Paris: Art, the Avant-garde, Existential Kink, Belief, Religion

Hotel Grand Amour Thoughts, Part One

At the moment, I am having a splendid time in Paris. I just spoke at Purple Magazine’s 30th Anniversary Festival, held at the Palais Galleria, an elegant fashion museum. Purple put me up with other speakers at Hotel Grand Amour on Rue Fidelity, a stylish hotspot where little glass vitrines offer shrines to Surrealist manifestos and other vintage books. The hotel even has its own thriving speakeasy. Last week, I was in Yorkshire, debating “the presence of the sentient other” with a gamut of psychedelic thinkers and scientists. This week, I am immersed in a world of style, fashion, and art, which I admit, with a vague sense of guilt, I find utterly delectable.

I thought I would try to parse that guilty feeling, as well as express other perhaps ambiguous thoughts, feelings, and desires that Paris conjures up in me.

I experimentally accept my old friend Carolyn Elliot, Existential Kink author, as my guru-of-the-moment. Elliot writes:

Many of us intelligent, spiritually inclined folk have had a profound realization: there’s no “reason” to do anything at all. … We’re all just fluid emanations of an endless Nonduality reality, so in an ultimate sense it really doesn’t matter whether or not you pay your bills, find true love, save the world, raise a family, or get enlightened, There’s no rock-solid, nonideological, dogma-free, pure reason to get in shape, go to the dentist, have a baby, build a nonprofit foundation — or anything else.