Your Life’s passion and your sex… what is the connection?
I have been hearing: do what you are passionate about and you’ll love your life.
Right. But how many of us know what it feels like to be passionate? How many of us are willing to give ourselves over to our passion? What is passion? Is it 21st century, (i.e. hip) to be passionate? I don’t mean irate. I don’t mean interested. I don’t mean enjoy talking about it… I mean passionate?
What is passionate anyway?
When I look at it in Hungarian, the root of the word is suffering. Agony and ecstasy, I am not kidding you! ‘Primal forces are about to explode’
Even in the dictionary that is the original meaning. “an extreme or inordinate desire” that sends you to agony and ecstasy. Inordinate means ‘Exceeding reasonable limits; immoderate’
When we look where we can locate Passion of that type we find it in the police reports, we find it in addicts, we find it with zealots, we find it, but really rarely in the domain of work, vocation, or anything “normal” like that.
So when someone tells you to find what you are passionate about, for the most part, you are screwed.
Why? Because, in my experience, the age we live in, has trained us to find safety valves, cheap shortcuts, replacements to what was going to make us passionate.
The story of Billy Elliot inspires people because he had the courage and the standing power to suffer the burning from inside, to oppose his father, to go through what he needed to go through to give his whole life to his passion: dancing.
Did it get easier for Billy Elliot at any point? The moment it got easier, it wasn’t passion any more, it was suddenly his ordinary life.
I saw a French movie about a sculptor, Camille Claudel. In that movie we can track the two stages of passion: Camille was passionate, and Rodin, the famous sculptor, a legend in his own time, used to be passionate. At the time of the movie, he is parasitically living on another person’s passion, sucking her dry. Camille doesn’t stop being passionate, and ends up in a mental institution.
Being passionate is on the thin line between mad and normal. Passionate is painful. Passionate is the spirit wanting to express itself through you, and it doesn’t relent.
I know a little bit about sexuality through my work with all kinds of people in that area. My experience has been that people, when they start to feel a little bit of tension (the spirit pushing from within) turn to some release, chemical, shopping, eating, their hand, a hired hand, and therefore they only experience the beginnings of tension and their release is a puff… not an explosion worth going for.
I know people who get “all creative” when the tension hits, but the “creativity” has no direction, it is only disperse, dissipate the tension.
Which means, in a way, we live in an impotent age, where we never allow enough tension to build up so we can actually do something worth doing… and that is true for every area of your life.
How you do anything is how you do everything. You can be a “handy” guy on one hand and a powerful creator on the other… you avoid tension that is sexual, you’ll avoid creative tension too.
This is why all the passion books, and all the passion courses are bs… they don’t mean passion, they mean hobby. They don’t mean passion, they mean “like.” And there is no energy there… the first boulder in your path will stop you and send you to the hills screaming…
Learn staying standing in the face of tension. In every area: hunger, thirst, sexual desire, desire to pick up the phone, text, send an email, etc. and expand the time you can hold the tension… Be willing to suffer the tension. Be willing to go a little crazy.
If you don’t: your life will always be humdrum, boring, inconsequential. And the spirit will never fully be able to work through you… you’ll waste a perfectly good life.
I enjoyed reading about your approach to passion – the tension of the spirit pushing from within and your recommendation to 'be with it' rather than move away from it using all kinds of different strategies. Thank you : ) I'm inspired and I will share this with others.
Thank you Chez. In my experience, every “modality” teaches you to dissipate the tension. Pop a pill, take a nap, take a walk, watch a movie, play a game, pleasure yourself, eat, just don't feel.
I visited a friend's body on Saturday and found that he is minutes away from having a heart attack: no oxygen, no breathing, pain already shooting down his arm. Feels nothing. Puts his attention on care-taking instead.
Anything but feel. Anything but stand motionless, attentive, in the face of even some minor feeling labeled negative.
People come to me because they want guidance. Most guidance comes to you cloaked in unpleasantness. You will never get the guidance if your habit is to run for the hills. Most opportunities come the same way. First it's bad news.
So the skill to stand and face the tiger and allow the tension to just be and then fuel your life in directions you would not expect will take, for most people, some time and a lot of discipline.
It's easier to live without tension, and wither away What a waste.
Perhaps it is genetically determined that most of people live simple lives in order to support humanity as a whole, doing boring work that needs to be done for the benefit of all. In normal times it would be detrimental to society if everybody started live in that kind of passion. However, if we accept that it is necessary now for the humanity to get enormous amount of work to be done in a limited time, a strong passion on this path is required. The question is: how a simple person can develop that quality, to start living in passion? Again, when we do not have 30 years for practice to develop it.
Wow, what a powerful post. I don't believe in coincidence so finding you blog and reading your post in not an accident. Your first post I read about staying connected to source and now this one about your life's passion has come to me at the right time. Things are really begin to take off for me in my personal and financial life and these post, are just that post on my journey. I love when you speak about letting the tension build up and doing something with it worth doing. I get it now. I've been dissipating that energy for years mostly alone. It's what Napoleon Hill is speaking about in chapter 11 in Think & Grow Rich. Thank you 🙂
Vladimir, I agree that most people are not suited to live with this kind of passion. But some kind of tolerance for tension needs to be developed, because without tension there is no movement of energy. And most people have, speaking the language of electricity, a 1-2 Volt tolerance. Once it reaches 2 Volts they reach for the bottle, or the coffee cup, or food, or computer games, or go to sleep, etc.
you can see that a person with the kind of passion I am writing about can hold thousands of volts… but even if you increase your tolerance to 5-10 volts, you can be the amazing famous winner in our time. And that is doable, fast. Just by getting that it is possible and that it's needed.
Start there.
In a language that comes from another discipline but really works here, you could be standing in the gap (between the no and the yes of achievement )and enjoy being there.
The classes you attend with me train you in that. They train you to be able to increase your capacity to withstand the desire to cheap closure by seconds, by minutes, by hours, by days… so you can become something other than the product of our impotent times.
One more thing, Charlie. Only 1% of 1% of humanity is willing and capable of standing and acting in the face of all-consuming passion. Most of humanity is interested in a quiet, uneventful life. Some are driven, but being driven is results oriented: once the result is attained, the fire disappears.
So, if this sounds alien to you, it is probably alien to everyone you know. And that is the biggest clue how off the self-improvement gurus are: they need to dilute the meaning of passion to “I enjoy doing that” or “I am interested in that” if they want to make money teaching “passion” based anything.
Unfortunately, as far as I can see, most people have no energy to sustain anything for enough time to accomplish anything worth accomplishing. You are way better than average in this regard
Charlie, do you hear that even your question comes from unwillingness? You need to strengthen your capacity to delayed gratification.
In addition to that, real passion is not about gratification, but living the passion. If my passion were about any gratification, which is the case with most gurus, I would have sold out long time ago, and humanity would be surely going out in a handbasket.
Mr. Jesus did sell out, by the way, he actually sold out twice; first when he chose to preach instead of “force” people to return to “home” which was his job (like it's my job!) and second when he was more interested in becoming a martyr than actually getting the job done.
I myself have the thought of going home often, but then again, I am so practiced in turning my life over to what's wanted and needed that I keep on hanging in there, even though the task looks too big and too hopeless.
The gratification is not my issue. this is another case of “it's not the destination, it's the journey!”
This is difficult to grasp. We've been trained to settle for instant gratification since it's right there and easy??
Be willing to suffer the tension until when? Until there's more clarity?