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Nothing is Enough // Or everything is not enough. // I have a hunger... //// The hunger is me. // If I feed it, it wants more. // Mostly, it wants something else. //// A wise person, said STOP. //

Saturday, September 19, 2020

the opposite of entanglement

Entanglement. It is the process of getting tangled, caught up in, trapped or limited by. We know physical entanglement; a mess of wires or walking into a giant cobweb. We also know social entanglement; getting swept up in the storylines of others. Or ourselves. Like going with a friend to a party and one thing leads to another and it's 3am and you are in the desert in a sticky situation.

There is a lot of entanglement in the world. And we like to pretend it is hidden, keeping it in our blindspot. Or we reason with it. Maybe this is as good as it gets. There is no escaping it, so might as well enjoy the ride. Maybe even the ride in the desert at 3am. Admittedly, there is a lot of fun in unreserved revelry. There is also a lot of fun in psychedelics and opiates.

Suppose we could make an opiate or psychedelic that had no drawbacks. No addiction. You could turn it on and off like a switch. Would that mean no entanglement?

In a way, yes; but in a more important way, no. Entanglements, in my old view, was always associated with the negative elements of an activity. Like love and relationships were possible in a pure form without entanglements, but it was because of my lack of skill but I kept on getting the entanglements. Same with physical pleasure. Same with money.

 But there's another sense of the word entanglements, which is how it gets me all caught up in or all tied up in some situation. And a situation is just a mental state really. Those are the dangerous entanglements.

So, as a ponder what the opposite of entanglement is, my old self would say that the opposite of entanglement is getting away with it. Partying all night but waking up without the hangover.

But my new self is much more broad in my understanding of entanglements. And that broadening viewpoint is beneficial because it keeps my nose clean and my mind out of trouble. So there are entanglements that I didn't think were entanglements before. And there are also things I thought were entanglements, that I no longer think of as entanglements. Putting an effort to develop skills is not fun. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of practice, to learn to play the piano or to rule one's own mind. But the difficulty of the work is (surprisingly) not an entanglement when the end goal is clear and worthwhile.

The opposite of entanglement isn't escape from entanglement in the old me view. The opposite of entanglement is seclusion. And its basis is heedfulness.

UUDR

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