I had been contemplating a question from  LP Thoon for a few weeks — what techniques does  desire use to persuade me? — admittedly, I wasn’t making a whole lot of progress. Frustrated, looking for something else to contemplate, I ‘tuned-in’ to the KPY Facebook page and saw a post from LP Anan: It was a video of a group of people preparing a meal of grilled octopus, only the octopus was still alive as they were grilling it.  

A picture is worth 1000 words, so here is the video. Warning 1: The video is graphic. Warning 2: the rest of this post will not make a ton of sense unless you watch the video.

OK , if you are back from watching the video, perhaps you can understand — I  watched that video and I WAS HORRIFIED. I was so shocked, I was so upset, it literally jolted me right into one doozy of a dharma contemplation.  So, with all that set-up, here we go…

Thought #1 Why why why on earth would someone do this, what could make it worth torturing another living being. Answer: Desire. Hunger. It is persuading these people.They see the squid as a tool to accomplish their desire, the have no concern for its feelings, its pain. They don’t see the hurt the squid’s experiences and they are blind to the consequence for themselves.

Thought #2: Who the fuck would ever ever ever do something so deeply horrible as to grill a squid alive as it squirmed around a hot plate in pain? Answer: I have done this same thing before. No, to be clear, I have never grilled a squid alive, but I sure as hell have hurt others while I was blinded, tricked, persuaded by desire.

You see, back in the day, I was a player. I seduced countless lovers: men, women, friends and strangers. I was hungry. I desired affection, attention, affirmation, so I used people without concern for their feelings or pain.

There was one guy, I literally can’t even remember his name, but we spent a few months ‘dating’ at the end of my senior year of college.  To me, it was a fling, a way to pass time, to amuse myself, to feed my ego. But that guy fell in love with me, and when I got bored and threw him away, his pain was as real as the octopus’.

Which brings me to Thought #3, consequences:  If that octopus could sting or bite or shoot poison darts, folks likely wouldn’t be trying to cook it alive. But since the costs, the consequences, of that tasty torture aren’t  immediate, they are super easy to ignore. But, in the long run, what happens to people who are so callous to another’s life and suffering? What kind of positions do they put themselves in? What kind of people do they surround themselves with?

I was someone who manipulated people sexually, used them and left them.  In my mind there was no harm; and despite the high drama and hard work of my beleaguered love life, worth it to me. But now I’m starting to see a very dark side to such behavior… Do I want to be someone that breaks people’s hearts? Who wants to be friends with a person like that, who will want to be my next lover? Do I want to be someone that manipulates people? If I signal to my partner that its ok to manipulate, to be in a relationship with no regard for the other person, am I not setting myself up for someone to manipulate and use me right back?

There is always a reason, a justification that we tell ourselves to makes our actions OK: A squid is food, not human, it can be tortured. Those POWs, from the book I was reading, are enemy combatants, they can be worked to death. These people I used, they were adults, they consented to the sex, their feelings are on them so I did nothing wrong. But I am the one who is creating the justification and then I am the one using that justification as a benchmark  to judge my actions as right, moral, and acceptable. This is crazy circular logic and in it is the key to desire persuading me: I figure out what to tell myself to make my actions ok, how to live with them, how to ignore their impact on others (that is their fault, their problem) and on myself.  

But, though I try to  ignoring consequence, lie to myself about the okness of my actions, let desire blind me, truth has a tell — it has been more than a decade since I saw that forgotten named guy, and a video of a frying octopus was enough to stab my heart with the guilt of my actions and the sorrow I feel for the pain I caused. It looks like karma is catching-up with me despite all my crazy circular logic.