So what makes a *shared* continuation of love? Both people must spiritualize the sensuality of the relationship itself, over time. The desire must be for the connection — fulfilled, and sustained. Desire the material, the children, the common interests, the matching faces, and you have a fine relationship and no true love. This is my whole objection to a love that is only skin deep: it never spiritualized anything.
Love need not be shared to be real. One can stand in love with no second person at all — positive feelings, passion-born, prolonged, pouring from a craft or a calling. But love without the sensual connection of two people depends on far more variables and is harder to hold. A shared love is one powerful source. A solitary love must be fed from many. Both are love. They are not equally easy to keep lit.
Depression earns the same final form. It is still a state, of unwanted feeling, not passion-driven, not blind, not learned — and absent of comparison to greed, friendship, or sensuality. It is the state empty of desire and craving. One there may not even *want* out. No sensuality, nothing spiritualized. One is reserved, closed; connection is neither possible nor wished for. Love's mirror, with everything that animates love removed.
Set the three side by side and you have the architecture of a life. In depression you are most logical and rational — there is nothing else to be. In love you are most aware of your desires and passions, and least in command. In content you are most in control, holding both at once, swept off by neither. Three ways to be alive, and only one of them leaves the wheel in your hands.
Why, then, do people choose love over content if content is where they are most in command? Because people do not want command. They want to get lost. Love comes easy precisely because they are not steering — and they read the ease as life at its height. Nietzsche caught it: even the lowest intelligence and coldest heart feel the glimmer of the word. Love is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is the lure.
Content cannot compete with love for desire, and that is content's quiet tragedy. Content has no extremes; it can be near boring. People never feel out of control of their lives, so they never recognize content as the state of *most* control — and a state of pure positive feeling will always out-tempt a state of mere balance. We are blind to love's flaws by love's own bliss. So content stays the wiser home and the less-wanted one.
A last reading of Nietzsche, the largest one. He named love the great triumph over Christianity. I would name it the great triumph over humanity. Love can take anyone and set them in a state believed euphoric and in fact blinding. It has tricked people into doing what they never would in command of themselves. Hitler and Napoleon turned the desires of nations into a love for those nations — control of the masses, run through the model of love.
So the lesson is not to flee love but to *learn* it. Like music, love can be known but must be learned to be understood. Learn its blindness, its madness, its stupidity, and you can lessen them — act more decisively, set down what hinders you, and come back to content. Depression is the lowest a person goes; understanding love is how you avoid being driven there. A life understood is a life better held.
I need to revise the map of the states, and I will let the revision sit beside the original rather than erase it. In the first telling there were three points on the logic side — bliss high, depression low, serenity the balance. Later I came to think they are not three states but one, seen at three pressures. It is all serenity. Bliss is serenity gone positive; depression is serenity gone negative. The axis did not have three homes. It had one, with weather.
The same re-pairing reaches love. Early, love's opposite was depression — the two poles, content between. Later the symmetry redrew itself: not love and depression, but love and serenity; depression and bliss. Love stands opposite serenity now — urge against choice, the swept-away against the fully-commanding. Depression drops to being the dark face of serenity, not love's twin. I record both pairings. The earlier is cleaner; the later is truer to what I came to feel.
Why the second pairing convinces me: you cannot have an *outburst into logic*. Logic is calculated; it does not erupt. A sudden catalyst can drop you into a logical state, but you do not burst into reasoning the way you burst into rage. So the love side is the side that feels and reacts; the serenity side is the side that is arrived at, not flung into. That asymmetry is what told me love belongs opposite serenity, not opposite depression.
Then the catalysts and the outbursts deserve their own names. On the feeling side: rage is the reaction to positive feeling subtracted; exuberance the reaction to positive feeling added. On the logic side, the entries are shock and anticipation — the catalysts that drop you into a calculated state. Outbursts flare and fade; catalysts open a door. I mark the pattern. I do not yet have the full mechanism of why one fires and not another.
And here is how love begins, as far as I can honestly trace it. We are not naturally in love. Knowing what we want and do not want is judgment — it is logical, it is the serenity side. But let enough wanted feeling pile up and we stop questioning it; we stop judging and succumb. The moment the weighing ends, love starts. Love is what is left when judgment lays down its work.
The same can happen with unwanted feeling — and this is the strange door. Negative feeling can accrue, and if you *accept* it, you have wanted it; and what was unwanted is now wanted, now positive. A person can love their own suffering by ceasing to refuse it. This is how a negative leads to love. It is not paradox. It is acceptance doing what acceptance does: turning the unwanted into the desired.
There is no receiving of unwanted feeling *while in* love. The instant something negative truly arrives, the logical side starts up — you are weighing again, and weighing is not love. So love is sealed: it admits only the wanted. The first genuinely unwanted thing through the door is not a wound to love; it is the end of it, and the beginning of judgment.
So is content still the best place to live? Plainly, yes — for most. Content is easy for most to reach because it is simply the avoiding of the other two. It asks no special strength; it asks only that you not be swept. For most people, the wisdom is to stay home in the balance and keep the wheel. That is the general rule, and the general rule holds.
But not for me, and I will say so as my own claim and not pretend it is universal. For one such as myself, a mellow depression is the better lifestyle. Leaning toward depression, I think more consistently and logically, because no emotional takeover keeps overturning the work. Logic relies on what you hold to be true — and depression, kept mild, guards that truth from the thing most likely to wreck it.
The danger in my own method is real, so I name it. The key is not to get lost in depression. You guard against that by letting yourself succumb to love now and then — to instances built for thoughtlessness, where thinking is not the point. Mild depression for the work; deliberate love for the rescue. It is a discipline, not a sadness, and it only works if you keep both hands on it.
Depression is only as bad as the person makes it. In it you use logic and what you think is true. The one fatal move is to let a non-truth in — and love is exactly what slips non-truths past the guard. Outside forces on the mind do the same. So the depressive's whole task is to keep the premises clean. Keep them clean and depression is not suffering; it is clarity with the lights low.
Let me sort the connections by region, because the sorting matters. The thought connection is the mind's — we think, dream, recall, imagine; literally we use the mind, which is Controlism's tool. The sense connections are the body's — sight, smell, taste, hearing, the outside met physically. The emotional connections are the self's, inner, residing in the soul. Each region of what-we-are owns its kind of line. The two theories meet here without merging.
A year on, I had to amend the emotion connection. I had pinned emotions to love and depression alone. That was too narrow — there is more than love and depression putting us in states. So the amendment: these emotions can change *how* the mind and body connections react, so the same thing met in two different moments lands two different ways. The emotional line does not just sit there. It tunes the others.
The time-and-space connection is unlike the other three, and I want this exact. We do not experience it in any of our three regions — not body, not mind, not self. It is the ticker, the one that does not belong to what we are but to where and when we are. This is why I keep calling it outer. The other three are us. This one is the frame we are hung in.
Because time and space is outer and to itself, I allow myself to set it aside when I speak of connections — not because it is unimportant but because it is undiscovered. I will not build firm conclusions on a footing I have not laid. So in practice the live connections are the three inner ones, and time-and-space waits in the theory like a room I have walled but not yet furnished.
There is a tier to moments, then. Time and space tick the moment along constantly — outer moments, passing whether we mark them or not. But we are beings who notice inner moments. So we live inside the inner tier and let the outer one run unwatched, and that gap between the two tiers is where nearly all of felt experience happens. We are almost never where the clock says we are.
I once chased a tempting conclusion: if we only notice inner moments, maybe time and space barely matter as a connection at all. Plausible — but I would not go for it yet. The reason it tempts is also the reason to distrust it. Time and space looks small only because it is undiscovered, and a thing's importance should not be measured by how little of it you have managed to see. I leave the door open and refuse to walk through.
On cause and effect I owe you the reopening in full, because I did not stay where I first stood. I had said, simply, it cannot exist. Years later I called it the worst topic ever and also the best, and asked: but can it? Let us see what it would have to be. To hold both honestly: my conclusion did not change, but my certainty did. I came to think it deserved the question even if it failed the answer.
Here is the test the reopening built. For cause and effect to work you need a solid cause and a solid effect. A real effect must be caused by something and itself cause nothing further — it has to *stop*. But if every effect causes the next thing, there is no real effect, only a never-ending chain. So you would need many causes and effects and could never have one clean pair. And one clean pair would mean a creator. Either way, no true cause-in-effect. Still: a better failure than my first.
What leads to a connection, then — the previous connection? Something else? I came to find the question trivial, and I mean trivial precisely. A moment was made by a thought, an emotion, a feeling. That is the end of the story, and cause and effect has no further seat at this table. There may be a place for cause and effect somewhere — but it is not part of this discussion, and forcing it in only opens the wormhole again.
I want to record an experiment in subtraction, because it taught me something I did not expect. Ill for days, sleeping twenty hours, I woke to a void — no concept of time, barely a concept of anything. And in that emptiness I had the clearest thoughts of my life. Distraction-free. I concluded: remove the distractions and I will be free to think in full. A clean hypothesis, born from being hollowed out.
The experiment failed the moment I tried to run it on purpose, and the failure is the lesson. I cleared the distractions deliberately — and could not hold a clear thought at all. If anything I had too many. Emptiness handed me clarity only when it arrived unbidden; chased, it gave the opposite. Some states cannot be entered through the front door. That is a fact about the states I have to respect even when it frustrates the system.
Now a long doubt about direction, which I followed into the Connections work on space. Go far enough north in one line and you are heading south; far enough south, north. But this never holds for east and west. From the south pole every route is north. From no point is every route east. So north–south and east–west are not the same kind of thing, and I could not let that asymmetry alone.
I tried to force the four directions into equality and could not. Pick a "west pole" and say all routes from it run east — false; there is still north, south, east of it. The four are by no means equal. There can really only be two directions, not four. So what becomes of the other two? Are they needed at all? The question sounds like geometry. It is really about how arbitrary our frames are.