Sadness is one of the deepest emotions and it must be kept without an object. Sadness or melancholy is one of the essential feelings. A kind of premonition of peace. Deeply, it means to feel that what we’re looking for is unreachable in the objective world. To feel that, no matter what I do, the motivation which leads me, won’t find its fulfillment.
When maturity comes, this sadness is constantly here because, no matter what I do, I know I won’t find what I pretend to find. Sadness in this sense is a form of maturity. When we know that sadness, we can no longer fall in love. Falling in love would mean to pretend, once again, that I’ll be able to find something somewhere else – which is impossible in maturation… In this sadness, there is no longer any place for expectation of any satisfaction in the phenomenal world.
…This is no longer the sadness of missing something, but it’s like a perfume… In the beginning, the scent is in space, we can’t feel where it came from, then gradually we can find its origin.
When you have the maturity to keep the sadness, there is a certain ascent to the source. But people who constantly deny the sadness, who fall in love, who gape all day of this or that can never go back to the source. They have this languor of the moment, then they deny its authenticity by thinking once again that a relationship, that a situation, that something will fulfill them… Until there comes a time where we don’t deny this sadness anymore.
There is nothing that can make us move on. No matter what happens its the same thing. There is no more intentional energy, there is only a natural energy, because the nature of life is action, but there is nothing that makes us move towards something anymore. This is when this sadness becomes a true sadness. And it reveals itself as the path, like a scent that we follow which will bring us towards that which we sense… which becomes nostalgia. But the smallest treason of this nostalgia, thinking that this or that will satisfy me, will only bring confusion.
…According to the Indian approach, sadness is the ultimate feeling. It’s the feeling of separation. All Indian music is based on the sense of separation. In the miniature art of the foothills of the Himalayas, we often see Radha looking for Krishna.
Sadness is a fundamental emotion. This sadness leaves no room for someone else, no place to fall in love with something else. This sadness burns up all the objective situations…There’s no direction to this feeling which becomes a way of life, which leaves no room for energy to go somewhere, to wait, to hope. This is the real sadness.
But as long as we’re sad over something, sad because something isn’t here or that something happened, we deny the real sadness. So we stay glued to the sadness, which becomes a form of poison to the body, for the psyche, for the mind. This is the conviction that there is nothing for me in the objective situations that can transmute this sadness.
There’s nothing that can be done; it’s a maturation. I can’t ripen voluntarily, but I can become conscious of my immaturity. I can realize that I am constantly attracted by this, or by that, that constantly I’m trying to create a relationship, to maintain a relationship, to hope for a relationship, to stop a relationship, to be like this or like that, to want this or that, to think that finally, maybe when I have done this, achieved that, it will get better.
It’s a claim, a negation of the deep feeling that there’s nothing that can satisfy me. When I deny this feeling while waiting for something that can satisfy me, life is miserable. When I can clearly see this mechanism in me, then the sadness is no longer sad. It becomes a fast of the heart…
The understanding that there is nothing for me in the objective world is a fast of the mind. But even more important is the fast of the heart; sadness. I no longer look for myself in emotions. The only emotion whether I like it or not, is this sadness. There are no objective ramifications, no direction for me.
To be open to sadness is to be devoted to the reality of the moment. Rid of all its attachments, this sadness collapses in our attention. Devotion without an object. Tears of joy.
Extracted from: The Only Desire. In the Nudity of Tantra, By Eric Barat
