Real Love

rating: Mango Lassi ;) pinch of salt optional.

Inspired by cool threads, even cooler people, nice named Atolls & love itself - I would like to explore the “simple” question of: What is real love? - Feel free to post whatever you want here that comes from the inferno: vid's, poetry, sutras, practices, analysis, ponderance, AQALiciousness - cover all and any corner(s) of the blissy abyss please! :) That's asking too much :) - but don't let that stop you! I post two fav's below. 
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Buddha and the Courtesan

Buddha and his disciples underwent a curious incident which left the disciples, for a time, puzzled as to the character of their Master. The Buddha and his disciples were vowed to celibacy and the renunciation of carnal love. And yet, one day, when the great Buddha and his disciples were resting in the cool shade of a tree, a courtesan approached him, attracted by the glowing body and face of the Master. No sooner had she seen the celestial face of the Lord Buddha than she fell in love with him, and with open arms ran to Buddha to embrace and kiss him, exclaiming loudly: “O beautiful Shining One, I love thee.”

            The celibate disciples were astonished to hear the Buddha's reply to the courtesan. He said, “Beloved, I love thee too. Do not touch me now, however. Not yet.”

            The courtesan replied: “You call me beloved and to me you are my beloved. Why, then, do you object to my touching you?”

            The great Buddha replied: “Beloved, again I tell thee, I will touch thee later; not now. Then I will prove my true love for thee.” The disciples were shocked, thinking that the Master had fallen in love with his courtesan.

Years later, as Buddha was meditating with his disciples, he suddenly cried out: “I must go! My beloved, the courtesan, is calling me; she needs me now. I must fulfil my promise to her.” The disciples ran after their Master, hoping somehow to save him, though he seemed madly in love with the courtesan.

            The great Buddha, followed anxiously by his worried disciples, came to the same tree where they had met the courtesan before. There she lay, with her beautiful body covered in putrefying, odorous smallpox sores. The Buddha, however, took her decaying body, held it like a child, and placed her head on his lap, whispering to her: “Beloved, I have come to prove my love to thee, and to demonstrate my true love, for I love thee when everyone else has ceased loving thee. I touch thee when all thy summer friends fear to touch thee any more.” Thus speaking Buddha healed the courtesan and invited her, now purged by him of carnal desire, to join his growing band of disciples. Divine love is unselfish; it seeks the happiness of the object of its love.

Re: Real Love

Wow, lovely post, Lisa!

Here's a light little poem I wrote several years ago … pinch of humour with a touch of resonance:

WHY?

imagine you
explaining your
love for her
to a grasshopper

imagine the universe
explaining its
love for you
to you

Re: Real Love

That's a great little poem Tom! :) Any more hidden up ya sleeve?

Lisa

Re: Real Love

Divine love FTW.

“Oneness is like the clear blue sky-
everything arises, unfolds, and subsides
within its all-compassionate love….
Everything is an aspect of Oneness.
And our quest to know this comes from Oneness.”

- Abhinavagupta

What sutra is that, Lisa? Link, plx.

Re: Real Love

Part of the Siva sutras it seems. Can't find an exact link, :) but you might want to have a peep at http://www.beezone.com/SivaSutras/sivasutras.htm">this.  Kashmir Saivism - the vedic view of consciousness. Interesting stuff to study if your interested.

This was a nice one, I always like the visuals just as much as the meaning:



He became the original form of every form It is his form that is everywhere to be seen.-Rigveda 6.47.18

Lisa

Re: Real Love

Here's another.  It's a feely fleshy particularist poem for the transcendentalist in you:

FEEL

only one is in this quaint little universe
only one
only one here one will be one was

only ever one you
that girl who played in the sunshine
whose mother died so young
whose feelings perhaps only the moon received

I have a clay jug
it’s made of stardust or something
I found it one halting evening
in some dry lonely place
— half buried in the nook of a windswept hill
in a land where skeleton barns post
solitary guard over vanquished family farms

and this clay jug
I’ve come to learn
is but what is
the gleaming holding perfection
of the seen
otherwise called here:
the history of the planets and all turning
intricately woven
in what some call flesh

and this flesh—every inch of it—
is a safe place
a refuge where
orphan feelings gather and find their way
are desired wanted
cherished held
protected nourished
loved

Re: Real Love

Here is something I wrote for my son a couple years ago – an imaginative piece where I cast myself in another incarnation, speaking to him at the end of my life.  It deals with love, especially the last half.

~*~

My son, as I write this, I am perched on a mountain in the Himalayan air. In a few days the old man's phurba will divide me until there's nothing there. Beyond the time we've spent together, what is left to say? I am the ray of light, and your mother the crystal that sparked the prism of your smile. If you cry for me, my heart-son, be sure you cry the Nile: Hold nothing back, but with thanks, feed the children and the crocodiles that gather on your banks.

My child, this world is a place of shadows, but it is our only home; it is the concrescence of desire and the spaciousness of Om. In the brilliance of their meeting, what is left to say? I found myself in the present motion of my hand, tapping grain by careful grain the colored shapes of sand, brilliant as the disk of sun; and I'll give myself to the Eastern wind when it lifts up what I've done.

You are not with me, my son, but I'm sure you hear these snoring trumpets shake the monastery walls. They are the voices of mountains, thoughts, and waterfalls. When you see where they are pointing, what is left to say? The self is Gift, and Gift is the thunder of the deep that splits the mighty world in two and makes the statues weep.

Listen, my son, I have only a few more things to say!

Emaho! Life is wonderful and pure. Know that what I've failed to give you, is what is already yours. Like the quick-turning eddy gathering leaves in the stream, we hold our bodies only for the briefness of a dream. Like the silver sides of fish that flash a moment and fade, the endless stream of mind is unceasingly displayed.

Love knows no direction. It is the original clarity of presence, the fire that fills all of space. In the immensity of the world, love is the intimacy that is already here, prior to our moving away. But when we return to love, it is that movement too. It is inescapable, and in that, love is ferocious: In the end, it will consume us all.

Hold to these things, my son, and we will never be far. What I am in my deepest, you already are.

Re: Real Love

Wow - amazing.

Tom:

a refuge where
orphan feelings gather and find their way
are desired wanted
cherished held
protected nourished
loved

Deeply haunting quality to that poem, and I really liked the words in bold up there. Poignant stuff.

Bruce - straight from the inferno no question. Mind blowing. What a good exercise too - taking that perspective to help access that immense depth.

Lisa
 

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What is not to LOVE about this?

_

Conditional Love

Unconditional love has no value whatsoever if you're interested in the evolution of consciousness. I know that this ideal is very popular in the postmodern spiritual marketplace. But let's just think for a moment about what the phrase implies. It means “I'll love you absolutely and forever, no matter what you do and no matter what you have ever done-whether you are the greatest saint or the worst sinner that the universe has ever produced.” That's love without any conditions whatsoever. But what use is a love like that? The only individual who wants or needs to be loved unconditionally is a sinner who has absolutely no intention of repenting! An individual who truly intends to change and transform doesn't need or even want love without conditions. If you have stopped playing games and have finally chosen to take yourself and the precious life you are living seriously for the right reasons, you take responsibility for the evolution of consciousness at the deepest and highest level. You make the heroic effort to cultivate soul-strength, which is the capacity for integrity, transparency, and most important of all, authenticity. Because you aspire to evolve morally, you just don't need to be loved unconditionally. In fact, you have awakened to a kind of love that is highly conditional, a love that demands nothing less than everything from each and every one of us. If you want the universe to evolve through you, the last thing that you need is to be loved without conditions.

Andrew Cohen

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There is something to be said for holding the space of love for those we love as they explore their humanity and shadow process.  It doesn't mean we react or act, just hold the space unconditionally.  Loving without limit in the sacred heart of infinite love just means loving and appreciating the blessing.

Re: Real Love

I love this thread, some great stuff all around.

I have been inspired to write some poetry, including on the subject of love.  :)

At this point, however, I don't know what real love is.

I am tempted to add the evolutionary view, to say that love is evolutionary, but at the moment it seems trite somehow. However, I may have something about that in time.

Love is at the heart of things, isn't it? It's at the heart of us anyway.

What is real love? What is an integral view?

We can see love going from self-love to family-love to tribe-love to nation-love to world-love to universe-love.

Has love always been here, or is it a more recent emergence?

The stars gave birth to all the elements, dying so that we could live.

It must have been here from the start.


~David

Re: Real Love

Here's a perspective on love (one of 6000).  Love is the connectionstuff and the movementflow of things (ie, of the All, which includes no-thing nothingness).  So, yes, it is evolutionary, and will show itself in evolutionary form and development (ie, more highly ordered expression over time).  Hence the increasing care and compassion as one moves up the evolutionary spiral. 

Love might be seen as the feminine voicing of the universal stuff, the universal backdrop and substance to things and their relational movements (every thing is a relation).

Freedom (a goal of typical spiritual forms, Nirvana, I am not that, etc.) might be seen as the masculine voicing.

Those two paths—freedom and love—lead to the same end: I am everything, and at the root of that big-I is (as little-I egoism tells us in baby form, usually derogatorily called narcissm*) self love.  (Need appropriate Ramana quote here.)

Here's an interesting etymological bit that shows the very close link between freedom and love: the root word for “free” means “love.”  Floored me when I first read it.


* What beautiful coherence!  Narcissism is the true stuff of things!

Re: Real Love

I think that you run into resistance to your notion about Narcissism because the connotation of the world relates it to the ego disturbance that creates behavior like exploitation and lack of humility.

 I have the feeling that you might be talking about something transcendent of ego, something more in line with the Seven Mirrors in the Essene Mystery of Relationship that believe our experience to be a vibrational mirror that reflects one or some combination of mirrored patterns in others and allows the acceleration of our understanding and emotional evolution.

These mirrors:
who we are in the moment
what we judge in the moment
what has been lost , given away or taken away
our most forgotten love
our relationship with God
our dark night of the soul
our perfection

allow us to see our reflection in others.  What they “do” reflects to us one or a combination of these mirrors of ourself.

Narcissism on this level would be truly spirit led.

Re: Real Love

Molly, yes, beautifully put:

… a vibrational mirror that reflects one or some combination of mirrored patterns in others …

I would only add: including that other, which I am, called the universe.

Re: Real Love

Here's a little ditty that expresses the above.

COSMIC DANCE

epi
phenomenal
I
thismatter’s me
this simple matter’s
chemical little resulting little me:
put matter together such
simply together such
togetherly nearingly 
adheringly caringly such and
I results
here again-yet-another-me
sure as day
and sure as night

then do matter walk
and matter talk
and matter move
to love radio
frequencies
transmitted from
the ancientmost of
ancientmost places.

Re: Real Love

And for those who prefer a more science-friendly approach to love:

CALCULATION ERROR

the mistake is saying this is love
and that isn't

if it goes to love
it is love

Re: Real Love

Beautiful ponderances and words people.

David - the Brian Swimme vid. presents such a journey there in what he says doesn't he. Hearing it like that literally sucks you back into the inferno in an awesome way. It is this depth itself - the great light turning in on itself, collapsing and exploding that I think is the material real love is made of  - so yep, it's at the heart of us. No doubt, as the bottomless pit, the greatest mystery, the yoke of life itself. Infinity.

Agonizing ecstacy. Implosion. Love seeking itself, always already present. Freedom. - Tom, I liked the 'free' meaning 'love ponder. It's our greatest longing, to rewind and dissolve into our kosmic heritage. :)

I love what happens to people when they merely think about love, for just a few minutes. It pours out of them, and trips them head first into the abyss. Ahhh, love is good. An open wound scratched across the rocks.

Real love has furnished us with both great art, grace and torment. I love that about love. No better a ponderance than a ponderance on real love.

Lisa

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'Pure love wants nothing else but the emptying of your mind from all it's fears and the shedding of all your masks. It exposes itself as it is.' Amma

nice pic of an off-duty younger Amma chilling in the lap of her pal: swamini krishnamrita prana

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Another love ponderer:  I give you Frankie Goes to Hollywood - remember them? :) :)

Lisa

Re: Real Love

Lisa, yes I do, and that's a nice song. Holly's a cool dude.

Remember this one?

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Yep I do. I love it. In fact, we had an impromptu Frankie Goes to Hollywood disco before our mantra session on wednesday & danced to that one. Have you ever danced to that one.?:) I highly recommend it immediately. ;)

Lisa

Re: Real Love

I'll give that a try, Lisa.  :)


Entering the Shell

Love is alive, and someone borne
along by it is more alive than lions

roaring or men in their fierce courage.
Bandits ambush others on the road.

They get wealth, but they stay in one
place. Lovers keep moving, never

the same, not for a second! What
makes others grieve, they enjoy!

When they look angry, don't believe
their faces. It's spring lightning,

a joke before the rain. They chew
thorns thoughtfully along with pasture

grass. Gazelle and lioness, having
dinner. Love is invisible except

here, in us. Sometimes I praise love;
sometimes love praises me. Love,

a little shell somewhere on the ocean
floor, opens its mouth. You and I

and we, those imaginary beings, enter
that shell as a single sip of seawater.


            Jelaluddin Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)

Re: Real Love

That poem is magnifique! David.

On my deathbed today, I found myself craving a few words from our great buddy, the late Adi Da (as you do!) ~ so I went about reading this. :

The Wound of Love from chapter twenty-one of The Dawn Horse Testament Of The Ruchira Avatar     Love Does Not Fail For You When You Are Rejected or Betrayed or Apparently Not Loved. Love Fails For You When You Reject, Betray, and Do Not Love… . Therefore, The Most Direct Way To Know Love In every moment Is To Be Love In every moment. In The Way Of Adidam, My Devotee Is Founded In This Capability By Virtue Of his or her Constant Communion With Me (and, Thus and Thereby, With The Divine Person, Reality, or Truth).     Only A Fool Will Fail To Cultivate The Relationship To The Beloved. Likewise, Only A Fool Will Fail To Cultivate The human Well-being and The Spiritual, Transcendental, and Divine Realization Of his or her any partner in intimate embrace. And This Is Also True: The ego (or the self-Contracted individual) Is Just Such A Fool! The emotional-sexual ego Constantly Hunts For an other. The ego-“I” (or self-Contraction) Hunts (or Seeks) an other (Even all others and The Total Objective Cosmos) In Order To Be Gratified, Consoled, and Protected. The Compulsive Hunting (or Search) For an other Is Generated By The Feelings Of Un-Happiness, Emptiness, and Separateness That Possess and Characterize the self-Contracted being. Once an other Is Found, the ego-“I” Clings To the other, At First pleasurably, and Then Aggressively. The ego-“I” Depends On the other For Happiness, and, Over time, the ego-“I” Makes Greater and Greater Demands On the other For Fulfillment Of itself (In all of its desires). Often, In time, the other Becomes Depressed and Exhausted By This Demand (and Thus Leaves, or Dies). Just As Likely, the ego-“I” Discovers, Over time, That the other Cannot or Will Not Satisfy The Absolute Demand For attention and Consolation. In That Case, the ego-“I” Feels Betrayed, and the ego-“I” Begins The Strategy Of Punishing, Rejecting, and Abandoning the other, Every conditionally Manifested being Has (In time) Often Been The Proposed Victim Of This Strategy Of Separate and Separative selves. Even More, Until The Heart Gives Way To Divine Love-Bliss, every conditionally living being Is The Original Genius and Grand Performer Of This Strategy Of Separate and Separative selves. It Is The Strategy Of Narcissus, and It Is The Dreadful Work Of all conditionally living beings who Are Not Awake To The Truth Beyond the ego-“I”. If There Is To Be Real Happiness, This Cycle Of egoic “self-Possession” and other-Dependency (or object-Dependency Generally) Must Be Transcended. In The Way Of Adidam, It Is Transcended Through Most Fundamental self-Understanding, and Through self-Transcending Love, Service, self-Discipline, and Meditation (In Responsive Devotional Relationship To Me, and, Thus and Thereby, In Responsive Devotional Relationship To The Divine Person), and (Eventually, By Grace) Through Direct Realization Of The Self-Radiant (or Inherently Spiritual), Self-Existing (or Transcendental), and (Ultimately) Divine Self-Condition Of Being (Itself). In This Manner, The Inherent Happiness Of The Spiritual, Transcendental, and Divine Self Replaces The Fruitless Search (or Hunt) For Happiness By the self-Contracted and Dependent conditional self… . The egoic (or self-Contracted) individual Is (By Virtue Of his or her History, self-Idea, and Lack Of Spiritual, Transcendental, and Divine Realization) Chronically Bound To The Ritual Of Rejection. The emotional (or emotional-sexual) Career Of egoity Tends To Manifest As A Chronic Complaint That Always Says, By Countless Means, “You Do Not Love me.” This Abusive Complaint Is Itself The Means Whereby the egoic individual Constantly Enforces his or her Chronic Wanting Need To Reject, Avoid, or Fail To Love others. Indeed, This Complaint Is More Than A Complaint. It Is A self-image (The Heart-Sick or self-Pitying and Precious Idea That “I” Is Rejected) and An Angry Act Of Retaliation (Whereby others Are Punished For Not Sufficiently Adoring, pleasurizing, and Immortalizing the Precious ego-“I”). The egoic (or self-Contracted) individual Is Chronically and Reactively Contracted From all of its relations. Fear Is The Root Of this self-Contraction, and The Conceived Purpose Of this self-Contraction Is self-Preservation, Even self-Glorification. Indeed, Fear Is the self-Contraction. The self-Contraction, or the ego-“I”, Is The Root-Action or Primal Mood That Is Fear. Therefore, All Of The self-Preserving, self-Glorifying, and other-Punishing Efforts Of the ego-“I” (or the self-Contracted body-mind) Only Preserve, Glorify, and Intensify Fear Itself. Fear, the ego-“I”, Un-Love, or The Total Ritual Of self-Contraction Must Be Understood and Transcended. All Of Fear, egoity, self-Contraction, or Un-Love Is Only Suffering. It Is Only Destructive. And It Is Entirely Un-Necessary. Fear, egoity, self-Contraction, or Un-Love Is Chronically Expressed Through The Complex Ritual Of Rejection, or The Communication Of The Dominant Idea “You Do Not Love me”. Once This Is (In The Way Of Adidam) Truly, and Completely, and Most Fundamentally Understood, The Ritual Of Rejection, Fear, egoity, self-Contraction, or Un-Love Can Be Directly Transcended, If Only It Is Summarily Replaced By The Ordeal (or Discipline and Practice) Of self-Transcending Love, and (Then, By Grace) Heart-Communion With and (Ultimately) Heart-Communication Of The Divine Self-Condition, In The Form “I Love You”. Therefore, In The Way and Manner Of Adidam, Understand Your Separate and Separative self (As Un-Love) and Transcend Your Separate and Separative self (By Love). And This Is Perfected (Progressively, In The Way and Manner Of Adidam) By Devotional (or self-Transcending and self-Forgetting) Heart-Surrender Of the conditional body-mind To My Bodily (Human) Form, and My Spiritual (and Always Blessing) Presence, and My Very (and Inherently Perfect) State, and, Thus and Thereby, To The Person and The Forms or Characteristics Of The Spiritual, and Transcendental, and Divine, Self. If You Will Thus Be Love (By This Devotion), You Must Also Constantly Encounter, Understand, and Transcend The Rejection Rituals Of others who Are, Even If Temporarily or Only Apparently, Bereft Of Divine Wisdom, Therefore, If You Will Be Love (As My Devotee, and, Thus and Thereby, As A Devotee Of The Divine Person), You Must (In The Way and Manner Of The Heart) Always Skillfully Transcend The Tendency To Become Un-Love (and Thus To Become self-Bound, Apparently Divorced From Grace-Given Divine Communion) In Reaction To The Apparent Lovelessness Of others. And You Must Not Withdraw From Grace-Given Divine Communion (or Become Degraded By Un-Love) Even When Circumstances Within Your Intimate Sphere, or Within The Sphere Of Your Appropriate social Responsibility, Require You To Make Difficult Gestures To Counter and Control The Effects or Undermine and Discipline The Negative and Destructive Effectiveness Of The Rituals Of Un-Love That Are Performed By others. For those who Are Committed To Love (and who Always Commune With The One Who Is Love), Even Rejection By others Is Received and Accepted As A Wound, Not An Insult. Even The Heart-Necessity To Love and To Be Loved Is A Wound. Even The Fullest Realization Of Love Is A Wound That Never Heals. The egoic Ritual Calls every individual To Defend himself or herself Against The Wounds Of Love and The Wounding Signs Of Un-Love (or egoic self-Contraction) In the daily world. Therefore, Even In The Context Of True Intimacy, The Tendency (Apart From Spiritual Responsibility) Is To Act As If Every Wound (Which Is Simply A Hurt) Is An Insult (or A Reason To Punish). The Reactive Rituals Of egoity Must Be Released By The self-Transcending (and Then Spiritual) Practice Of Love. This Requires Each and Every Practitioner Of The Way Of Adidam To Observe, Understand, and Relinquish The emotionally Reactive Cycle Of Rejection and Punishment. And The Necessary Prerequisites For Such Relinquishment Are Vulnerability (or The Ability To Feel The Wounds Of Love Without Retaliation), Sensitivity To the other In Love (or The Ability To Sympathetically Observe, Understand, Forgive, Love, and Not Punish or Dissociate From the other In Love), and Love Itself (or The Ability To Love, To Know You Are Loved, To Receive Love, and To Know That Both You and the other, Regardless Of Any Appearance To The Contrary, Are Vulnerable To Love and Heart-Requiring Of Love). It Is Not Necessary (or Even Possible) To Become Immune To The Feeling Of Being Rejected. To Become Thus Immune, You Would Have To Become Immune To Love Itself. What Is Necessary (and Also Possible) Is To Enter Fully Into The Spiritual Life-Sphere Of Love. In The Way Of Adidam, This Is Done By First Entering (By Heart) Into My Company (and, Thus and Thereby, Into The Company Of The Divine Person), and (Therein) To Submit To The Divine Embrace Of Love, Wherein Not Only Are You Loved, but You Are Love Itself. Then You Must Magnify That Love-Radiance In the world of human relationships. If You Will Do This, Then You Must Do The Sadhana (or Concentrated Practice) Of True Active Love and Real (True and Steady) Trust. As A Practical Matter, You Must Stop Dramatizing The egoic Ritual Of Betrayal In Reaction To The Feeling Of Being Rejected. You Must Understand, Transcend, and Release The Tendency To Respond (or React) To Signs Of Rejection (or Signs That You Are Not Loved) As If You Are Insulted, Rather Than Wounded. That Is To Say, You Must Stop Punishing and Rejecting others When You Feel Rejected. If You Punish another When You Feel This, You Will Act As If You Are Immune To Love's Wound. Thus, You Will Pretend To Be Angrily Insulted, Rather Than Suffer To Be Wounded. In The Process, You Will Withdraw and Withhold Love. You Will Stand Off, Independent and Dissociated. You Will Only Reinforce The Feeling Of Being Rejected, and You Will Compound It By Actually Rejecting the other. In This Manner, You Will Become Un-Love. You Will Fail To Love. You Will Fail To Live In The Sphere Of Love. Your Own Acts Of Un-Love Will Degrade You, Delude You, and Separate You From Your Love-partner (or Your partners In Love) and From Love Itself. Therefore, those who Fail To Practice The Sadhana Of Love In their intimate emotional-sexual relationships, and In human relationships Generally, Will, By That Failure, Turn Away (or Contract) From God (or The Great Condition That Is Reality Itself). Love Does Not Fail For You When You Are Rejected or Betrayed or Apparently Not Loved. Love Fails For You When You Reject, Betray, and Do Not Love. Therefore, If You Listen To Me, and Also If You Hear Me, and Also If You See Me, Do Not Stand Off From Relationship. Be Vulnerable. Be Wounded When Necessary, and Endure That Wound or Hurt. Do Not Punish the other In Love. Communicate To one another, Even Discipline one another, but Do Not Dissociate From one another or Fail To Grant one another The Knowledge Of Love. Realize That each one Wants To Love and To Be Loved By the other In Love. Therefore, Love. Do This Rather Than Make Any Effort To Get Rid Of The Feeling Of Being Rejected. To Feel Rejected Is To Feel The Hurt Of Not Being Loved. Allow That Hurt, but Do Not Let It Become The Feeling Of Lovelessness. Be Vulnerable and Thus Not Insulted. If You Are Merely Hurt, You Will Still Know The Necessity (or The Heart's Requirement) Of Love, and You Will Still Know The Necessity (or The Heart's Requirement) To Love. The Habit Of Reacting To Apparent Rejection (By others) As If It Were An Insult Always Coincides With (and Only Reveals) The Habit Of Rejecting (or Not Loving) others. Any one whose Habitual Tendency Is To Reject and Not Love others In The Face Of their Apparent Acts Of Rejection and Un-Love Will Tend To Reject and Not Love others Even When they Are Only Loving. Narcissus, The Personification Of the ego, the self-Contraction, or The Complex Avoidance Of Relationship, Is Famous For his Rejection Of The Lady, Echo, who Only Loved him. Therefore, If You Listen To Me, and Also If You Hear Me, and Also If You See Me, Be Vulnerable In Love. If You Remain Vulnerable In Love, You Will Still Feel Love's Wound, but You Will Remain In Love. In This Manner, You Will Always Remain In The human (and Then Divine) Sphere Of Love. Therefore, The Most Direct Way To Know Love In every moment Is To Be Love In every moment. In The Way Of Adidam, My Devotee Is Founded In This Capability By Virtue Of his or her Constant Communion With Me (and, Thus and Thereby, With The Divine Person, Reality, or Truth). Therefore, If any such a one Fails To Be Steady In This Communion With Divine Love-Bliss, Then he or she Will Become Weak In Love. And To Be Weak In Love (At Any Stage Of Life) Is To Be Always Already Independent, Insulted, Empty With Craving, In Search Of Love, Manipulative, Un-Happy, and Moved To Punish, Betray, and Destroy all relationships. Such a Weak one Always Already Feels Rejected and Is Never Satisfied. Indeed, such a one Is Not Even Found To Be Truly Lovable By others. Those who Love Are Love, and others Inevitably Love them. Those who Only Seek For Love Are Not themselves Love, and So they Do Not Find It. (Even If they Are Loved, they Do Not Get The Knowledge Of It.) Only The Lover Is Lovable. Therefore, Every Heart Should Become As True Love Is. And My Every Listening Devotee, My Every Hearing Devotee, and My Every Seeing Devotee Should Realize (and Demonstrate) This Principle In True Active Love With Me (and Real, True Trust In Me), The One Who Is Love.

Re: Real Love

….A sustained breaking open, a crying and yearning of the soul which is painfully unbearable, a stripping of the sensibilities, a bullshit barometer 'i.e. free from attachment = running away from the pain of real love = conning only oneself, not loves goalless goal.'
Acute involution of resistence meeting itself head on - producing vulnerability - which produces more painfulness & woundedness - yet at once, the deepest connection to the mystery we might ever know.

is also…. A sudden ambush, freefalling over the edge of a cliff with your eyes wide open, sleeplessness, & last but by no means least; a thousand birds singing in the trees.

While it is not Rumi, :) It is 'hot off the press.' Nothing like a good old love insight at the crack of dawn.

Lisa

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Lovely Lisa.  : )

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Thanks Tom! You've got to laugh and love the serendipity of life on this here buzzing planet, haven't you. :)

Lisa

Re: Real Love

That's beautiful, Lisa. You're a natural.  :)

Can I write a poem?
Maybe not. Maybe yes.

I've been thinking, in my subconcsious, about a poem about
Jonestown.

I don't know where to begin.

 

Jim Jones in his wicker chair
Mercenaries in the jungle
900 devotees under armed guard

Rice with weevils, black-eyed peas
The Well for children, the Box for adults
On suicide day they all drink the punch

They've done it before, lining up on both
sides, in the night, they've taken the drink
and lived …

But today it's different, today the children
scream and cry and froth at the mouth,
die in their mother's arms

This time, it's for real
This time there's death on the other side
of that drink, but what can they do?

Some want to die, and some do not
But most everyone does, eventually,
900 or so by cup or syringe
a few by bullets, including Jim Jones
and his mistress, Maria Katsaris.

Now we think back on that jungle day
The congressman dead on the tarmac
His assistant with five bullets, two of which

she keeps even today

More run through the jungle, thinking someone
is chasing them. They will run for days.
A couple others manage to live, one hiding under a building
another running into the jungle

The survivors ask themselves, “Is there anything more I could have done?”

Father's have taken their sons, their wives, their daughters
Their mothers and fathers and cousins. Now they are dead. One father comes later and tries to find his daughter—he says he was too cruel, that she ran away, and tells other fathers to forgive.

The rest have their stories, and we listen
Jonestown is overgrown with weeds and palms
There is no Jonestown, except in our minds.
But it was there, and it is here, and what does it mean?

Re: Real Love

Mr. Muggs, the Jonestown chimp
played in his cage, and played with the people
of Jonestown

Father had saved him from an experiment,
a torture …  for science, for medicine
but on suicide day he died with all the rest

Someone went in and shot Mr. Muggs

Re: Real Love

Whooooooosh! Fantastico maximo….Get down David!

Can I write a poem?

Yes. One per day.

Ohhhhhhh wierd imagery and tempo - I like it. It's 'off it's head!'  
As the scousers would say. Strange pace. Mouth full of soil. Ooohhh,
a interesting outburst David. Twisting my head and heart into a variety of unnamed shapes & spaces.

Do carry on! 

Great!

Lisa

Re: Real Love

That's just outrageous about Mr Mugg's!
How could they. Cool sinister stuff! The stuff that 'Lurve' is made of. :)

Re: Real Love

Only now I got my eyes on the Adi Da text. This quote from Adi Da created in me a reaction of repulsion, and  nauseating feeling . To me he is almost psychotic in his creation of a dream reality of his own.

I wonder how happy the man has actually been in his relationships with his numerous wives. Of course, because he sees himself as an Avatar, every problem, every non loving thought and action, is always initiated by the wives. Has to be, because he is the embodiment pure love, leaving the wives wallowing in feelings of inferiority and failure. The very qualities disowned by Adi Da.

I  know very little about his teachings. Maybe he too was preaching that there is no separate 'I' or 'self'., while simultaneously putting himself on a pedestal of pure love. He is very much unlike the imperfect selfish others, which means separation. This is not transcend and include. This is fake transcending through disowning.

I think we exist as entities or selfs only in relation to others. Two beings are needed for love to arise.
Love creates energy, that in the long run stirs the mud so neatly hidden beneath. That mud is not anyone's alone. It too is arising in the relation between people. Often it is located in the collective subconsciousness of humanity.

Adi Da claims the mud to be caused by 'ego' . As he also seems to be convinced that he has no ego, he thus proves to himself that he has nothing to do with the arising of the mud. It has to be always situated in others.

 My experience is that love always activates mud,and shadow stuff to be worked through. It is not just the harm created by ego. This phenomenon is a true blessing of love. Adi Da has no understanding of this.

My guess is his love life looked like this: When a little bit heavy stuff arises in the pure love with one wife, he escapes to the arm's of another, leaving all the blame of the problems on the wife and her ego. The real feat  is how he manages to skillfully rationalize his escaping from his disowned issues as spiritually advanced behavior, and getting others sacrificing their lives to help him in his disowning process.

Real love, when in action, is pretty imperceptible. When present the person does not make fuss about oneself, or she/he does not see herself as pure and above others, but is with others,and uses all her skills to work with the mud and heavy stuff . If she or he is emotionally on an advanced stage, she/he doesn't  identify with the the stuff. This non identification does not mean disowning or distancing from heavy emotions, but makes possible to fully feel the heavy stuff in an appreciating way. Through that process order and harmony is spontaneously created out of chaos without any intentional and complicated transmutation tricks.

Irmeli

Re: Real Love

I think you just don't get him Irmeli. There is a place for all, I personally find his brand of psychotic sometimes just that, sometimes entertaining, sometimes full on obscure. Throughout, I like his bravity! It makes me laugh. Sometimes there is full depth. Real insight, like KaBooom, the mad guy is on to something! :)

I find your intense reaction interesting, thank you for sharing it.

Lisa

Re: Real Love

I am particularly interested in what you say here Irmeli:

 I think we exist as entities or selfs only in relation to others. Two beings are needed for love to arise.

While we do exist as entities in relation to others, I strongly disagree with the latter point, that for love to arise you need two.

I could probably write an essay on this subject, as it's extremely interesting. But I will save that for another day. In a nutshell, what usually 'arises' between two people, which they both agree to define as 'Love' is usually emotional entanglement based on neediness, and extreme conditions. This is not Love proper. Though I believe it is possible to experience that within relationship.

The mystics knew it, some authentic renunicates know it, as do some ordinary folk, that love is not dependent on another person for its existence.

Love creates energy, that in the long run stirs the mud so neatly hidden beneath. That mud is not anyone's alone. It too is arising in the relation between people. Often it is located in the collective subconsciousness of humanity.

There is truth to some of that, I do agree that love is a great exposer, even in its lesser forms, but usual then, only on reflection.

I see that some (most in the regular human context) faces of love look like an agreement, a negotiation - leading to codependency. Otherwise seems beyond agreement, the real deal, the type which will leave the egoic self crawling up the wall and leave the heart bigger, more open, more honest, more giving….more ironically ready to be open to communicating itself and acting in that space that is not bound, or therefore shrinking - with another. On all accounts, I could be wrong. :)

Just musing.

Lisa

Re: Real Love

Lisa , I agree I expressed myself somewhat inaccurately considering love.However I don't understand what love would be without something you love: humanity, nature, life, a person etc.

 To me love means a sensing of a loving connection to the other, that can have many different forms. When I said that for love to appear two are needed , I meant this felt connection love creates. And the other does not need to feel consciously the connection, or to interprete it as love. Love as a feeling is an interpretation of something I sense.

And I agree there is something valuable also in Adi Da:s rant about love. However I perceive it to be an idealizing of a state beyond ego, not his lived reality. He also does the idealizing in away which hints to me that  his transegoic state is strongly mixed with  immense hidden egotism. He has probably been very keen in observing ego in others, but was blind to his own ego, that is hiding behind his  ideas of his own enlightenment and superiority. Something a person denies or is unaware of, can grow in secrecy to immense proportions.

The transcend and include principle of hierarchical unfoldment of stages means that we all inevitably have an ego. To be beyond ego means to me that I clearly have an ego, and it is in many ways useful to have, but I don't identify with it. If someone claims he has no  ego, I become pretty suspicious and  would not want to get involved with that person.

Love is beautiful at what ever stage of development it appears. And it can appear in many forms, not just as romantic love. Ego is not the thing that spoils love.

For me love does almost always at some phase expose  dark or stuck energies in me, so that I can sart working with them. The crucial part is to be able to appreciate this exposure, and really start to work with that stuff, and also to be able to do it. This is not just about reflection, it is visceral, it is feelings, strong physical sensations.

 I cannot believe that I would be so different from others in this regard. I rather suspect people tend to dream about love without the other side of the coin, and hence fight against that part of the equation.

Irmeli

Re: Real Love

I sense in Adi Da a just-post second tier emotional development … in other words, nothing special, just the expected level of development for someone given to and who has taken the time to look at oneself.  This development looks to have been tied to an orientation that, among other things, chose not to voice this-world relational experiences in first person terms, etc., which he probably felt was inconsistent with his role as guru.  This latter can morph, probably quite quietly and easily, into dishonesty and lying, as it begins its fledgling life as an image cum sales pitch coupled with a felt need to maintain an image, rather than just go—openly go—with what arises.

This pattern is probably endemic to those who aspire to teach others how to live.  I've seen it almost every teacher with whom I've had experience.

For my part, I often feel love, in one important way it manifests with me, as a still, open, active acceptance of my and others' always-moving process.  I also see that what I call love was birthed from those processes—that but for earlier stages, no current somewhat higher expression.  I therefore don't distinguish between temper tantrums I threw as a child and my current quieter perspective, nor of anything in between: if it goes to love, it is love, acorn to oak.  I therefore rarely use terms like “ego,” as if being in any stage human were undesirable, a mistake, etc.  I usually sense that the use of such terms represents a desire on the part of the person using them to be important, a me against the universe stance where I've found something wrong with what is and, with my Heroic Human Will, will fix it. 

I also experience with Irmeli that love is relational, an energy between, whether as between cells in my body, or between me and another, including rocks and trees, even time and space.

Re: Real Love

Tom:
This latter can morph, probably quite quietly and easily, into dishonesty and lying, as it begins its fledgling life as an image cum
sales pitch coupled with a felt need to maintain an image, rather than just go - openly go - with what arises.

This pattern is probably endemic to those who aspire to teach others how to live.  I've seen it almost every teacher with whom I've had experience.

This is probably so, and in that sense I'm possibly too hard on the spiritual teachers.
For a person like me, who is not playing a special role in society, and no one is putting high expectations on, it is much easier to go with anything that arises. There is no need to be perfect, or function according to the ideals of spiritual traditions.
This freedom, this boon, I appreciate very high. Still I have not become a monster. I'm not perfect, and I'm happy about that. It is truly liberating to appreciate being imperfect!
Maybe I should start a 'Being Imperfect' movement. I would feel comfortable there.
Have you ever thought how much tension our need to be perfect creates. I suspect life will never fit fully into the ideals. The ideals are illusions.
By this I don't mean we should not have ideals, but I think we should not consider them as ultimate truths.

Irmeli

Re: Real Love

Irmeli, your attitude toward spiritual teachers might represent just the energy required to keep your individual process away from teachers' grasping.  The teaching mode implies “I have something to give you,” which probably is almost always by degrees false in addition to any truth it might represent.

Falsity can lie, IME, in the often unquestioned assumption that the teacher's path can be transposed to anyone else's.  Yes, certain developmental generalities or goals-for-the-time-being might have some relevance from one person to another, but the particularities of a person's particular unfolding?  Wow.

I speculate that one reason teachers so rarely emphasize that particularity is it undermines the teaching role. 

For my part, the more I progress in my own inner life, the more I recognize that who I am now, and how I continue to develop, depends essentially on both the content and the sequence, not to mention the particular environment, of everything that went before.  How to generalize that?  I don't think it can be generalized.

Thus to add to my description of love, as I grow, I become more attuned to the importance of individual difference and uniqueness.  This attunement cuts the evangelistic drive in me.

As to the ideal of perfection, I view the notion to represent, in the conceptual realm, the energetic pull of life toward higher levels of order.  What is considered “imperfect” is a perceived lower order of relational order or maturity.  The evolutionary impulse forward into ever higher levels of order IMO can manifest, in human psychology, as a critical attitude toward what currently is …. this imperfect event, that imperfect relation, that imperfect thing I did yesterday, etc.  IME, seeing this concept as an evolutionary pull—a horizon to which one never really gets closer—has helped me give it its place in my life without consuming my awareness of and love for life otherwise. 

Re: Real Love

One thing that's kind of interesting to me is that, because of the nature of shadow, a person can be quite genuine and loving one moment and then just the opposite the next. I think it's pretty interesting to consider when dealing with people.

In the case of Da, surely there was a lot of shadow there and a lot of messed up things, but I think that's not quite the whole story. I think he could really care and offer something really good at times. He didn't live up to his ideals; that's for sure, but of course no one does; they wouldn't really be ideals if they did.

My take on this quote is that it is really from Da's heart. I find it really inspiring—to respond with love no matter what. Of course “love” there can include tough love, but always keeping in mind the other person's interests, acting for the sake of all.

It's particularly difficult when we feel rejected, of course, and very challenging not to reject ourselves in return, whether in that situation or in another. But I think it's a particularly interesting insight on Da's part: people do seem to play rejection games just as he says.

I do notice that people do fall into victimhood (simultaneously losing an evolutionart context) and act over harshly, go too far. In those moments they are probably projecting pure evil or pure ego onto the other person. I think becoming aware of that is pretty important, and the evolutionary context is really helpful. 

The evolutionary context is a very good guiding light, a “moral compass,” as Ken Wilber has called it. Without seeing the evolutionary perspective it is even more difficult to know what is compassionate or not compassionate. With it we can stay as much as possible at this time with the ”grain of the kosmos.”

If Da had had Wilber from the beginning, I think he might have been different. During the same period other teachers went a little wild as well, Trungpa Rinpoche, for example. To some extent I think it was just the time and place.

Re: Real Love

Real love surely isn't lust. At best lust is a downgraded form of Real Love. If there is lust for objects we know that is not Real Love. Real Love is seeing other as subject. Surely this is the Bodhisatva vow, to see all others as Buddha i.e. as Absolute Subject.

Namast e

Re: Real Love

In all fairness to you, and your take on Da's quote Irmeli, I have to admit, that I had literally removed the personalisation Da laced it with (Where he turns it in on himself with notes for devotees) and enjoyed his take in a way that totally transcended him! The absolute side of the street. He intuits the highest ideals of love. I think he was a warrior optomist to then go on to attempt a good old human experiment, which straight away enters the absolute into the minefield of human games people play with each other. 
 
I think it is also interesting to consider the time and place issue that the Adi Da - human-love-relation sprang from, like David mentioned.

There is no doubt, he had at the very least a highly controversial life, and lifestyle that goes against the grain of what is considered the norm.

Seen beyond those constrains, from this perspective, I find that a lot of what he says is brutally honest, particularly all the stuff on rejection. We only have to look within our own lives and patterns of behaviour to see that we do it en masse, with frequency, with lovers, friends, anyone we have made a connection with. I think to deny that feature of the ego's response and investment in 'love's' game - (and I agree, all forms have there place, and can be beautiful), is to loose at least one gem, in what hes saying.

I don't doubt much of what you say whatsoever regarding his egoic carry on and the complex issues of his muliple relationships. Again, to clarify, I took the juice out of his 'love insight' and put his personal complications, or the mess surrounding the commune trying to live out those ideals, aside.  In the 'Laughter and Wisdom' thread you can read  from Garbage and the Goddess, which had some of his devotees talking in snippets about how his approach to anti-contractual love in relationships really messed them up at first, or with frequency.

That gives you another insight from him regarding his thoughts on ordinary relationships, and their collective motivations - you will not find it tasteful probably, but its interesting. I find myself wholeheartedly not interesting in this part. Throw a bunch of adults together, tell them contractual monogamous bonds are a full on boundary to Love a la proper, and watch the sexual antics & dynamics mess the charade up in 0-60. Maybe there was some success. Who knows! Of course his idea did not just involve the romantic / sexual side of human relations. I am sure parts of what went on were somewhat evolved.

What would love be without something to love?  Yes, I think it only wants to become. But become what?  I liked Tom's broader relational scope. So from the inferno into the heart, through the pen, etc it is distance dissolving and the connector of all things. In that sense that is beautiful, very much so. What is is that spoils that flow? If we made a list of things - I would guess that 98% would be traits of the contracted self, the ego, in action. Trying to grasp on to the inferno, like a Magpie stealing anything that shimmers.

I like also love as the gradient, that moves through lesser forms of its own territory.

I also like the way e mentions the absolute: from object to subject. It sounds like what Da's devotees were trying to do, but alas, throw a sexual dimension (object/subject collision) to the lions and see how quick the cracks appear. We are only human, but its good to have ideals beyond your station. Da set the tone. I say, bless him!

Lisa

Re: Real Love

Hi all!
I realize I have got some great responses to my posts. At the moment however I'm on holiday in a sunnier and warmer place than Finland.
And here I don't have net connection in my apartment as I imagined I would. The little I'll be at computer I will have to focus on taking care of my work related issues.
I'll be back at home after a week, and then come back to this topic.

Irmeli

Re: Real Love

Lisaji: Seen beyond those constrains, from this perspective, I find that a lot of what he says is brutally honest, particularly all the stuff on rejection.

Actually I also like what he Adi Da says about rejection, and  being open to the feeling of  woundedness without resorting to punishing.

Still I feel his idealization of love is dangerously too idealistic and partial. In real life to keep ourselves mentally healthy, we need also to set limits, even to contract, to protect our appropriate boundaries.

Love is fine, when it spontaneously arises. However in  Adi Da’s  text I sense a compulsion towards love.

What if unloving thoughts spontaneously arise?. What should I do then? Try to do all kinds of techniques, and  tricks to make them go away? My way is to appreciate the unloving thoughts almost as much as the loving thoughts. They can be pretty invigorating. In life there is a proper place for all kinds of feelings and emotions. This makes life full, and creates less shadow.

Allowing all kinds of thoughts to appear in your mind, be in dialogue with each other, openly evaluating their function and purpose, makes my approach to life resilient, functional, realistic and more comprehensive or integral, and necessitates much less shadow forming.

Skill is needed in how to express the feelings and thoughts to others. More space appears in the mind to develop those skills, when it is not fully occupied with controlling and manipulating the shadow. The idea that I would have to always have only loving thoughts feels like a nightmare to me. I would have to start to fight against what spontaneously arises inside my mind. That means lack of trust in life in its totality.

Modern psychology has come through accurate observation of people’s behavior to the conclusion,  that the more we are able to fully feel anger, hatred, disappointment etc. internally, the less we tend to inappropriately act out those impulses.

The spiritual traditions have poor understanding of this. Therefore adopting those teachings uncritically as one’s highest ideals can put one’s progress through the stages to a halt. Still I think there is a lot of juice and depth in those traditions. However in my opinion they have to be applied through the best modern understanding very much in line with what KW presents in Integral Spirituality.

Irmeli

Re: Real Love

Dawid:One thing that’s kind of interesting to me is that, because of the nature of shadow, a person can be quite genuine and loving one moment and then just the opposite the next. I think it’s pretty interesting to consider when dealing with people.

Exactly. This is what happens, when big parts of ourselves is denied. The denied and suppressed parts tend to burst out unexpectedly and or doing its work silently and unobserved in the background. The very same emotions, when owned and contained, tend to create holistically more beneficial results, when acted upon.

Also practically all people have their moments, when they are genuine and loving. And a person’s genuine understanding can be pretty one sided, depending on what kind of ultimate beliefs he or she has.

Dawid:My take on this quote is that it is really from Da’s heart. I find it really inspiring—to respond with love no matter what. Of course “love” there can include tough love, but always keeping in mind the other person’s interests, acting for the sake of all.

I have never understood people’s need to justify the damage to others a guru is causing by calling it tough love or the guru teaching the follower a lesson. The same harm or abuse done by an ordinary dude is not seen that way, even if it could qualify as well as a lesson. Expressing one’s anger towards a person, can be beneficial to both parts, but why call it tough love? I would call it anger that is expressed skillfully.

Dawid:It’s particularly difficult when we feel rejected, of course, and very challenging not to reject ourselves in return, whether in that situation or in another. But I think it’s a particularly interesting insight on Da’s part: people do seem to play rejection games just as he says.


This I can agree with.

Dawid:I do notice that people do fall into victimhood (simultaneously losing an evolutionary context) and act over harshly, go too far. In those moments they are probably projecting pure evil or pure ego onto the other person. I think becoming aware of that is pretty important, and the evolutionary context is really helpful.

Victimhood is just a power game that often has turned out to be a successful strategy for the person who uses that technique. The responsibility over the results is also on others by not participating in that game and allowing the victim role for that person.  

Dawid:If Da had had Wilber from the beginning, I think he might have been different. During the same period other teachers went a little wild as well, Trungpa Rinpoche, for example. To some extent I think it was just the time and place.

This is possible. Hopefully the present spiritual teachers have been able to learn from the mistakes from their predecessors. For this reason uncovering the mistakes and wrong kind of idealization of the doings of spiritual teachers is of crucial importance. That way the new teachers will less likely repeat those same mistakes. If a person cannot critically evaluate the behavior of her/his parents she tends to repeat the same patterns as her parents did.

Irmeli

Re: Real Love

Tom: Irmeli, your attitude toward spiritual teachers might represent just the energy required to keep your individual process away from teachers’ grasping.  The teaching mode implies “I have something to give you,” which probably is almost always by degrees false in addition to any truth it might represent.

Tom, you can read me very well. My process has been very much internally guided, and I have a strong need to protect it.  I perceive a teaching from a distant superior position  as an inferior way of helping modern people to learn and evolve. Much more effective is to be with people, tune in to their reality, observe where they feel stuck, and a little bit help them widen their perspectives in that area. And almost always there is something for me also to learn from that person.

Tom: Falsity can lie, IME, in the often unquestioned assumption that the teacher’s path can be transposed to anyone else’s.  Yes, certain developmental generalities or goals-for-the-time-being might have some relevance from one person to another, but the particularities of a person’s particular unfolding?  Wow.

 For this reason somebody who wants to help another person to evolve, has also, to tune into the reality of that person, not just the other way around as is usually the case in guru/disciple relationships. Even the greatest time tested truths and insights tend to be stage specific. When a person tries to apply noble ideas, that are far above one’s developmental stages, hypocrisy,  mood making, denial and disowning parts of oneself are easily the result. And these tend to lead to stagnation of the developmental processes. Also it can happen easily that the teacher is only in states more advanced than the student and neither of them can understand this.

Tom:I speculate that one reason teachers so rarely emphasize that particularity is it undermines the teaching role.

 Yes, and  it also undermines the power position gained through absolute superiority and  authority over  the disciple. Spiritual teachers have  often been strongly identified with their image of themselves as superior and enlightened beings. This may be a good approach at red and amber levels, but not beyond that. This kind of identification hints to me also that the teacher is not in the self line higher than amber. This makes a truly weird combination with the ‘no I’ teachings. Only the aspect of our sense of ‘I’ that creates an image of ourselves, we can stop identifying with as we evolve. The ‘I’ that interprets and creates a whole with continuity of sensory stimulus and makes meaning, we have never been able to identify with, and hence it cannot be left behind in healthy development.

Do those people who have a strong identification of themselves as enlightened beings really understood, what it truly  means to live with ‘no I’ , or with no solid identification with an image or idea of oneself. Without it you cannot perceive yourself permanently superior or enlightened. Different images of oneself will arise depending on the situation and  the company one is involved with, and dissolve as fast as the situation is over or changes. Also different roles can be taken upon depending on the situation, but there is no permanent identification with those roles. This creates healthy humility and modesty. Because there is no identification to any self image, there is no expectation either for others to see you in a certain way. What arises depends on the situation.

Tom:For my part, the more I progress in my own inner life, the more I recognize that who I am now, and how I continue to develop, depends essentially on both the content and the sequence, not to mention the particular environment, of everything that went before.  How to generalize that?  I don’t think it can be generalized.

 This is a great way to express the specialness of everyone’s own path.

Tom:Thus to add to my description of love, as I grow, I become more attuned to the importance of individual difference and uniqueness.  This attunement cuts the evangelistic drive in me.

T his loss of evangelistic drive has happened also to me. Instead there is more respect for everyone’s special path, and space to see how our different paths actually can be complementary.

Tom: As to the ideal of perfection, I view the notion to represent, in the conceptual realm, the energetic pull of life toward higher levels of order.  What is considered “imperfect” is a perceived lower order of relational order or maturity.  The evolutionary impulse forward into ever higher levels of order IMO can manifest, in human psychology, as a critical attitude toward what currently is …. this imperfect event, that imperfect relation, that imperfect thing I did yesterday, etc.  IME, seeing this concept as an evolutionary pull—a horizon to which one never really gets closer—has helped me give it its place in my life without consuming my awareness of and love for life otherwise.

 This is a beautiful way of expressing our drive towards perfection. There is one important caveat however: our drive towards perfection can become compulsory. In that case we tend to deny our own imperfections, as we desperately want to perceive ourselves as perfect and enlightened. Then others out there are seen as imperfect. That again can create an evangelist drive.

We have to accept our own imperfections for those projections to stop. However this acceptance process people often understand meaning giving in to their imperfections. Actually people seem to oscillate between a compulsory drive towards perfection and giving in to their imperfections. Here could Adi Da’s idea of an open wound be applied as accepting to live fully in the feeling of one’s wound of imperfection. Life is built in a way that, when you feel in an accepting way  the soreness of an open wound,  the wound starts to heal itself.

Irmeli

Re: Real Love

Irmeli: Allowing all kinds of thoughts to appear in your mind, be in dialogue with each other, openly evaluating their function and purpose, makes my approach to life resilient, functional, realistic and more comprehensive or integral, and necessitates much less shadow forming … The idea that I would have to always have only loving thoughts feels like a nightmare to me. I would have to start to fight against what spontaneously arises inside my mind. That means lack of trust in life in its totality.

Irmeli, I really like how you put this.  What you say is my approach and experience.  IMO, in the spiritual drive to achieve unity awareness, a certain familiarity and intimacy with the stuff of one’s being is very easily lost.  In many cases, that loss is an active jettisoning.  That loss or jettisoning ironically diminishes one’s integrity—severely restricts one’s unity awareness—despite the stated intention to achieve that unity.  Actually, from my perspective, I often see a subtle refusal of deep unity in that escape from feelings, etc.  I think this is what you say that adopting a high ideal can bring growth to a halt.  How true.

I am not here expecting any given tradition to be all things to all people.  But any tradition expressed from a pre-yellow view will shade into absolutism.  This problem is the more pronounced with spiritual traditions, which by their nature and chosen wording deal precisely in absolutes.  Thus can someone like Da claim godhood about every including the downright silly and immature of his mental workings, or Jesus or Krishnamurti or Osho or Buddha claim “I am the way.”  Absolutist about the absolute.  Just go over to the “I problem” thread.

Irmeli, I think your final sentence I quote above hits the crucial point: accepting all feelings and thoughts as meaningful, as telling me something perhaps vital about what’s happening here, about my attitudes, my relations to others and to myself and self-responsibility—accepting the entire gamut of whatever arises—is to trust life in its totality.  That trust is, IMO, a source of deep realization, a term often applied in a way as ironically to create just the opposite.

Interestingly, the word trust shares the same root as truth.  That should tell us something about the importance of trusting what and how one is.

Irmeli: I have never understood people’s need to justify the damage to others a guru is causing by calling it tough love or the guru teaching the follower a lesson. The same harm or abuse done by an ordinary dude is not seen that way, even if it could qualify as well as a lesson.

I tend to side with your perspective on this, Irmeli.  I have a female spiritual teacher friend who is a bulldog in how she states observations of others.  I’ve been on the receiving end of that, and though the ordered, disciplined, strong-willed, depth-desiring side of me can feel invigorated by her straight-out observations, I’m always left feeling put off about her perceptions of me.  What she misses is the subtle little thread of progression—a very personal thread—that provides the vital link to her often otherwise correct observations.  I’ve thus through this experience basically closed the door on tough love as it misses the personal, particular, vital point.

Irmeli: Even the greatest time tested truths and insights tend to be stage specific.

My god, that is so true.  Thus by “time tested” is often meant “tested by and relevant to an infinitesimal fraction of total time”!  Geezus, I thought I had The Absolute in my grasp, and it slipped away again!

Irmeli: Spiritual teachers have  often been strongly identified with their image of themselves as superior and enlightened beings.

I’ve been listening lately to 1975 dialogues between Krishnamurti and David Bohm—mostly to hear Bohm.  My perception of K from these dialogues is that he was over-the-moon egoic in the sense you speak, very amber.  Subtle how identification can hide in talk and teaching about non-identification. 

Over in the “I” thread, I suggested the “I” also exists, apart from one’s mental definition, in how one acts and the position one assumes in that acting.  This is the functional, real-world actual definition of I as lived.  This functional definition I think speaks to how, as you suggest, different functional images of oneself appear and dissolve depending on the context.  IMO, the overall flavour of those appearances gives one’s true level of development.

Irmeli: Here could Adi Da’s idea of an open wound be applied as accepting to live fully in the feeling of one’s wound of imperfection. Life is built in a way that, when you feel in an accepting way the soreness of an open wound, the wound starts to heal itself.

Yes.  IME, I find that carrying a wound and being with it allows movement into fuller maturity.  I often have seen a certain “hurt” at the root of my reactions to others.  In going into that hurt, I have often seen more clearly the structure of how I was projecting onto the other or using the other as a foil.  This inner education—holding the hurt and not using it to sharpen a barb I throw out—has been a source of heartfelt movement in my life.

Interesting enough, the word “passion,” which essentially means “passive,” derives from a root meaning “to hurt.”  Thus the passion of Christ is his hurt, ie, his hurt-path, or woundedness-path.

Re: Real Love

Tom: For my part, the more I progress in my own inner life, the more I recognize that who I am now, and how I continue to develop, depends essentially on both the content and the sequence, not to mention the particular environment, of everything that went before. How to generalize that? I don’t think it can be generalized.

Irmeli: This loss of evangelistic drive has happened also to me. Instead there is more respect for everyone’s special path, and space to see how our different paths actually can be complementary.

- Interesting conversation. In both cases, maybe evangelism is lost or disintegrated when one starts to take radical responsibility for oneself. Which I would think allows one to offer authentic care to others, rather than ‘hell & fire’ realisation and reformer type imput that can semi-bypass the heart.

Irmeli: Still I feel his idealization of love is dangerously too idealistic and partial. In real life to keep ourselves mentally healthy, we need also to set limits, even to contract, to protect our appropriate boundaries.
Love is fine, when it spontaneously arises. However in Adi Da’s text I sense a compulsion towards love.

- It is the human condition to feel compulsion towards love, it seems to be what is at the heart of our deepest human searchings. So really, it’s quite understandable that a spiritual teacher would have a compulsion towards love. I do think it is a compulsion that sets the bar high in all respects, and as such creates a distance in view of where a person is authentically at, and the highest most ideal expression of themselves. But in doing so, rather than creating shadow, I reckon in the right hands, it offers more clarity. More clarity to work on the parts of oneself that separate them from proper whole health. Somebody asked Almaas in the Q & A session of his ‘Love & Emptiness’ lecture - ‘Why does love hurt?’ He said, ‘It doesn’t. Love is a great revealer, and it is what it reveals that hurts.’ I think the fact that love is a great revealer is wildly pertinent to this point.

If this is the case, then it makes sense that the whole gamut (I like that word Tom!) that is encapsulated in the frame of love, can open up more parts of ourselves, in all domains, and thus play an enormous role in integrating shadow and other less desirable aspects of our entirity.

I suggest a compulsion for love is indeed completely necessary in order to dialogue internally with those darker aspects of ourselves, in a way that is transformative, compassionate, and therefore going to be healthier. In my humble opinion, this doesn’t irradicate the range & room for all kinds of feelings and emotions. To me it just creates less blurring when what is inwardly dialoguing can consists of a combination of darker drives & real shadow territory.

I have seen this repeatedly, a person living in constant communication with the darker self dialogues, deeper shadow and lesser thoughts as they are arising, and without a proper internal orientation, something as strong as love to clear the path. A person can quickly fall into self hatred, depression and radical dark shadow projection, including complete contempt for others.

Lisa

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Lisaji:It is the human condition to feel compulsion towards love, it seems to be what is at the heart of our deepest human searchings.

I agree  with this. Actually I meant something else. My English skills have failed me here. With compulsion towards love meant I perceive in Adi Da an obsession to see everything he does as an expression of love, because he identifies with an image of himself as an enlightened person. He apparently has also created internally an idealized idea of an enlightened person as an always loving being based on the beliefs based on spiritual texts. In this way love can become a power game to subordinate others. It is not real love. When real love arises you don’t need to be aware of it. And certainly you don’t declare yourself to be all love.

I tried also to listen to the lecture on ‘love and emptiness’ given by Almaas. He seems to come much closer to what I understand love to be. Regrettably my ability to understand spoken English is clearly weaker than my ability read and write it. Also Almaas articulates  words often not very clearly, and hence a lot gets lost to me.

Lisaji:I suggest a compulsion for love is indeed completely necessary in order to dialogue internally with those darker aspects of ourselves, in a way that is transformative, compassionate, and therefore going to be healthier. In my humble opinion, this doesn’t irradicate the range & room for all kinds of feelings and emotions. To me it just creates less blurring when what is inwardly dialoguing can consists of a combination of darker drives & real shadow territory.

My inner process has similarities with this.  I tend to hold bliss and the heavier energies and feelings and sensations present together simultaneously. Almaas also connects bliss to love. I have never associated bliss with love, for me it has been just a strong blissful pull inwards towards subtler and subtler domains. The bliss has made it much easier to face also the heavier and darker stuff that I meet, when I dive inwards.

Lisaji:I have seen this repeatedly, a person living in constant communication with the darker self dialogues, deeper shadow and lesser thoughts as they are arising, and without a proper internal orientation, something as strong as love to clear the path. A person can quickly fall into self hatred, depression and radical dark shadow projection, including complete contempt for others.

What you describe here is a severe state of  depression. Depression is basically created by repressing  heavy stuff.

Dwelling in and identifying with heavy emotions is not the same as facing them. When they are faced, they start to open the contractions, where they have been hiding in the body, and are transformed to flowing energy and to better connection with one’s authenthic healthy, natural emotions. The dwelling in heavy emotions instead of being capable of facing them is something that has happened to people who get depressed. E.g. long lasting stress can create a situation, where shadow stuff starts to pour out more than the person is capable of containing. If the person is not capable of facing the stuff that comes up, she instead starts to dwell in it, and that is depression. When one is able to through meditation infuse the dark stuff  with either light, love or bliss, it becomes much easier to face heavy emotions and even pain.

 

I think advanced meditative states can be highly useful in doing shadow work. But this may be a pretty advanced technique, where one has to leave behind attachment to emptiness while not losing the groundedness in Being. That ground has to be established in an unshakable way. Whatever appears you don’t lose your groundedness in Being.

Irmeli

Re: Real Love

- Thanks for your extremely interesting follow-up Irmeli.

I did wonder actually whether or not you meant something different with your use of ‘compulsion’ - then I decided maybe not! Nevermind.

I found Almaas a little hard to follow myself during that lecture, for the record. He’s got quite a heavy accent.

So back to Adi Da:

Irmeli: With compulsion towards love meant I perceive in Adi Da an obsession to see everything he does as an expression of love, because he identifies with an image of himself as an enlightened person. He apparently has also created internally an idealized idea of an enlightened person as an always loving being based on the beliefs based on spiritual texts. In this way love can become a power game to subordinate others.



- Well, we know that he had very high regard for himself in the ‘self realised’ master realms don’t we. As far as I was aware, his ideas were based more on his intense realisation, rather than spiritual texts, after all, if he was the most realised realiser of all time, his own texts are going to be the most profound, no? You’ve got to laugh at the mans ambition! I think there was probably something really genuine going on with his love insights, but yes, it was perhaps laced with various unresolved delusions and pathology.

I tend to hold bliss and the heavier energies and feelings and sensations present together simultaneously. Almaas also connects bliss to love. I have never associated bliss with love, for me it has been just a strong blissful pull inwards towards subtler and subtler domains. The bliss has made it much easier to face also the heavier and darker stuff that I meet, when I dive inwards.

I can totally relate to what you are saying there, Almaas talks about that magnetic pull in that lecture. I connect bliss to love too, as it pulls towards subtler and subtler domains as you say. It’s interesting to me how you would not relate that to love. To me, that’s one of the most refined, unclouded & uninterrupted manifestations of love.

Dwelling in and identifying with heavy emotions is not the same as facing them.



-Yes, I agree. It all boils down to the level of self awareness the person is able to move from & articulate through their life.

I think advanced meditative states can be highly useful in doing shadow work. But this may be a pretty advanced technique, where one has to leave behind attachment to emptiness while not losing the groundedness in Being.

- Yep I agree. I guess in the meantime any practice that increases self awareness, no matter what a persons level of development is, is ‘the’ starting point. From observation, I’ve noticed that the moment that self inquiry begins (no matter what path then ensues) in a person, the quicker they are set on the road to their own recovery.

Lisa

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Lisa: Which I would think allows one to offer authentic care to others, rather than ‘hell & fire’ realisation and reformer type imput that can semi-bypass the heart.

Yes, and beyond hell & fire and reformer motivations to subtler levels of the evangelizating motive, like speaking in the objective cast, for instance, saying “you” when what is spoken of is my experience.  Objectifying language, for me, is a subtle form of force that says “this is the way things are, accept it without personal difference.”  Almost every spiritual teacher I’ve heard says “you” rather than “I” in just this sense.  That, to me, is an attempt to impress my information into the listener’s brain, an action functionally comparable to that of a virus injecting RNA into a host: forced information.  What is lost in that process?  The listener sitting before the speaker.  I thus agree with Irmeli that a teacher should assume the role of listening and tuning.

Here’s a stark example of this dynamic.  Like I mentioned I’ve been listening to dialogues between Bohm and Krishnamurti.  In those dialogues, Krishnamurti presents himself as an unconditioned person (!), perhaps the only one to walk the planet (!).  At one point, Bohm, somewhat believing K but wondering how that could be true and could any other person reach the state K reached, asked:

B: “Assume I am you.  What would you do in my presence to [become enlightened like you or something]?”

K: “Listen to you abolutely.”

A good workout for one’s immune system.

I propose that “you” language—language describing inner states, experiences or pathways in the objective cast—is Tier 1.

Re: Real Love

From my knowledge of K’s teaching, I don’t believe”listen to you absolutely” in this case was intended to mean, “believe you absolutely” or “follow you absolutely” – I thinkhe was speaking about a sort of undivided, serious attention, since he often did this, and he was also quite clear in his views about the violence of authority and belief (and urging people not to take him as an authority).

Regarding conditioning, he believed choiceless awareness was beyond conditioning and insight grounded in choiceless awareness could undo conditioning, but to my knowledge, he never claimed to be entirely without conditioning himself. In many cases, throughout his life, he talked about discovering some sort of conditioned reaction in himself and then spending time with it to see through it and end it.

Re: Real Love

Tom: Objectifying language, for me, is a subtle form of force that says “this is the way things are, accept it without personal difference.” Almost every spiritual teacher I’ve heard says “you” rather than “I” in just this sense. That, to me, is an attempt to impress my information into the listener’s brain, an action functionally comparable to that of a virus injecting RNA into a host: forced information. What is lost in that process? The listener sitting before the speaker. I thus agree with Irmeli that a teacher should assume the role of listening and tuning.



Yes, I hear what you are saying. I often experience it as a kind of subtle level violence. When you say forced information, yes, it is probably like that, although nobody would of course taken a person to a satsang with a gun to their heads. :) Its a choice. I fully hear what you are saying, and reckon you are well on to something. This is interesting. What is the way forward for spiritual teachers? ‘Who is qualified to teach’ or ‘what a person has got to teach or put forth’ will obviously impact this conundrum. I don’t know whether a teachers job is just listening and tuning, imagine that, it could get insane! I think people usually head to such places because they want to change, I wonder if a teacher with something authentic to teach should do that it a way that causes the least harm possible.That really propagates an onset of self-honesty in a person & thus the ball rolling. Something like a higher ethic in action.

Lisa

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Bruce: From my knowledge of K’s teaching, I don’t believe”listen to you absolutely” in this case was intended to mean, “believe you absolutely” or “follow you absolutely” …

IMO, from even the direct wording without context, but also from the context, and also from a variety of other things he said during these long conversations, he did mean “hear the truth of my words absolutely.”  Just taking his words at face value, if he didn’t mean believe the words absolutely, one might just as well give one’s focused attention to CSI on Fox nightly.

As to conditioning, he often said in these discussions he was talking about things, particularly his non-conditioning, he’d never previously discussed … he reported he actually several times was shaking talking about these things, would have to leave the room for a break, etc.  He did qualify a few times that he was only just very lightly conditioned (inessential conditioning).  He outright said more times than otherwise “that boy” wasn’t conditioned.

Re: Real Love

How much of his material have you read? For him to say, and mean, ”believe me absolutely” would go against most of his 40+ years of teaching. I think he did mean that the “pointing” a person established in choiceless awareness can give is worth attending to with absolute seriousness, but I don’t believe he was asking Bohm to follow him or believe him unquestioningly.

I personally no longer resonate with K’s teachings the way I used to, and I also find some of his language and such inadequate, but the portrait you were painting of him above just seemed more like a caricature, based on a surface reading of his remarks, and I wanted to temper that.

Re: Real Love

Lisa: I often experience it as a kind of subtle level violence.

The word violence derives from a root which means “to force,” so the association is natural. 

Lisa: What is the way forward for spiritual teachers?

They can qualify, when they speak, that this is my experience or opinion, and that this experience or opinion only ever partially applies to anyone else and is sometimes hurtful if applied at the wrong time or in an inappropriate stage.  Particular and concrete.  But teachers like absolutism: it sells, it feels important, it’s the information that you need.  100% organic pure ego.  Byron Katie, who I otherwise appreciate, says her way is The Work (underlining but not capitalization mine).  Eckhart Tolle, who I otherwise appreciate, is similarly absolutistic about his path.  Krishnamurti says I’m the guy, explicitly and implicitly.

And, yes, teachers often have something very pertinent to convey to listeners.  It seems to me the next stage of development is for them to lose the functional ego too, not just the theoretical ego, and to take a seat as a little partial thing who also listens.  But listening takes time.  And how’s one gonna also have time for the revolucion?

As to self-honesty, teachers could do well to put a list of their foibles on the inside flap of their books. 

Re: Real Love

Bruce: … the portrait you were painting of him above just seemed more like a caricature …

I don’t think it’s caricature, Bruce.  I personally couldn’t believe what I was hearing, I mean, I don’t how many ways you can dice “listen to me absolutely.”  I thought of making a list of things he said I found quite surprising, but to what end?

Read Rene Weber’s remarks about K in her scientists and sages book.  She calls K an absolutist, basically says she can’t abide his attitude.

I haven’t read much of Krishnamurti, but I’ve listened to his discussions with Bohm and then some.  As I said, he did talk of many things in his discussions with Bohm that he said he’d never spoken of previously.  His writings wouldn’t convey things he’d kept to himself.

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If you prefer to form your opinion of him based on this and not look at the body of his work and teachings, that is your prerogative, of course.

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I don’t mean to devalue what K says, alot of which I rather enjoy.  I find his books focused and his words to carry a depth that engages me.  IMO, he like anyone has his blind-spots, and one relevant such spot for this discussion is the specialness he felt about himself.

Re: Real Love

Yes, he did think he was special or unique. In terms of his life – taken as a boy, groomed to be the “world teacher,” given a castle in which to “teach,” disowning and dissolving the organization and proclaiming truth a pathless land, etc – his life was indeed unusual. And in terms of his psychic processes – what he called “the process” – his subjective experience was also rather unusual. So, to me, it’s understandable that he felt different and special. But I agree, his sense of specialness probably involved more than an objective assessment of his life – likely some blind spots and shadow in there as well, especially given the weirdness of his life.

Re: Real Love

 
 
 
Bruce, what did K mean by “the process”?
 
Also, I once read a story about K’s “out-of-body” experiences where Blavatsky or someone would bring him milk for a few days and that was all he had to eat. Do you know anything about those? They were described as out-of-body experiences in the article I read, but maybe they were more common emptiness/ground experiences or something.

Re: Real Love

Freedom, your name is love! Love, make me your slave!

Slavery to You is the door into the Garden.

My door into eternity is exactly the shape I make

When I walk forward, headless, on my knees.
 

Rumi

Re: Real Love

Circle of Love

Re: Real Love

I was looking for somewhere to place this nice Kabir poem, and I think it may just have found its home here, almost as nice as loveliness itself:

When the Day Came
By Kabir
(15th Century)
English version by Andrew Harvey
 

When the Day came –
The Day I had lived and died for –
The Day that is not in any calendar –
Clouds heavy with love
Showered me with wild abundance.
Inside me, my soul was drenched.
Around me, even the desert grew green.

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Lisa, that is so beautiful! That is among the very coolest! Andrew Harvey does a beautiful job with poetry, and Kabir was one of the greats.  :)

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Yes, isn't it just! Lovely lovely. Get into this…
A bit more of Kabir, courtesy of Robert Bly, breaking it down in his own way. :)
Love the line, 'The only (wo)man awake, is the (wo)man who has heard the flute.'

&… 'If you make love with the divine now, in the next life, you'll have the face of satisfied desire.' This one really reminds me of Ramana. :) A nice eccentric performance for you. :)

Re: Real Love

I really enjoyed those, Lisa. I listened to the first poem when you posted it and the others now. Robert Bly really rocks with that cello! I haven't seen poetry read to music so nicely, so in time.

I think Robert Bly is a great translator, too, of Rumi, Kabir, also Rilke. He said something funny to Coleman Barks once; he was the guy who got Coleman Barks into Rumi; he said, “These poems need to be released from their cages.”

Kabir is really cool, too:

Re: Real Love

Wow, I'm glad this thread got re-activated, so I could discover it. What an enriching conversation!! It would take days to really get into and respond to it all properly. Forgive my just jumping in with a few thoughts.

I don't think Andrew Cohen's description of unconditional love is the only version of that kind of human love. There is something some have called Being-love, which means that (as the giver of the unconditional love) you continue to love the Being of the other person independent of anything they might say or do. Needless to say, this is not common, not even from parents to children although I think it could be more common there than anywhere else.

Usually it just means “I can't imagine you doing anything that would shake my wishing the best for you.” If the person happened to do something “bad” beyond what you could have imagined, well then, we'd see how unconditional the love was, eh?

But I'm not even sure humans are capable of “unconditional love.” This is held up as a spiritual ideal (due to a misunderstanding I'll mention in a second here) and many people feel like spiritual failures when they don't achieve it. 

But this is a case of people trying to get to a spiritual goal by mimicking what they believe is the experience of someone who's achieved the goal (enlightenment, for example.) But it doesn't work that way. Behavior flows from Being, not the other way around. You can't get enlightened by mimicking the (supposed) characteristics of an enlightened person. Most of the New Age “spirituality” is based on this erroneous approach. Well, and a lot of Eastern spirituality too. 

Anyway, here's what I really wanted to contribute to the discussion. For a long time I have made a distinction between love as a human emotion, even “unconditional” love as a human emotion, and Love that is part of the Being/experience of the One, the Infinite Self, the Ineffable – use your own label. 

I maintain these are actually completely distinct and different things. One is an emotion, the other is a quality of an energy, a quality of Consciousness/Beingness As Such. People “come back” from expanded state experiences and report it to others in words, and use the word Love, but IMO it's a big mistake to think they are talking about anything resembling human love. 

For me, this Ineffable Energy Love is sometimes experienced as a fullness/energy which is kinda like a river flowing through and out of my heart chakra area. It is most definitely not an emotion or feeling. It is simply an energy. It bears a resemblance to “love” so one might use that word, but only a resemblance. It does feel “good,” for sure !!!!!!!!!!

To me, the human emotion of love is a subject-object matter. As (I interpret what) Irmeli said, it is a relationship concept/experience. It is a “between two” kind of thing, a connection. 

The other, what I call Divine Love, has no subject and no object, not even an object such as life. Or, if there is an object, it is “All Form and All Nothingness.” So the subject and object are identically the same. Which of course gets paradoxical for the mind to try to grasp.

When people “come back” and try to describe their (causal or nondual state) “experience”  of Beingness or the Ground of Being (choose your own words here for the Ultimate) what I'd say they are doing is having perceived white light, they come back and describe the colors revealed by the prism of their own awareness. (That's a metaphor.) 

So based on my experience, one can label “it” peace or love or joy or bliss, and all are equally so and all actually have the same referent!!!! But they are what we ARE, not what we FEEL. In that state, going by my own “experience,” one doesn't say “I feel Love, I experience Love.” (or joy, peace, bliss.) If there were words, they would be I AM Love. I AM Peace. I AM joy. Inherent in Being. Immanent in Being. Not an activity of Being, or an expression of Being. Simply, another word FOR “Being.”

I think the conversation in this thread has wandered between human emotion love and Being/Isness/Love without making the distinction.  Of course, making the distinction might or might not be of value to anyone  – except me.

And of course, if a distinction is made, then the question arises of the relationship between the two. In a word, the relationship IMO is none. IOW, a Love that is immanent in Being is present in and as every human emotion, including apathy and hate. And indeed in every body and every object in existence!!

Most spiritual teachers have pointed to this as, for example, the joy that underlies every feeling. In this sense, they call it “Unconditional Love,” because it is there without conditions. They just happen to fail to mention that they are not talking about the human emotion of love, so people get VERY confused. And indeed they suffer, feeling like spiritual failures, as I mentioned earlier.  

Thanks for hanging in there with me in trying to express myself. I am very challenged trying to find good words on this matter.

Does this resonate for anyone?? Thank you again for such a scintillating conversation, one and all !! I especially enjoyed the sharing of poems, and the personal vulnerability a lot of you showed.

Blessings,
OM Bastet 



  

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Nice blast of Kabir there, David. That's a corker. As for The Beatles, well they are just supreme. In fact, I feel like I have been brainwashed by the beatles since birth. Part and parcel of  'the scouse' conditioning. :)

Hi OM - Great to hear your musings on this thread. Your distinctions between relative and absolute love take me back to some of the discussions we have stumbled into in other threads while getting into the territory of emptiness/fullness & - non-duality and duality. People usually seem quite aware of these subtle distinctions without clearly stating them. I guess the inquiry itself begs one to jump in, and that means mixing it up, unravelling oneself, sussing it out in your own heart and life, practice, whatever.

For the record, you can probably check most of those older conversations out in 'Inquiry Island.' You may find some of that equally interesting.

I liked reading your trail of thought though.

Yep, interesting you mention that Cohen quote at the beginning of your post. I thought it was quite refreshing to read this on 'Conditional' love. When I read it for the first time, - it resonated on many levels. Mainly because I think the brand of 'unconditional' love we most commonly come across is a bit of a mask that makes out we are living in fairy land and that everybody is completely equal, (or equally that some are more equal than others).

I don't think that's always that helpful. And can go too far into the superficial. A bit like painting over a damp patch of wallpaper with brilliant white paint, without treating the problem. As you sort of get at when you mention the confusion encouraged by certain 'spiritual teachers.'

Cohen's perspective of course is as a teacher of evolutionary enlightenment, and is a little dry and incomparable to Rumi, and other mystics who capture the 1 & 2 face perspectives of god so deeply, if we can frame it like that for a moment, in a way that takes the transformative power of 'love,' to another level. Though AC is a master of the second face of god!

You talk about the quality of 'being,' the energy of this - and differentiate that from other forms of love. I've been thinking how going from first face - God as self (I AM), to God as Other - second face, is when the flood gates are shattered open to love a la proper.

I've mainly been contemplating this in relation to bruces essay on Transformative Devotion in Sufism & Dzogchen.
I am still contemplating this, &  finding myself blown away by the fundamental differences of these orientations when it comes to the question of transformative devotion / Love. And how important it is that first and second person perspectives are entered into and integrated properly, and in how not doing so could land one in a territory that is bereft of potential gems.

Re: Real Love

Hi, OM. Great comments!


OM: For a long time I have made a distinction between love as a human emotion, even “unconditional” love as a human emotion, and Love that is part of the Being/experience of the One, the Infinite Self, the Ineffable… .
I maintain these are actually completely distinct and different things. One is an emotion, the other is a quality of an energy, a quality of Consciousness/Beingness.


There is an “energetic aspect of Being,” to use Almaas' words, that is on a different line than the personal self altogether, though at the same time we can say that the personal self is a filter through which this energy flows. But there comes a point when one can see both, and the “Ineffable Energy” as you call it can begin to flow more purely, consciously.

Some people will say that this is giving nonduality or whatnot attributes, but this is actually a separate discussion, on the relative side of the street. It is a vertical realization, a structural realization, one with ego awareness. I think the reason that most spiritual teachers don't make the distinctions you have been making is because most spiritual teachers don't have this vertical realization; they have some kind of horizontal realization + some manner of personal motivation, through which love, with a capital l, Love, can sometimes flow through, usually in a filtered way and then beginning to flow more purely and freely later on.

I think we could say that the evolutionary impulse flows through each structure, and then when a person has ego awareness and can see the distinction, then it can begin to flow through consciously and with greater consistency since one is able to make the choice. Making this decision consciously and consistently is the point of Andrew Cohen's “top-down” approach, and of course he puts it in an evolutionary context.



Lisa: I've been thinking how going from first face - God as self (I AM), to God as Other - second face, is when the flood gates are shattered open to love a la proper.


Lisa, I think this is exactly right: without the second face of God, the ego will a chance to hide out and continue to work toward its own ends, even if it is an enlightened ego (meaning, horizontally, the right turn part way up the Wilber-Combs Lattice). But with the second face of God, at the later altitudes as well as the earlier, a person can begin to go beyond the personal motivation altogether, giving birth to “love a la proper,” as you say.  :)

Often a kind of self-sacrifice will precede that love, but not a self-sacrifice where the person loses out; rather a continuation of or another form of the bliss and freedom that one has found in meditation in action.




Lisa: I am still contemplating this, &  finding myself blown away by the fundamental differences of these orientations when it comes to the question of transformative devotion / Love. And how important it is that first and second person perspectives are entered into and integrated properly, and in how not doing so could land one in a territory that is bereft of potential gems.


Yes, I am still contemplating it often as well; in fact, it's probably the biggest contemplation, how to integrate these three basic paths, what that integration looks like, what it's like when they all come together in Ultraviolet, Clear Light. It's quite a bit different, worlds different, than the nonduality most teachers discuss.

There is an interesting audio clip from Andrew Cohen on the second face of God on his website now.

Also, I've quoted this before, but one of the most amazing guru-and-pandit exchanges was on this subject. It discusses, among other things, how postmoderns tend not to want to place anything above themselves—so, we have state experiences that aren't really transcendent, no second face of God, no evolutionary impulse—the ego is left on top.

Much of the resistance to Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen stems from this: there is such a self-transcending vibe in their work; their entire work is infused with it, but most people are not into self-transcendence but into self-actualization, using Maslow's scheme (“Needs”) for a moment:

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Thanks for that, David. I can read that stuff again and again, I think it can really help people out.

I was returning to a poem I find interesting by D.H. Lawrence today, and it is something I often contemplate, and that I feel is one of the most important realisations, which in and of itself, is actually a prerequisit to any such notion of 'real love:'

Deeper than Love

There is love, and it is a deep thing
but there are deeper things than love.

First and last, man is alone.
He is born alone, and alone he dies
and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives
alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy
and alone.

Love is a thing of twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.

And underneath the great turbulent emotions of love, the
violent herbage,
lies the living rock of a single creature's pride,
the dark, naif pride.
And deeper even than the bedrock of pride
lies the ponderous fire of naked life
with its strange primordial consciousness of justice
and its primordial consciousness of connection,
connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire
and the old, old final life-truth.

Love is of twoness, and is lovely
like the living life on the earth
but below all roots of love lies the bedrock of naked pride,
subterranean,
and deeper than the bedrock of pride is the primordial fire of
the middle
which rests in connection with the further forever unknowable
fire of all things
and which rocks with a sense of connection, religion
and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness
and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial
imperative.

All this is deeper than love
deeper than love.

**************************************************************************************************************
What a work of art, just simply laying it out like that. D.H. outdoes himself there, no question. Without a realisation to the core of ones being of that, love in any form has no foundations!

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hmm fascinating. Thanks,

Love,

Nicole

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Lisa, that is amazing! Among his very best!

There was a time, a little while back, when I had thought I had found all of his greatest poems, but now you keep finding them!

And you know what? Just a few hours before this I opened up the Complete Poems to the uncollected section because that is the one section, for some reason, I haven't really gone through, and this poem is in that section. But I didn't see it this morning, but I did see another poem about love in that section, ten pages before that one.

There is also an early draft of the poem in the appendix. It is two and half pages long. I will copy it out some time. I haven't even read it carefully yet. The first stanza is the same and the beginning of the second, and there are some of the same lines, but much other material as this poem is about half as long.

It is very beautiful and profound, as is your comment that without that realisation love has no foundations. That is one to ponder on.  :)

I think it's quite profound—“below the roots of love is the bedrock of naked pride”—to me this sounds very much like Almaas' narcissistic wound and narcissistic rage. To be apart from that realisation is to be in a state of narcissistic emptiness.

And beneath that is the “unknowable fire” that “rocks with a sense of connection, religion and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial imperative,” without which, as you say, love has no foundations.

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~

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Lovely tune, David. And Sweet lyrics. Ah, the light in the eyes, what a sight.
 
Oh Dear Unbearable Pain

Oh dear unbearable pain
That rips through my throat like a raging torrent
A cyclone
Where I once stood
A minefield
Tossed into the air
At the speed of light
Infinite  
I should spend more time perfecting
The way I welcome you home

*
The end of that really makes me smile. :) That's my mission right there. :)

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Lisa, that is very beautiful indeed. And the ending is truly amazing. It really made me smile as well. It is like Rumi, only a feminine version.

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Empty Me of Everything But Your Love
(by Khwaja Abdullah Ansari - trans. by Andrew Harvey)

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That's very lovely and amazing, Lisa. Those Sufis know how to write a poem!  :)

I love their metaphors—drunkenness, wine, slavery, Feast!

I'm not familiar with Ansari. Andrew Harvey does a beautiful job, as usual. I will have to look into Ansari a little; I see he has some poems at Poetry Chaikhana. Or you can bring them to us.  :)

These Sufis are really on fire, too, aren't they?

Here is a picture of a mosque in Ansari's home town, Friday Mosque in Herat, Afghanistan. They build beautiful mosques, too.  I posted it once before, I remember now that I see it, in reference to another poet that lived nearby.

And I almost forgot—one from Rumi:

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A photo gallery of people adopting unwanted dogs and puppies in Missouri.

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David do I have your permission to post this to the Love of Animals Pod. 

As someone who has had dogs for 35 years, ( all but three were rescues ) this article has touched my soul.  

Nothing more to share for now. 

Clare

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Hi Clare,

Absolutely!  Yes, it really touched me, too. I really love dogs. It sounds like you've had quite a nice family of them.  :) Nice to hear from you.

David

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Ah David, Clare, doesn't stuff like that just restore your faith in humanity. Really beautiful and heart warming. I loved the pic's. Really captured the love and kindness pouring out of people.

*
That little bit of Rumi is a prize gem, David. Asolutely love the lines. especially this one:
                              …'until your eyes constantly exhale love'

Isn't that just lovely, you can really breath it in just from that. It was so right what Coleman Barks said about him, how he was the message. A fully embodied flow.
Yes, the Sufi's are outrageously amazing with their metaphors. They just get it and set it on fire. Yep, they are on fire! It is my favourite poetry for that, no doubt. I also love their titles, and expression, their simplicity and humorous staggering around the floor-esque passion. Here's a little corker from Poetry Chaikhana by Bulleh Shah:

Your love has made me dance all over
 
Your love has made me dance all over.
Falling in love with you
Was supping a cup of poison.
Come, my healer, it's my final hour.
Your love has made me dance all over.

*
That one makes me smile. :)

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Shall we have a bit of good old St. John of the Cross, on this fine Sunday?

Love's Living Flame
 
O Love’s living flame,
Tenderly you wound
My soul’s deepest center!
Since you no longer evade me,
Will you, please, at last conclude:
Rend the veil of this sweet encounter!

O cautery so tender!
O pampered wound!
O soft hand! O touch so delicately strange,
Tasting of eternal life
And canceling all debts!
Killing, death into life you change!

O lamps of fiery lure,
In whose shining transparence
The deep cavern of the senses,
Blind and obscure,
Warmth and light, with strange flares,
Gives with the lover’s caresses!

How tame and loving
Your memory rises in my breast,
Where secretly only you live,
And in your fragrant breathing,
Full of goodness and grace,
How delicately in love you make me feel!

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A fine poem for a fine Sunday. thank you! do you know this Loreena song? A Love Story - The Dark Night

Love,

Nicole

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Lisa, those are both really cool. I am not familiar with Bulleh Shah at all. “Your love has made me dance all over” is a particularly great line.

He was a real character. Listen to this:

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Hi David,
Ha, that is hilarious, and excellent. I really like the sound of Bulleh Shah. Sounds like a top character, and what a poem. I love this line, it is the fuel:
                        'the fire of separation is unceasing!'

They know it. The list of metaphors is getting sufficiently out of control, to which we must now add 'sipping cup's of poison', and torture. :) When love is stumbled into like this that can produce such depths of passion, and aliveness in verse, that is love a la proper. It makes the type of emotion we usually associate with love and that humans usually go hunting for when they feel lonely, seem very silly. 

I reckon that real love, when it knocks on your door hunts you down. You don't look for it, it appears, and your heart is suddenly ripped out of your chest. :)

Back to Bulleh. It amazes me, that little tale of dressing up as a woman, recognising the devotion, and demonstrating it for his teacher. :) Those sufi love ponderers are second to none! Very funny too, that he called his teacher 'The thug of Lahore.' :)

*
Thanks for that video, Nicole. It was extremely sweet.

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Hi Y'all good people :)

Check out Abida Parveen singing some Bulleh Shah. Brillant watching someone dishing it out straight from the heart, with such cool drumming.

Really liking this little gem:

The Glow of Your Presence

Where have you taken your sweet song?
Come back and play me a tune.

I never really cared for the things of this world.
It was the glow of your presence
that filled it with beauty.
Hafiz (1320 - 1389)

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She can wail! Is this the same tune?

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I don't think so, at least to my ears. But it's a nice catchy one to sing too, don't you think? Ah but that wailing. It gets me every time. :)

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Yeah…same poet different poem.

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That put me in a trance, Lisa.  :)

It was even more intense the second time I listened to it, because the first time I wasn't really paying attention to the subtitles but just listening to the sounds.

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That was so beautiful, David. Hauntingly so.

Lets have some Emily Dickinson, who is surprising me at the moment:

LOVE'S BAPTISM

I'm ceded, I've stopped being theirs;
The name they dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church,
Is finished using now,
And they can put it with my dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools
I've finished threading too.

Baptized before without the choice,
But this time consciously, of grace
Unto supremest name,
Called to my full, the crescent dropped,
Existence's whole arc filled up
With one small diadem.

My second rank, too small the first,
Crowned, crowing on my father's breast,
A half unconscious queen;
But this time, adequate, erect,
With will to choose or to reject.
And I choose – just a throne.

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Lisa, those are really great. The first one is surely one of the best ever, don't you think? The second one is just as beautiful.

I opened a book about Emily Dickinson earlier and found some great things I thought I might post, but I didn't mark the place. Then when I just opened it again I found another really amazing poem! So which to post?

I will post two:

Flowers — Well — if anybody
Can the ecstasy define —
Half a transport — half a trouble —
With which flowers humble men:
Anybody find the fountain
From which floods so contra flow —
I will give him all the Daisies
Which upon the hillside blow.

Too much pathos in their faces
For a simple breast like mine —
Butterflies from St. Domingo
Cruising round the purple line —
Have a system of aesthetics —
Far superior to mine.

~     ~     ~

This is a Blossom of the Brain —
A small — italic Seed
Lodged by Design or Happening
The Spirit fructified —

Shy as the Wind of his Chambers
Swift as a Freshet's Tongue
So of the Flower of the Soul
Its process is unknown —

When it is found, a few rejoice
The Wise convey it Home
Carefully cherishing the spot
If other Flower become —

When it is lost, that Day shall be
The Funeral of God,
Upon his Breast, a closing Soul
The Flower of our Lord —


~     ~     ~

Are you familiar with Maria Sibylla Merian? There was a picture of hers in the book I was looking at, and I googled her name and saw all kinds of amazing things. Here is the picture in the book, though it may come out a little small here:

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They really are amazing aren't they. They have the quality that somebody on fire captures perfectly. I never really got acquainted with Emily Dickinson's poetry so I am having a field day, really. Loves Baptism, the first one up there is so profound to me, that yep, it is perhaps one of the best I've ever read, in meaningfulness.
That was another lovely one. They really are like cherries straight off the divine tree. :) Beautiful.
I've never heard of Maria Sibylla Merian. What a gorgeous picture, perfect for the poetry, I will have to have a look at some more. Thanks

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I love the line, “Bashful, sip thy jasmines.” That poem is amazing once you sink into it, an amazing vision. She is as good as D. H. when it comes to insects and flowers.  :) I remember a good animal poem of hers, too. The book I am looking at is focused almost entirely on her flower poems. She has great people poems, too, of course, and mystic ones. It is great when all that comes together in one poem like “Love's Baptism.”

This book I'm looking at (The Gardens of Emily Dickinson) has all these great snippets here and there, mostly to do with flowers and butterflies and such: