I enter a café and pay for my coffee, and the cashier smiles. It’s a wonderful smile, broad and open, not asking for or requiring anything. It’s the perfect expression of shared humanity, simple kindness and connection. But is it what it seems, or is it just an act? Is it real, or just the semblance of reality?
     I went to a retreat, and during the week there was a continual series of events and gatherings. The intimacy and the intensity of the setting compelled us to act as if we were a family. In being crushed together, a bond was formed. But the truth is that we were brought together on the basis of a single interest. Now, at the final gathering, we stood in a circle, holding hands, swaying back and forth. We sang songs about love and peace. Toasts were made, embraces given. Hearts softened and tears flowed. When the circumstances passed, what would remain?
     It was a great romance. We spent day exploring together, and envisioning the future. It was beautiful and pure and idealistic. We told each other countless stories about friendship and love. But one day a door closed and never again opened. It was over, and nothing at all remained. The very ideas and feelings we shared seemed to be contaminated. Is real, true, pure friendship and love possible? Or do we just go on in a new cycle of passion and misunderstanding, of love and loss?
     Does it come from the heart? Or does it come from the head and go to the heart? It’s possible to look as if you care, to act as if you care, even to feel and be full of compassion, but for all this to be a pretense. Inside, who knows what’s lurking? How do you know if it’s love, or if you’re just a good con-man, fooling yourself as well as others?
     What if you awoke on your deathbed and, in a moment of clarity, realized that your whole life had been a sham? Perhaps you accomplished great things. Perhaps you had an abundance of pleasure. But the inauthenticity is finally revealed, and it turns out that it was all a false construction of the imagination.
     I am not doubting the feeling. The sensation is magical. The song sweeps over, the dance insinuates itself, and there is a tremendous relief from the disconnection and isolation of daily life. It’s meaning, love, connection. But is it real, or is it fantasy? To believe that one loves, and to act as if one loves, produces the expression and the feeling of love. But love is not an expression or a feeling.
     You cradle a baby in your arms, kissing its forehead, and it’s impossible to contain your feeling of love for this innocent being. You fall deeply in love, and the whole world is transformed, glowing with a new aura. Why would one want to doubt the authenticity of these feelings? What critical mind would shatter this spontaneous, natural, and beautiful state? It’s going to hurt when you find the flaws. They are secreted in nearly every social act.
     Your bodies are intertwined, and your hands are moving, caressing each other. The caress is the very expression of love: its act and its form. It is a statement, a claim, a proclamation: love is here. One cannot caress without making this claim. If the belief is not there, touch is no more than tactile stimulation, movement of skin on skin. The majority of the pleasure depends on this claim of connection, on its being a caress. Otherwise, it’s just touch, stimulation, and the resulting pleasure is mild.
     When a claim of connection is being made, but there is actually no connection, the result is pretense. There is a falsification of what is purest, most intimate and most important. Knowingly or unknowingly, integrity is destroyed, and therefore one becomes capable of anything. It is a sacrilegious event: it shatters the sacred. This is the danger of promiscuity.
     Even when there is no hidden motive, making illusory claims about connection or love exacts a heavy cost. We are gifted with a few sacred tasks and relations. To replace what is highest with a sham replica is to trivialize it. It’s a dangerous submission of one’s dignity, power, and capacity for love. It’s a resignation to game-playing, power struggles, and the cycles of violence and love. It diminishes the likelihood of love, its reality and triumph. To pretend that a relation is real is to desecrate love.
     A state of mind that is externally produced is artificial. We have many mood-creating methods. This is the primary function of music, especially recorded music. When one wants to feel happy, exhilarated, or connected, all you have to do is flick the switch. The music’s rhythm drowns out the true rhythm. It smothers and overwhelms the truth inside, enveloping it with false images. Almost anything can be used for escape and manipulation. Art, science, religion; food, study, charity; friendship, family: everything good is susceptible to distortion.
     It is only when it is freely and consciously chosen, emanating from and connected to oneself, that the effect is authentic. But some mood-altering choices are always manipulative and artificial; for instance, the use of alcohol and drugs. The feelings that are produced, though quite real, are false representations of ourselves and our relationships.
     Commercial society manufactures, distributes and imposes moods. The purpose is to make you think you want something, whether you do or do not. It’s not easy to extricate oneself from the constant bombardments onto your brain of alien images. Immersed in sophisticated and seductive mood-creating environments, it’s hard to know the difference between what one is feeling and what one would feel if there were no manipulation. I wouldn’t blame the corporations which manufacture the images, though. They have little power that we do not freely yield to them. We gladly and actively seek out those images and fantasies, because we are addicted to them.
     Rituals and customs are replicas of discoveries made by others. They are reminders and guides. Can insights be encased in formulas, codified and structured, and passed down through re-enactment? Or are these only the semblance of the thing, a dead repetition of what was once alive?
     Marriage contracts, the celebration of holidays, religious and non-religious rites, forms of dress, social behavior—these are all stabilizing factors, needed for the continuity of society and for moral guidance. Without them, our culture would be even more chaotic and hedonistic than it is. Though they may be necessary for us as we are now, this does not mean that the behavior which they cultivate is authentic. Mere repetition has no life in it, and cannot impart life.
     That’s not to say that a ritual can’t be an occasion for authentic expression. Maybe life can be breathed into a ritual. But in that case it’s not the ritual, the re-enactment and outside form, which has life. The life is what you bring to it, and its origin is elsewhere.
     A simple kiss on the cheek is an emblem. The same goes for a handshake, a smile, or a hug. These are tokens, very small and very important. They stand for a certain human relation: they signify that one cares. But is there caring going on? Does what these symbols stand for exist, or is there just a social compulsion to create the illusion of connection, and a false consciousness about the truth of the relation?
     Artificial mind-states can be produced by thoughts as well as feelings. The mental realm is addictive, and it has a life of its own. What you discover through reason easily loses its vitality and fossilizes into dogma if it’s not continually renewed. You can spend your whole life in analytic, rational criticism, and the ethereal world of concepts and ideals, without truly caring at all about what you find out. It’s a top-heavy, intellectualized existence that is disconnected from reality.
     A tenured professor spends decades imparting his knowledge about ‘dialectical materialism’ to gullible teenagers. An activist spends hours on the street talking to strangers about libertarian philosophy. There is no love gained or lost, because it is the idea which is the center of the relation.
     You say it, because you care about it. But, over-stimulated by the thoughts themselves, you dwell excruciatingly on single elements, and can no longer see the complex reality behind them. Connection with the whole picture and the real world is broken. With the power one gains through this intense focus on single ideas, disastrous consequences are quite possible.
     Yes, we want unity, but however sincere we are in our attempts, our will and our sincerity don’t by themselves achieve it. She smiles, and your whole world turns. He cries, and your heart breaks. Tears are flowing. There are passionate embraces, devoted worship, enthusiastic speech. Is it real or is it wishful thinking?
     Ideals are fantasies, rituals are simulations, symbolic gestures are feigned. Celebration is not connection, intimacy is not love, helping is not caring. You do it, but do you care about it? You say it, but do you understand it? You feel it, but do you experience it? You wish very much that it were so, so you act that way, you talk that way, and even feel that way. It’s a good resemblance, and strangely difficult to penetrate, because it’s our own minds that are doing the fooling, and our very identities are falsified.
     There is nothing wrong with expression and feeling and thought. These are the living articulations of our very life. But they are secondary features, and they must correspond to the original state or they are false. How do you see the original state and relation? How do you purify the superstructure of falsity?
     One can begin with the faith that the living truth does exist. If the artificiality is possible, that’s because the real version is desecrated, and this implies that it exists. Concentrate on this feature, of sham mind-states, and the truthful element inside will become visible. Cease to engage in sham behavior—of evoking and acting out feelings that are not the expression of reality. Step outside of the circle. It may be painful, when a song starts and a dance begins. Isolated, but redeemed, you will see the desecration, and the reality behind it. It reveals that which it is not. The falsity will direct you to the truthity.