hi. Sorry about my 'outburst' last night. Just a little latent rage.
Do you remember the phrase, "latent homosexual"? Boy, does that bring back memories.. shame, fear, and worst of all, self-loathing. It's kinda neat remembering it today, cuz today I am feeling a lot of those same things, only today the phrase is 'latent HIV'.
Is it the world that makes queers into victims, just to fulfill it's need for victims? Or could it be that queers each did something in another life which earned them this incarnation as a sort of purgatory? I know the latter is not plausible because life is what we make it regardless of the misfortunes which appear out of thin air. So I think it is the world which needs victims, and creates them accordingly.
That's not to say there is no alternative. Once I learn the truth behind this recurring stigmata, then it will end. And it will be taken away by.. well, whatever you want to call it; Life, the Universe, Atman. Indeed no action is taken apart from the whole, we are each utterly impotent if we presume to act alone. I am not a sole agent in anything, everything from the act of picking up a coffee cup to expelling my last breath is done by the whole world, through me, with me, and in me.
"That which is the finest
essence--this whole world
has that as its soul. That
is Reality. That is Atman.
That art thou."
--from the Upanishads
Thought I would just toss that in here as reinforcement. <grin>
There was a movie, 
Advise and Consent, with Don Murray as Brigham Anderson, a married US Senator and 'latent homosexual' with a history, who is blackmailed by an ultraconservative Senator. In its most memorable scene, Senator Anderson, with the courageous intent of ending the denial, meets his ex-lover. Just as it seems truth has won, Anderson abruptly leaves the bar and moments later, as his ex pleads with him through the window of the limousine, the Senator grabs the man's face and pushes him onto the ground. Later we discover the latent homo-senator kills himself. I saw it on TV in the late sixties, right around the time I concluded that I was a latent homosexual. But I was wrong. I was having regular sex with my best-friend David, and carrying overwhelming guilt for it. My sexuality was not latent in the least; it was an active and loathsome secret. I was a latent queer, dying to come out, cruelly deformed by the restraint.
"I am not happy, I'm gay." In what world would that make any sense, other than this one? My budding philosophy here is not one of 'them'—the bigots and religious fanatics, as opposed to 'me'—liberal, queer and open-minded; that dichotomy is always a seductive alternative to accepting responsibility. No, I have already acknowledged that none of us is a sole agent; there is no other, there is only the One which includes us all. My suggestion is that we have made it a part of our nature to suffer by believing the illusion that we can create happiness. We can't create a goddamn thing. What we call creativity is simply the expression of what is already there, in us. True creation can only occur in the presence of true destruction, and man-made happiness only exists in the presence of man-made suffering. For every life lived in relative affluence here in the United States, there will be at least ten other lives on this Earth spent in abject poverty.
We need the creeping little fears, like illness, like prejudice, like loneliness and unhappiness to reinforce our constructions of a faulty reality in which we can create joy—if we but try hard enough, and have a little luck.
Joy, really, is nothing but opening to it. It accompanies no philosophy, it favors no lifestyle over another, and it results from neither gentle religious practice nor virulent fanaticism. It is here now. Let go of all the rest, and you can have it. Let go of your fears, your defenses, your denials and blatant lies. Let go of everything you have invested in, even let go of your investments in spirituality, and all that will be left is joy. It is indestructible and uncreatable.
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