I’m still looking for it. For years I sought it through Mahayana Buddhist practice, but I realized that I ended up using it as a weapon against myself (my fault, not that of Buddhism! But still… I don’t think there’s much room for transsexuals in Buddhism. I digress.)
Someone very dear to me (that homme fatal) told me that he discovered it is possible to find an interior intimacy, and I think that is what I am working on now. Along with fighting the solitude for which I have signed up in my academic career, I am working on becoming serene in my own company.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s fifth essay in “Reflections of the solitary walker” (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire) describes his insights into the nature of happiness and serenity. I have been trying to reflect on these (which are astonishingly close to some of the beginning premises of Buddhism, in fact!). It’s considered among the most beautiful writing in modern French, and here is my feeble translation of an excerpt:
“I have noticed that in the vicissitudes of a long life that the periods of the sweetest joys and the most lively pleasures are however not those of which the memory attracts and touches me the most. These brief moments of pleasure and passion, as vivid as they can be, are only however, by their very vivacity, sparse episodes in the stream of life. [...] Everything is in a continual flux on earth: nothing keeps a constant and solid form, and our affections which attach to exterior things necessarily pass and change. [...] But there is a state where the soul finds a place to rest itself completely and gather together its whole being, without need to recall the past nor look forward to the future [...] as long as this state lasts, he who finds himself in it can call himself happy, not an incomplete happiness, poor and relative like that which one finds in the pleasures of life, but of a sufficient happiness, perfect and whole, which leaves no void which the soul feels the need to fill. [...]
What does one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing exterior to oneself, nothing except oneself and one’s own existence; as long as this state lasts one suffices to oneself like God. [...]”