"Whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too; for if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back into you."
I've always wanted to look more in-depth on this quote because I always took a liking to how it was phrased. What I have always read of it's meaning is simply that those who take up a path of battling evil should be careful to not become consumed with evil themselves, however, lately I have wondered if there may be more to this statement than that to this statement
Staring into the Abyss. I capitalize Abyss because I feel that it may represent more than just endlessness.
The Abyss is referred to in this quote as though it talks about the monsters, evil, something terrible, though no specification is given to who or what these "monsters" are and what they do or say. Their true intentions are unclear, if they even process them.
I've always been one who enjoys to look inside of themselves to see and understand more about myself, to analyze and to fix and to discover what there is inside of me. In doing so, I have found that there are emotions, desires and thoughts inside of me that I must recognize and fight and face. With talking to other people, heart to heart conversations, I have gathered that they think the same way, more or less. These emotions, desires, thought, they could all be as simple as laziness and procrastination or as complex and powerful as the desire for power or money or respect or to overcome. Sometimes these desires will drive us to insanity when we aren't even ourselves anymore. We lose ourselves to multiple needs, desires, corruption, emotions. It all overwhelms us and takes a hold of us, grasping our sanity as it slyly snakes its way into your more deepest and most vulnerable spaces, some of which may even be unoccupied or left forgotten.
These are our monsters.
We used to think they hid under our beds when actually they live inside us. And wait. And flourish.
Our overwhelming desires that can bend and shape our will to any shape imaginable in order to achieve it. Why? Why do we allow ourselves to become like this? Allow ourselves to be controlled by desires that will leave us with nothing, not even ourselves?
We do it to survive. We don't do it to survive in the modern era. The modern era of civilized society has no need for such desires. But we did need these desires before. We needed these desires to be able to live in a world where stability was just as fathomable as being able to go around the world in hours and have food ready whenever you felt hungry.
We are not bound by desires because we want to be. We are bound by desires because we were.
Now that this has taken care of where the monsters we fight have come from, we must understand why it is that fighting them can cause us to become them.
We try to fight our desires and battle the emotions, and we always think we can prevail these in one on one, hand to hand combat. Perhaps it is not wanting to look old. Perhaps trying to get someone to notice you. Perhaps trying to avoid the temptation of dessert or a guilty pleasure. If we do not at times kick back and reflect on what we have accomplished and what we have learned, we can end up creating a new desire. A desire to fight these desires, to not let them overcome us. This desire then consumes us just like the others would have. We become those monsters that were hidden in us all along.
Yet we are too busy to notice, or too oblivious. Some of us refuse to see it even when given the chance to be presented with it. Not just by fighting these monsters, but with our lives that are going on around us. There is not enough time in the day or enough says in the week to allow us to relax and think about who we are, to understand and recognize what it is and what is going on. We can change and think nothing of it because we didn't know what we were in the first place. We were immune to the beginning process of human to human with monster characteristics. Or, in some cases, just a monster.
"...for if you stare to ling into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back into you."
The Abyss. It's name is mostly associated with nothingness and emptiness. It's desolate and cavernous. It will swallow you whole and make sure you are not discovered again, digested and sunk into a desolate refuge. With the end of what we don't even want to imagine, let alone even comprehend.
When stated this way, it almost makes me think we are talking about ourselves. We condemn our desires and try to relinquish ourselves from them. But they are what make us us. If we do not want, if we do not care to have something different, we are no longer human.
Perhaps this is why we are consumed by the Abyss. We try to clean it out of our systmes and remove all of our humanity, and we get consumed because we unconsciously want to remain human, the greatest desire of all.
The Abyss cannot be considered nothingness, because it holds everything. It is who we are, and when we try to fight it, try to change what makes us human, we are consumed by our humanity. We cannot escape that fact.
"When we fight within ourselves, we must take care not to lose our humanity; because if we do, we will become more human than we may have ever wanted to be in the first place."
A rough draft