Dorian

The Odds & Bits Series : VI

The fascination with ageless youth  was a feature  with the alchemist. They sought the fountain of youth and the philosopher's stone with a knowledge of chemistry ... and in the celebrated case of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to see the dark side of a fantasy that was as yet poorly understood. These days we appear to have sobered up on issues such as this but the fascination remains.

 

Youth … like immortality … is a promise in our experiences … and there are people … we come across … who are still determined … to find its source. We find such attitudes in the early eros experience … of the child … who is fixated on avoiding death … and seeks to fulfill the promise of life … in the birth it finds itself. Such willful avoidance of the death impulse … continues in many of us today … expressed in several other ways.

 

We perceive society in much the same way and have no reason to think that everybody is not in some way actively seeking to live and to enjoy the life. Therefore when we encounter people who deny the principle like the suicide bombers we don't just dismiss it as cranks but pause to ask why.

 

In the aftermath of the 9/11 incident … we ask ourselves whether … it had anything to do with … the legalization of same sex marriage … and the gay issue. Obviously traditional societies … steeped in conventional thinking … seek to preserve … the individual male mystic … while liberal societies … are guided in some way … to seek eternal youth … by the re-discovery of possibilities.

 

To the average Indic … this represents in part … the age-old practice … of self realization … today brought into the front pages of the world's news … with the open declaration … that its what life is about. Where these practices … came to view the primal nature of man … in his intimate privacy … it suddenly appeared … that he is no longer pressured to maintaining his practices … as clandestine rituals of a secret sect. He could now bring his attitudes into the open … to review them in the light of day.

 

The issue of eternal youth is a factor … in the experience of the individual male. It is possible to see that death to the body … is not the end of our individual experience of consciousness. Logically its possible to see what new bodies a person … would come to occupy … in the next one thousand years … in the new births to be undertaken. That's viewed with the acceptance of death … in this life.

 

Viewed this way … the child that we were … in the experience of eros in us today … need no longer battle … too strongly with the impulse of death … and in time … to come to heal the obsessive separation … between the two impulses.  In the place of the separation … we substitute … with a new found understanding … of the relation between them. It is … in some way … linked to the conscious and unconscious relations.

 

In the old days the Indic mystics used to think such knowledge was the privilege of only a select few on account of the privacy of its practices. These days they are likely to speak of it openly and bring such thoughts into mainstream society perhaps even influencing the consumer's behavior for buying products. Anybody fancy a brand of milk labelled ' Eternal Life?' or a hair gel branded as ' Dorian?'