Fractions of the Soul (eBook)

A Tale of Rocks and Blades

Anthony Adore (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
262 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-4357-6 (ISBN)

Infos

'Fractions of the Soul' invites the reader to eavesdrop on the wisdom communicated beyond the sacred boundaries of the master-apprentice relationship. In a series of orations, or meditations, the master sheds wisdom of a lifetime as he senses his inevitable death. Topics explored between the whetstone and his blade range from identifying flaws in perception, feminine manipulation techniques, unavoidable loneliness and solitude, and the nature of his love for her.

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"e;Fractions of the Soul"e; invites the reader to eavesdrop on the wisdom communicated beyond the sacred boundaries of the master-apprentice relationship. In a series of orations, or meditations, the master sheds wisdom of a lifetime as he senses his inevitable death. Topics explored between the whetstone and his blade range from identifying flaws in perception, feminine manipulation techniques, unavoidable loneliness and solitude, and the nature of his love for her. Offering his unique understanding and interpretation of the world to his student, the master's wisdom is imbued with his passion, and demonstrates his secret love for the apprentice in an attempt to reaffirm life before death.

Textauszug

CHAPTER ONE

FRACTIONS OF OBSERVATION

To investigate the primordial relationship between man and woman, teacher and student will primarily use their imagination to apprehend, dissect, and explore the obvious. Empathy, imagination, imaginative variation, and qualitative interpretation, usually not considered tools in a traditional scientific sense, will be their instruments. Because the accuracy of these instruments depends on the teacher’s and the student’s clarity during their use, their task will be to identify structures in their consciousness that either impede or enable clarity. Validity reflects the congruence between the observer’s analysis and his student’s agreement as determined by the reader. The reader shall witness the deductive critical analysis illuminated between the two.

I am not sure where things went wrong. No one starts a serious relationship expecting it to end. But some do and I find it weird every time. You see, most couples seem to embody a certain childlike enthusiasm and giddiness at the beginning because, if for no other reason, things between them are new and fresh. Novelty colors sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and responses to being touched. New relationships are different. They are exciting. And they feel good.

Each individual in the new dyad acts and reacts in their own habitual way to the other while simultaneously gorging on the novelty emanating from the other, enabling each to see themselves anew. New flesh reincarnates innate desire, lust, attraction, and anticipation within a heart pining to end winter’s loneliness. Their phoenix is now reborn, rising from its own ashes in the presence of someone new. New possible futures shine forth as flames from ash and, for the first time in a long time, icy passions warm and loneliness recedes.

But I know that there is nothing new under the sun.4 Millions, if not billions, have done such things in the past. Literature records ample proof spanning centuries and cultures concerning men pursuing women and women running away from men until allowing themselves to be caught. I believe that man’s desire for companionship and woman’s acceptance or rejection of man traces back to the interaction between Adam and Eve and I believe that their progeny also inherited numerous shadowy memories of Eden from their parents, including Adam’s yearning and loneliness, Eve’s submission to her own desires and narcissism, and Lucifer’s defilement. However, humanity inherited more than just their darkness; we also inherited faint memories of a time before the fall, now blurred through the veil of death and sin.

Proof of this latent remembrance demonstrates each time a person desires something good—a good that they have never personally known. Some never experience love but yearn to be understood and accepted, others living in fear desire strength and courage, and few want justice more than those who experience injustice. How can a person who has never known love, strength, courage, or justice seek something beyond the opposite that life has taught them? It is like a colorblind person desiring to see the world in color. How can a person who has only known black, white, and shades of grey want to see in color—something they have never known? Perhaps those trapped in fear, loneliness, and injustice witness others who possess what they themselves do not and consequently believe that they can obtain the same. In this case, even though others inspire them to believe in something contrary to their personal experience, they still recognize those contrary things even though they have never experienced them for themselves. If darkness, emptiness, and sin express all there is in life, then why do some still seek out the light in defiance? How could the people tied and bound inside the Platonic cave begin to conceive that sunlight exists when their eyes have known nothing but the dancing shadows on the wall from the fire? How can a person want something that they have never personally experienced? How is it that something good provokes remembrance and desire with no prior experience?5 There must be something in us that remembers.

All possess a distant remembrance of walking and talking with the divine, of interacting with both angel and animal, and of walking through harmonious nature in peace and comfort. Additionally, like a shadow grasping at something in darkness, we remember the divine faculties granted to Adam and Eve, and by extension, also granted to us, which allowed them to perceive matters of the spirit with ease. All men are the sons of Adam; all women are the daughters of Eve. To understand the relational dynamic between Adam and Eve laid at the beginning of the world, we need only to study movements of the human heart throughout history and in modern times. And for this reason, we find ourselves together, teacher and student, to study the movements of other people’s hearts in order to understand our own. Rather than performing an abstract historical analysis of romance and love, let us venture forth into the world and study the human heart from afar at first.

Let us go to a place where men and women mingle together in a dance as old as time itself. Let us find one man and one woman in a quiet nightclub and observe them. From them, we will collect our data and make our deductions about human nature. We will bring them into ourselves and use our imagination to deduce their motivation and purpose. Lest we build a case study, the more often we do this across different people, the better we will be able to figure out the essence of the human heart. The ritual about to unfold before our eyes seems new from the perspective of each at that table; however, the human heart never changes. It is time for the story of Adam and Eve to begin again with new characters playing their parts.

If you will, please focus your attention on the young man and woman. Notice the effect of his approach on her. See how she changes her posture: arms once crossed but a few moments ago now uncross, her pupils dilate, and her pulse quickens as her breathing becomes shallow and more erratic. She shifts in her chair almost unnoticeably. With a delicate touch, she grooms her hair with her right hand grazing her neck. She pulls one side of her long hair behind her ear, exposing her neck, allowing her earrings to catch hints of the low light. With no words spoken between them thus far, she communicated permission for him to enter her space. And with an imperceptible self-congratulatory smirk, he accepted. At first glance, a naïve observer would see only two infatuated individuals exploring one another through playful touch and idle conversation. And while not entirely incorrect, the layperson’s casual glance reveals just as much as it conceals, and as such, in contrast with the amateur’s way of seeing, we observers desire to follow the evidence to its implication. Awareness of our inherent perceptual deficits motivates us to look at mundane events in an uncommon manner to achieve an understanding beyond a mere complacency with the self-evident.

Let us pause time and halt the courtship unfolding before us with our mind and ponder the conditions of possibility that made such an interaction meaningful and possible in the first place.

You and I are just two observers wanting to understand the cosmos that already exists between man and woman and the new universe created after they have interacted with one another. This desire to understand motivates us to become a special kind of scientist. Information collection, for us, happens by observation alone without the informed consent of either the people we observe or those with whom we have personal interaction. The reason for such a covert approach resides in my personal belief that people tend to change their normal behavior in order to present themselves in a more positive light after they realize that they are being observed in an information-gathering kind of way. While revelatory and descriptive about the observed to some degree, it is more efficient for us to begin collecting our observations without their knowledge. Should they discover our purpose along the way, we would at least have an established comparative context within which to evaluate the change in behavior.

We are not violating scientific ethics because our observations come from what people do and say in public settings. It is possible that our observations will capture attempts to skew the other’s interpretation, especially at the genesis stage. Over the course of repeated observations, however, shifts in their behavior will become more pronounced, unless we too begin to believe what the other wants us to see. While forming a personal emotional attachment to the observed would allow us to perceive facets about them normally hidden from frontal scrutiny, we must begin at a distance lest we filter our intellectual effort through our emotional limbic brain. The other in their relationship, already caught in the limbic spell, fails to notice the other’s nuance out of willful neglect, pure ignorance, or neurochemical delight. The anticipation that their newfound companion creates for them satisfies their evolved biological mandate: to mate and reproduce ... to multiply.

Observers, on the other hand, cannot strap themselves to their ship’s mast like Odysseus to hear the siren’s song and maintain a proper...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.12.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Lebenshilfe / Lebensführung
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-4357-3 / 1098343573
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-4357-6 / 9781098343576