On Celebacy

Celebacy is not about action. It is about freeing yourself.

The Catholic church had a history of eerie tools for self-flaggelation and torture to deal with this matter. No doubt other celebates also take things into their own hands in other ways, so to speak. But this is missing the whole point.

A person who tries to be celebate but can’t find the willpower is a slave to it, because they struggle and fail. A person who struggles with celebacy and manages to uphold it is still a slave to it. Celebacy is about freedom. If you’re stuggling to uphold or break celebacy, you’re already a slave to it. Focus should not be on whether you’ve managed to uphold it for the day. This is like checking a cancer which sometimes grows, sometimes stays the same and sometimes regresses. The focus should be on whether the feeling has arisen and whether you have attached to the feeling or not.

There are different ways to overcome the ‘problem’ of celebacy, and hopefully noone any longer resorts to the ways devloped within the Catholic church. Be observant of the feeling, and just don’t cling onto it.

What Life Really Means

Only one thing in life is certain, and that is death. Death is not seen as desirable. People are not indifferent to it. Death is something fearful. Death is even compared with evil.

We should firstly contemplate the reality of this before moving on. This is the most important, nagging reality present always in our subconscious. Our brains are naturally wired to avoid death by seeking nourishment as a baby, and our bodies are naturally wired to avoid death at all costs. Take for example the role of the spinal chord when your finger touches a hot surface: the message doesn’t run from your finger to your brain that there’s a hot surface, only to await an active command to remove it. The message runs to the spinal chord which automatically moves the hand for you; only an active brain can override this natural reaction. But I digress. Further anatomical and psychological studies, as well as the amazing feats people have gone to in extreme conditions to preserve their life (such as cutting off their own arms to escape from under a trapping object) attest to the fact of the body and mind’s natural instinct to survive at all costs. So everything only points to one thing: to live.

I was waiting for my order of noodles to arrive so I had time to contemplate this reality. If only death is certain, and we don’t want to die, then how do we deal with it? The answer was quite simple. Make a story nicer than the reality. Believe the story’s true. Then integrate the story into other aspects of your life to reaffirm that your role in this life is in comformity with the storyline so that it all goes as planned.

This, ultimately, is the what religion is. We argue about the branches (which religion’s right right one and why?), we look deeper to the trunk (is there a god?), and death is the root of it all (what will happen to me after detah?). Earlier I wrote about man’s natural regression to infancy in times of distress, and even that ultimately comes down to survival, because the utter failure of everything (failure to eat, protect ourselves from the elements, to be healthy) results in death. All natural things exist to avoid the only true reality of this universe. It’s quite fascinating. The mere thought is enough to tempt one to look away and think of something else, but we should think of this deeper with one-pointedness; upon realising this, we may come to try accept death without a story attached to it (the stories come with fine print, which is quite shocking to the thinking person). Yet we can’t accept death, because we’re biologically wired to reject the only true thing of our existence.

When children have a wild imagination, it’s not uncommon for parents to make up a story of something more grandiose than reality. Its grandieur has several functions: it distracts from the reality; it creates a new reality; it differs so markedly from the true reality that its desirability becomes absolute. Remember that death has no positive to it, so its opposite is absolutely positive in outlook.

Most of us don’t contemplate death, because death isn’t real until you truly think it’s coming right now. Instead we subconsciously think we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, despite us housing the innumerable fears associated with it. Others who do contemplate it will turn religious. One reason we have so many religions is that they ll invariable have a positive answer for death. Without it, it wouldn’t be ’spiritual’. Theists are so immersed in this alternative reality that they devote themselves in a show of distain for their present state into a preparation for death and its afterlife. The person harbouring fears of death who lives a “let us drink and be merry” may find themselves in an unfortunate opinion later in life that life was “for nothing”. It had no purpose. This is what I felt when I became religious again. But I have discovered that the true answer to the fear of death lies in between: it is neither to be a hedonist by pretending death doesn’t exist, and it isn’t becoming a theist who lives by an alternative reality so flimsy that at best it’s unprovable and at worst it’s no more reliable than a child who believes santa is real.

The theist is so caught in their story that they may even pity atheists. The theist knows he has eternal life afterwards (conveniently, he believes his will be a positive one), and pities the atheist who views life as limited and without hope. “I don’t see the benefit of atheism” some say. This only shows how far their new reality has taken them.

It’s an queer paradox that religion was made to comfort fear of death, yet results in death of the follower and others. This is essentially like the lover that loves their partner so much that they take a bullet on their behalf. You fall in love to be happy, but it can misfire and result in your death. Similarly religio can lead to your own death, but it’s largely because you would have been so absorbed in the story that you liked it more than even life itself. People have fascinations for different things, and a love for a religion because of how amazing its story to answer the problem of death is doesn’t mean the religion is right or that my hypothesis is wrong; it merely shows how powerful the story is, like a person who should be sleeping right now but is so immersed with acquiring knowledge and developing his thoughts that he’s still awake.