Magdalenbrother
February 7th 2005, 06:02 AM
Is there a thing called homosexuality? My contention is that this is an invention of Western science. An invention like "AIDS" or "SARS" in the field of medicine or, in the field of religion, "God".
First of all, when we observe homosexuality in a given human being, is his sexuality something that exists apart from the rest of his life?
The answer is no. You can separate sexuality in your mind through an operation named "abstraction" but in the real world this separation does not exist at all. Therefore if we want to understand anything at all, we have to observe it as a whole. Only the whole thing is real. Can we do that? Shall we do that?
If you do it, you will realize that knowledge of the whole is not easily expressed in words. Besides, it doesn't become a science, a system of magical formulas-"science" is our prudish, rationalized word for "magic"-to manipulate and exploit the "outside" world, because knowledge of the whole is pure love, which regards manipulation as an abomination and in which the separation between "inside" and "outside" no longer exists.
This is my first challenge.
The second challenge is that even if we managed to focus on the sexual behavior of a person and somehow separate it from the rest, we would still find that there are no two exactly similar expressions of sexual energy from one moment to the next. If we observed two so-called homosexuals, we would soon find that they are not the same, both in very subtle and more obvious ways. Reality is in a constant flux. Reality is made of disparate beings. There are no universals. There is nothing to grasp out there. Grasp in the sense of making it into a concept. Concepts are life-denying.
Now, apparently since Plato officially, we in the West have been in the habit of denying the actuality of life and of reducing it to strings of concepts which we abstract from it. The concepts are totally illusory, but because they are useful in some ways, because they allow us to put everything in a neat little box and manipulate it with a certain degree of apparent efficiency, we do as if they were real. We confuse the simplistic phantoms of our stupid mind with the complex and ever-changing things themselves.
There is no knowing through concepts. All concepts, all knowledge is ignorance and darkness. Only immediate perception of each unique expression of the All is light. In this form of knowledge, there is no accumulation, no conclusions but constant learning, so that mind remains fresh and unburdened. Not having made itself separate from the rest of the universe through knowledge, the mind is also free of fear, so that it can observe eveything with absolute lucidity.
But we don't want that. Although it causes us tremendous pain, we want to remain separate from life because we are afraid of change and the unknown, because we want to be "ourselves". Life as change is not conceptualizable. Therefore we choose to live in a kingdom of death with our dead words and explanations. In this darkness we go around labeling things and destroying them, for we don't see our essential oneness with the All.
Become empty-handed. Abandon science.
First of all, when we observe homosexuality in a given human being, is his sexuality something that exists apart from the rest of his life?
The answer is no. You can separate sexuality in your mind through an operation named "abstraction" but in the real world this separation does not exist at all. Therefore if we want to understand anything at all, we have to observe it as a whole. Only the whole thing is real. Can we do that? Shall we do that?
If you do it, you will realize that knowledge of the whole is not easily expressed in words. Besides, it doesn't become a science, a system of magical formulas-"science" is our prudish, rationalized word for "magic"-to manipulate and exploit the "outside" world, because knowledge of the whole is pure love, which regards manipulation as an abomination and in which the separation between "inside" and "outside" no longer exists.
This is my first challenge.
The second challenge is that even if we managed to focus on the sexual behavior of a person and somehow separate it from the rest, we would still find that there are no two exactly similar expressions of sexual energy from one moment to the next. If we observed two so-called homosexuals, we would soon find that they are not the same, both in very subtle and more obvious ways. Reality is in a constant flux. Reality is made of disparate beings. There are no universals. There is nothing to grasp out there. Grasp in the sense of making it into a concept. Concepts are life-denying.
Now, apparently since Plato officially, we in the West have been in the habit of denying the actuality of life and of reducing it to strings of concepts which we abstract from it. The concepts are totally illusory, but because they are useful in some ways, because they allow us to put everything in a neat little box and manipulate it with a certain degree of apparent efficiency, we do as if they were real. We confuse the simplistic phantoms of our stupid mind with the complex and ever-changing things themselves.
There is no knowing through concepts. All concepts, all knowledge is ignorance and darkness. Only immediate perception of each unique expression of the All is light. In this form of knowledge, there is no accumulation, no conclusions but constant learning, so that mind remains fresh and unburdened. Not having made itself separate from the rest of the universe through knowledge, the mind is also free of fear, so that it can observe eveything with absolute lucidity.
But we don't want that. Although it causes us tremendous pain, we want to remain separate from life because we are afraid of change and the unknown, because we want to be "ourselves". Life as change is not conceptualizable. Therefore we choose to live in a kingdom of death with our dead words and explanations. In this darkness we go around labeling things and destroying them, for we don't see our essential oneness with the All.
Become empty-handed. Abandon science.