Problems of freedom

I am an ascetic. - Am I therefore also a masochist? "He who possesses is possessed." And yet, the idea occurs as early as Nietzsche that asceticism is cruelty turned inward; it is the tyranny of the soul over the body, which it denies as its true source. And yet there come times when one recoils in horror at the thought that one is nothing more than the moment of meat's becoming aware of itself. One rediscovers the appeal of the renunciation that comes with the idea that I am something immaterial and transcendent, imprisoned in this transient, weak, corruptible flesh - the word flesh itself disgusts me. But reflection perpetuates this divide, while experience reconciles the opposing substances and merges them back into a single awareness turned outward. Reflection is a corrosive force - after all, reflection on the foreignness of one's own body soon leads to reflection on the foreignness of some mental habit or other, the non-essentialness of some character trait/flaw. One begins to peel away the layers of one's personality, seeking the core, only to discover the nothingness of one's ego. Aside from the layers, which are all contingent, there is nothing there. People say more than they realize with the proverb "the eyes are the window to the soul." The black mirror of the pupil is the I itself - glass, transparent and opaque all at once, reflecting the outside world in its own nothingness. Between the falsehood of the outside and the nonexistence of the inside, what remains? Shifting illusions? Whence comes the concept of truth?

A related thought: if universality - the attempt to free oneself from all illusions of a particular point of view - resolves into nothingness, the point of view from nowhere, then how far can one move from the mire of one's subjectivity into the realm that exists between two subjects? Can anything be said, or is each word non-identical with its repetition?

To be continued in a more lucid state of mind.