One must never deny feelings. This precept forms the basis of the struggle against narcissism, which denies the true self in favour of the egoic self. Lowen teaches us this. Before going further, let us recall that the true self is the self that feels, whether it wishes to or not, because the human being is partly a being of sensitivity, perception, and interoception. Now let us continue. We must therefore not deny the reality of our physiology and cognition — which, together, are the seat of our feelings. But why? In particular, why should we not deny painful feelings? Well, as always, because denying reality very often means running the risk of dying. In the case at hand, if we feel things despite ourselves, it is because reality has a message to convey to us, and ignoring it is dangerous.
Good, but this remains insufficient — and, in fact, far more than insufficient: it is profoundly insufficient. Nietzsche showed that merely identifying and understanding reality, even if that reality were the feelings of our being, leads to death-in-life, or even to death by suicide. So long as one remains within science, even if it is a new science, there is danger. To retain a taste for life, we must create a reality that is our own. Here, then, we will be concerned with creating feelings. Yet this will not be artificial in the slightest, as you will see; on the contrary, it will be rooted in the vital wisdom that I believe I have gradually acquired over the years, so that this creation will in fact follow a kind of law of necessity of the living — except that the word “law” is ill suited to the living, which is a reality that transforms laws.
A brief aside about man’s gestational matrix is called for here, because it is not enough to exhort people to create; one must also explain how to create something that serves life, in order to move from genius to philosophy, for every useful purpose — particularly that of retaining a taste for life. Unlike woman, man does not have the opportunity to experience biological gestation, to nurture another human being within himself and then bring that being to life. He can therefore even less afford to be content with neither working nor creating, for only in this way can he experience what most closely resembles female biological gestation, and only in this way can he retain a taste for life: by nurturing life within himself and bringing it into the world, metaphorically one might say — in any event, it is certainly not another human being that he will bring into the world. To feel, in one’s belly and chest — indeed, in what I call the organima — the life developing within oneself, and to bring it into the world: this is the only experience that allows man to retain a taste for life. This process is, in particular, plainly the opposite of consumption, since it is a matter of producing, and of producing the highest possible value at that — therefore the only value that should have any right to exist — namely, life itself. For we have said that this creation must serve life, and the only way to serve life is to embody it as fully as possible and allow it to radiate.
How, then, are we to understand and resolve the tension between the first two paragraphs? In the following way. While it is true that we must not deny the feelings of being, our understanding of what promotes life allows us to encourage some of them and discourage others. We must never deny them, but that is a far cry from indiscriminately encouraging them all to take possession of us — a step we must not take.
For us, the only healthy feeling of power is one that arises from the joy of being, and the tram that carries us from the latter state to the former is called desire. Note the following crucial fact: the feeling of power is itself a kind of feeling that is not a feeling of our being, but a feeling of the latter’s growth, which is very different. But let us return to the feeling of power that arises from joy and make our meaning more precise. It is the only feeling of power to which our consciousness should grant the right to rise within us to its highest degrees; in other words, it is the only feeling of power by which our consciousness authorises us to let ourselves be possessed. All the others make us ill.
That being said, what are we now to do with all the other feelings of being, since we have said that we must not deny them — even if we prevent them from nourishing an excessive feeling of power, if not any feeling of power at all? There is only one thing to be done with these feelings: learn from them and, first thanks to that learning and then by means of it, transmute them into joy — but without moving too quickly, of course, lest we should in fact have denied them.
Let us be clear: when I say “learn from them”, I am calling here for greater seriousness. To learn from them, we must first agree to feel them intensely and deeply. Once again, this does not mean that we will allow them to nourish any feeling of power. But we must let them penetrate us — yes — in intensity and depth. We must feel them in this way, but solely as feelings of being: that is all they originally are.
If, nevertheless, we are led to permit one of these feelings of being to nourish, to some small degree — and only to some small degree — an associated feeling of power, it will be solely to compensate for the shortcomings of merely magnifying, in intensity and depth, what these feelings are within our being, and this, as always, with a view to transmuting them more successfully into joy.
Take the example of the pain of “unlove” — though what I really wish to discuss here is thwarted desire* — and the latent rage associated with it in every sufficiently healthy organism. If we feel this rage beginning to show itself within us, we must magnify our experience of it, draw closer to it, allow it to do its work within us, and understand it; but it must never nourish any feeling of power. We may act on this feeling categorically — at least locally — and effectively, but no more than that. Then, little by little, we will transmute this feeling into joy by understanding what suits us and, I dare say, what we are increasingly convinced serves life — as opposed to what, in our view, works against it.
So long as we do not allow this rage to nourish a feeling of power in our actions, and so long as our actions in relation to this rage remain subordinate to a concern for preserving the living — since we cannot nourish this living being, cannot give it the gift of ourselves and make it grow, because it did not allow us to express our desire to it in a total way —, our action will be good.
I undoubtedly still have to perfect my reactions and actions in this regard, but in any event I am assuredly making progress.
Pablo
*Thwarted desire does not give rise to frustration. Frustration comes from being unable to fill a lack — in short, from being unable to consume. Thwarted desire is not frustrated, for there is nothing it wished to take that it failed to obtain. It is simply in pain because it remains pregnant with the gift it had to make, as a pregnant woman might suffer from being unable to give birth. It is the pain of an excess, not the pain of a lack. It is the pain of one who seeks to give but finds no one to whom they can give what they have to offer. Such a thwarted desire, in particular, will not twist back into any kind of rage, still less frustration — as for the feeling of frustration, we have seen that it simply has no grounds to exist. It will continue, ever and increasingly, to seek the places and the people where, and to whom, it can give what it has to give.
PS: As you will have noticed, the various developments I have pursued around the central matrix of this sentimental education mainly concern man, as opposed to woman. This central matrix is also proper to woman, however; it is simply that the privileged dynamics within this matrix are reversed in her.