/lit/ - Literature

>>15116994
You're not going to like what he had to say above love. He would recommend you to fuck though if you really need to.

U.G. is notorious for his response to the 60's slogan "Make love, not War". He retorts that making love is war! For U.G., love-making and war-making spring from the same source, the separative structure of thought. They both presuppose a division between the "self" and the "other". This is why U.G. does not take kindly to fashionable talk about "loving relationships". He points out that the search for relationships of any kind springs from a sense of isolation, an isolation created by the separative thought structure. What one wants is to fill the emptiness or void with someone. It is a process of self-fulfillment, self-gratification. But we are not honest enough to acknowledge this sordid truth. Instead, we invent fictions like "love" and "care" to deceive ourselves about the whole affair. When these fictions are blown away, what remains expresses itself in its own way. Then there may not be "others" to love or to be loved by.

U.G. is notorious for his response to the 60's slogan "Make love, not War". He retorts that making love is war! For U.G., love-making and war-making spring from the same source, the separative structure of thought. They both presuppose a division between the "self" and the "other". This is why U.G. does not take kindly to fashionable talk about "loving relationships". He points out that the search for relationships of any kind springs from a sense of isolation, an isolation created by the separative thought structure. What one wants is to fill the emptiness or void with someone. It is a process of self-fulfillment, self-gratification. But we are not honest enough to acknowledge this sordid truth. Instead, we invent fictions like "love" and "care" to deceive ourselves about the whole affair. When these fictions are blown away, what remains expresses itself in its own way. Then there may not be "others" to love or to be loved by.

There is more than a touch of advaita in all this. I use "advaita" in its etymological sense, meaning non-division or non-duality, and not to refer to the philosophical system of Shankara. U.G.'s philosophy has little in common with Shankara's system. U.G. rejects the authority of the shruti (he says that the Vedas were the creations of acid-heads!), repudiates the assumption of Brahman, and dismisses the doctrine of the illusoriness of the world. There is no place for any kind of "consciousness" in U.G.'s philosophy, not to speak of "pure consciousness" or "witness-consciousness". And yet I use the word "advaita" because U.G.'s philosophy is permeated by a spirit of negation of all division and fragmentation. It is an interesting and original form of advaita, one that is based on a physical and physiological mode of description. For instance, U.G. claims that nature is a single unit and that the body cannot be separated from the totality of nature. There are actually no separate individual bodies. This is a form of advaita or non-dualism. It is a naturalistic or physicalistic advaita in contrast to Shankara's metaphysical or transcendental Advaita.

In U.G.'s account, all forms of destruction, disorder, and suffering flow from the division between the self and the world or nature. This divisive movement of thought came into operation with the birth of self-consciousness somewhere in the process of the evolution of mankind and marks the beginning of the end of this species. "The instrument that we think places us at the pinnacle of creation is the very thing that will lead to the destruction of not only the human species but all forms of life on this planet," declares U.G. He is thus no starry-eyed utopian or millenarian. There is no "kingdom of heaven" around any of the corners of time. On the contrary, it is the apocalypse that awaits us. This is not because of any religious or supernatural factor —