Disgust
Some days the world will feel totally disgusting to you.
You’ll wake up and you’ll say “What the f@ck is the point of all this?!”
You’ll look around and notice that nothing ever works.
Sure, things work sometimes, but other times, they just let you down.
And the horrible part is, you never know which one it’s going to be today.
Will this relationship be the one that works out, or will it be the one that crashes and burns, leaving you feeling like an empty wretch?
Will this meal be the one that fills you and leads to delicious post-consumption languor, or will it be the one that gives you food poisoning?
One day, it may well be that the wonderful things we rely on for pleasure, or to nourish our lives will be the ones that bring our death.
Elements as innocuous as water, fire, earth, air - all required for the nourishment of beings - all of them equally murderous.
Is it any wonder that some days you will awake and hate the life you are living in?
If you tell this to your psychologist, they will quickly give you a remedy certain to cover up these troubling feelings.
The problem is, on these days, you might be right.
This is not an encouragement to go out and get depressed. Depression is the belief that these days where you see that nothing works, these moments of pure disgust, are more right than the moments when life looks just fine.
They are not more right, but neither is the conspiracy of false joy we perpetuate upon the world - seeking out discomfort and attempting to shield ourselves from it in every moment. This campaign of division, between the "acceptable" emotions and insights, and the "unacceptable", can lead only to greater suffering because it denies an entire facet of the truth. This life is disgusting, and it is also totally pure. Somewhere at the meeting of these truths is beauty, art.
What art knows, or, what is known through art, is that beauty is not a thing of sharp distinctions between “good” and “bad”, “correct” and “incorrect”, “acceptable” and “unacceptable”. Beauty is the dance of seemingly irreconcilable opposites.
They juxtapose each other in countless ways, and every so often they merge, in a flash of light, or in a mysterious dissolution (barely noticed).
The ancient ones understood disgust in ways many of us have rarely glimpsed. They knew that any object, thought, or feeling that hampered the ability to give one’s heart away totally was doom, death.
To these vast warriors, nothing could be put higher than Love - no images to veil the face of the divine - and so if a physical pleasure caused a contraction toward “me” vs “you”, they renounced it utterly.
But don’t imagine some sour faced oldster swearing off physical affection forever because he was burned by it once. That’s not caring, that’s contraction too. Think more fluid, think of catching yourself in the act of letting pampering distract you from another’s heart - and then think of expanding - immediately becoming something much greater than the one who could feel deprived.
This will give you a small idea of the every-moment practice of the Masters. There are no fixed decisions that will apply “forever” - that kind of safety is anathema to such a being. There is only each moment being guided by the Heart’s true compass.
The feeling of disgust becomes a welcome friend, a trusted guide. It tells me “I’m contracting in fear - I want to force the world to work for me rather than opening myself as a gift to the world”. When this feeling arises, don’t be afraid to clean out your closets, gut your schedule book, and throw “safety” into the wind. You never had any safety to begin with. Letting go of its illusion is liberation, not a problem.
The ways we keep ourselves “safe” are shackles on the heart - a sky dragon kept in a small box and stunted. Set it free.
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