I thought about how much more interesting life had been since I began the breakdown of my social identity.

Funny that the list should currently be mentioning synchronicity because that’s exactly what seemed to happen when I gave up my belief – suddenly a potential boyfriend came into my life. The great thing about his sudden appearance is that it gave me a first-hand opportunity to watch how love functioned inside of me.

Okay, so I learned REALLY fast the negative side of love – the sense of longing for the person when they weren’t present, the disappointment after sexual contact, the jealousy and worry over their whereabouts, the dependency, the fear that the other party would perhaps commit adultery – and so, too, I quickly decided that I wasn’t going to deal with this love thing any longer. I find it humorous that Richard referred to love as a ‘holy cow’ (or something similar) at some point when describing his experiences during the period where he was ‘enlightened.’ Then again, that description is pretty accurate.

Something interesting that I recalled today was that long ago, I had realized that ‘love’ was somehow based in the instincts, especially romantic love. That is, I understood that ‘love’ was intimately related to the human sex drive, and that the driving force beneath all those sugary-sweet words was to fuck (no sense in sugar coating the word at this point, either; in fact, making the point in crude language further emphasizes the falsehoods of love). So in other words, love is about some sort of trade-off, ‘I’ll be nice and sweet to you as long as you make my sex organs feel good, as long as you make my life meaningful, as long as I have you to live for.’ In some respects, love is largely a socially acceptable way of expressing sexual instincts.

Another point is that it goes back to the condemnation of the physical world, i.e., ‘sex is bad because the body is bad because being physical is bad because the physical world is less than the spiritual world.’

What nonsense!

So with questioning my belief in love, a whole ‘pillar’ of my social identity began to topple! Not only do I not need love to be happy, I do not need a relationship (though it is an option, a choice I can freely make) to be happy, I do not need sex to be happy, I do not need a companion to be happy. Because I do not need a relationship to be happy, I do not need to struggle to feel ‘beautiful.’ Because I do not need to struggle to feel ‘beautiful,’ I can accept my body as-it-is. Because I can accept my body as-it-is, I can more readily accept other bodies as-they-are. Because I do not need to struggle to feel beautiful, I do not need to compete with other males to attempt to gain more partners than they, I do not need to concern myself with an individual’s sexual identity to see if they are a possible companion, I do not need to concern myself with whether or not the person is beautiful enough for me, I do not need to justify my self-perceived ‘level’ of beauty by attempting to impose upon another my perceived level of their beauty, and so on and so forth. Because I do not need to feel ‘beautiful enough’ to attract a companion, I do not have to feel fear of rejection for not being beautiful enough.

So the tag-team days of nurture and desire are quickly ending. Yay! I thought I would write these things here so that others might benefit from them; I’m sure others who come on here have had similar experiences to mine. My focus is shifting more to dealing with death and my persistent belief that something endures after physical death.

Obviously, the root is fear, and what a fear it is!

Oh, just on another note concerning PCEs, I was wondering if someone might describe the identity and the affective faculties as also being the separative faculty. What I mean by this is that the few very brief PCEs I’ve had (they usually last only a few seconds, perhaps 5 or 10 at the most), I feel like a fog clears up and I can seriously SEE for the first time (the visual acuity is what improves the most). The point is that it seems as though the barrier between ‘me’ and everything else is removed, at least in terms of this ‘fog’ that I keep experiencing. The second time it happened, I seriously felt like I was seeing everything in my house for the first time. All I could say was, ‘Woah.’ Then the self bubbled back into action because intensity of the experience frightened me.