Fighting Mephistopheles (II)

Dare to shine, without burning out completely.

I am Mr. Hobbs. Nothing impedes me from talking about what truly consumes me, an image that tortures me terribly, the existential aspect, which replaces in me the only fuse lighting the flame of joy and hope: the thought that I’m leaving as a slave of my passions. For, yes, I am ruled by a strong passion related to my past, same as the suffering of an artist is reflected in the mood of his painting, full of those melancholic nuances from which irony or the justice of fate draw their sap.

Suffering is a drama of consciousness that antagonizes individual integrity with worldly ambition. I became the prisoner of my own intrigue, in a game that once again puts my nerves to the test, which consumes any sliver of hope linked to a perspective of the joy of life. I feel forced, tried by a particularly intense pleasure, to grant myself the privilege of rising once more to the heights of danger and suspense, more than anything, as a machiavellic manifestation of vanity. Which I find impossible to escape.

The fight with the thoughts that separate me from any other external concerns has started. And as surreal as this estrangement from my old identity, from the serenity I have always kept tightly around me may seem, it is still the carrier of an essence whose gradual revelation makes the object of my future initiatives. Mediating any inner conflicts or arguments.

Is the world that transforms you into a new person doubled by an aesthetic of the image that transforms the sadness behind your manifestations into a deep and solitary existence?

I cannot describe the war I’m waging against the army of thoughts that insistently and confusingly assault me. To a certain extent, I set aside what I have always treated kindly and with respect. Up to this moment. When the series of these seemingly endless bombardments has brought my conscience in a state of inoperability. My existence no longer varies according to the nature of the gained ideas of freedom, love and happiness, in the spirit of high moral ideals, but only by the nature of exceeding the limits of fairness in the name of an authority that does not allow contradictions.

I am endowed with the only useful knowledge of a leap above danger, in the vast pages of the consequences of an extraordinary experience, suspended at the height of atypical moral exigencies, which make me fit to become the protagonist of a work written by Stephen King. The protagonist of a life-story that many cannot even begin to imagine, but one I do not wish upon even my greatest enemy.

There’s something ascetic in my being, a voluntary isolation, giving up the world, some sort of zealotry that completely distorts me from reason, relentlessly fueling my commitment to something above myself. A formidable will of not taking into consideration neither God, nor kindness. Because my sensing fibers still shelter feelings of the past, that still have the bitter taste of social injustice and inequity.

In fact, my personality shines through one force: the hope of unleashing my vengeance on those who are guilty of my wife’s death. But what burns me entirely under the impulse of a bitter sense of gratitude, combined with the images of an overwhelming experience, is that I promised my wife for a long time that I will forget everything, that I will leave behind bitterness and resentment. That I cannot do.

Are you the "victim" or the "beneficiary" of a past injustice that shadows your identity, in terms of the predisposition to engage in a dialogue with the shame of denying yourself?

The tendency of being doubtful, maintained by the feeling of living "blindly" or in oblivion and targeting long-term consequences, doesn’t give you any consolation, any support, but only a suffocating and tiring hope if you want to get away from the world.

Which does nothing else, but to enhance the shame resented in the relation: You-Ego-Truth-Reality, inducing a secondary command impulse in your resting period and regaining the power to getting ahead in life.

Thus, you end up in the position of either a "victim" or a "beneficiary" of a past injustice that shadows your identity. Instead of trustingly going forward towards fulfillment, you separate from your true being, you become the prisoner of your own intrigues, in a game that tests your patience. By putting aside what you have always treated with kindness and respect, you bring your conscience in a state of inoperability – because your moral beauty has been touched by the lightning of selfishness, revenge, hate or self-rejection.

Leadership is a matter of taking the underground condition of your being that influences the stability of an advantageous situation for the evolution of the course of certain development benchmarks.

In leadership, the people that stomp on the brake pedal instead of the gas stand out more. What frees man from the slavery of passions, restoring his state of equilibrium and serenity, begins with the denial of a NULL type value.

This value representing the sum of all passed experiences through time through the filter of consciousness and sensibility, the sum of all things that could have been avoided, can be converted into a valid value if man manages to distinguish between what animates him through the externalization of experiences. and what is lost in the intensity of experiences.

Indeed, the world beyond leadership has many options and colors, new chapters of life that you need to go over with your eyes, soul, thoughts, with your angels and demons. Means to find and lose yourself at the same time, because in the end, you know yourself best. Just as music serves the soul, so does alternating between cold and warm of emotional condition, it serve man development, strengthening him or bringing him down, through its countless interventions and limits it imprints alone in his conscience.

To engage in a dialogue with the shame of denying yourself is to appeal to a higher decision-making authority invested with the power to change the things your inner universe cannot accept as defining in the course of events which you manage.

Fighting Mephistopheles highlights that existential aspect which gives a sensation of discomfort that eats man from within, bringing him in the impossibility to fight his own negative conditioning. Because, barely at this point, an ample view over the dimension of his real identity can be temporarily opened.

* Note: Flawless (2007)