I have been rethinking my relationship with self-destruction, which includes my relationship with smoking a lot. (Interestingly, I almost wrote "talking a lot" instead. Maybe I smoke to swallow the words left unsaid.)
I have been smoking for ten years, counting from when I started smoking every day. I remember leaving school to buy cigarettes, or leaving the house just to smoke, and discovering that nicotine was great company, a reminder and proof of my existence.
An important part of understanding how this bond was formed is understanding what my relationship with death was like. Far from being something I feared, it was a hope. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense in a completely incoherent world.
But time passed. I no longer want to die. I no longer see meaning in death, not more than I do in life. The sweet feeling I cultivated toward everything that could kill me is gone, but perhaps it was never truly replaced.
Because self-destruction is still here, no matter how much I think it is incoherent.
And all of this makes me question human nature, especially its fragmentation and lack of unity. If, on the one hand, I convince myself of something and can even become fully convinced that it is my will, and at another moment I discover that there is another within me who disagrees, and I usually refuse to recognize him as myself.
So, in the end, I am the one who creates this fragmentation. But its condition of possibility is the belief that I have to be a unified self. But why does that belief feel so natural in the first place?
Well, I think that without this function of cohesion, there would be no "I," nor any self-consciousness. There would only be the immediate. Self-consciousness seems to require precisely the opposite: that existence distance itself from itself, become an object to itself, and, in returning, recognize itself.
Perhaps the same applies to why we cannot, from the very beginning, possess a non-dual awareness of the world. Without the separation between subject and object, between light and shadow, between the conscious and the unconscious, there could be no recognition and no dissolution. There could be no existence.
