Like most Europeans, and all masochists, I am a compulsive pessimist. Not only that but I take pride in it and identify with it as if it’s some kind of sign of my cultural superiority.
Actually, of course, it’s a sign of weakness. Feeling superior to people, being able to outwit them intellectually, gives me pleasure because it is an outlet for my repressed sadism. Being always able to gain the upper hand, I am safe in the knowledge that no one can really get to me. I don’t run the risk of being vulnerable and of getting hurt. That means I’m safe; but missing out on life.
For some reason I’ve never quite figured, life on the other side of the pond has evolved in an opposite direction. Or perhaps it has just not “evolved” at all. There is something about the American outlook on life that grates terribly on a lot of Europeans. That little children laugh and play in African villages is still OK, Europeans can feel superior and still benevolently disposed towards these manifestations of joy in a simpler life, more at one with nature. However that Americans have the hubris to believe that they will succeed against all the odds, that they dare to try to infect us with their enthusiasm for frankly daft projects, well, that’s just too much. They strike us as naive, often dangerously so, and nowhere outside the mountains of Afghanistan and the souks of Baghdad is the Schadenfreude at American failures greater than in the refined salons of European capitals.
Strangely, our own failures (and God knows they are plentiful enough) fail to fill us with the same sense of joy. Actually, they fail to fill us with anything at all; we are blind to the ways in which the European nation-state extinguishes personal initiative in both the economic and private spheres.
I am certain that the American outlook has a good deal of neurosis built into it, too. I am not trying to eulogize it any more than I am trying to deprecate European sensitivities. However, when the result is that genuine joie de vivre is taken by Europeans for a marker of cultural naivete, it should set alarm bells ringing. This is called cynicism, and it is always an ego defense.
The thing is, ersatz Lebenslust is merely amusing, or sad, but it is not threatening, you do not need to defend yourself against it. And if you defend yourself against what turns out to be the real thing, you miss the opportunity to be taken up in a positive vortex; you miss out on living. In fact your ego defenses are the only thing that prevent you from living: the mirror is being held up to your own resistances.
And so it is that I am delighted to welcome tantra teacher Dawn Cartwright to Brussels. When I feel resistance at her enthusiasm, which I do, I am grateful for the chance to examine what it is that keeps me from jumping into the river of life; and then I just let myself fall in love. Life has this quality, that it is very easy to fall in love with; because life is our nature and it seeks out itself. When we are in love, we are dissolved, free, we are ourselves.
Join us 27-29 November in Brussels; fall in love; and, if you can, dive deeply into all of Dawn’s offerings in Europe this fall. They’re on her website at www.dawncartwright.com.