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How can you stretch your dollars?
I’ve been wondering something that is going to sound pretentious and totally rhetorical, but so be it. What’s more important, True Love for One Person™ or just the Beautiful Divine Experience of Love at Large™?
Sure it’s just a linguistic distinction, but fuck me if I’m not into language and the ability for us as people to slice down to exactly what we mean when we communicate. I mean I know it’s a fool’s errand, but hey that’s the kind of life I have chosen. The Fool’s Path. Fine, so let’s continue.
Are love for one person and love for God exclusive of one another? That is, because the two things happened at the same time for me in my life, does it mean that this person enabled me to see God’s love or that God’s love enabled me to love this other person? I mean I totally know it’s a moot point and you’re just rolling your eyes and being like, “Fuck this guy, get over it already.”
But I still feel like the question is an important one. When you tap into the massive reserves of love flowing out of the wellsprings of God or whatever you want to call it, just how exactly do you know what’s what? I mean, say - hypothetically - that you have one or several interlocking transcendent experiences of God which fill you with Boundless Joy™ and Overflowing Love™, well how do you go about bridging that back into the so-called “ordinary world?”
There are no guidebooks for this sort of thing and I feel like I am foundering.
Every little thing catches you in its eddie as it passes. Any sign, any hand signal, any moth fluttering its wings thousands of miles away affects you to the minutest substratum of your being. And so you hold on. To what? To what. To the shards of the ark you built as it disperses upon the quieting waves about you. You kick, you push, you paddle on.
I now know what the Second Temptation™ is and how to pass it. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you pass it the same way you pass all the other ones. You listen to your heart. It knows you better than you know you. How many more there are on this road I don’t know. How many behind me is as equally impossible to say. What was ever Temptation™ to begin with and what was ever Necessary Life Lesson Learned™, who can ever say? You make decisions, you live with them. But what are you behind all of them? What’s the essence of you interpenetrating all these moments? Here’s me. Here’s me. Watch out.
Ooh, three runes ill-divined. Watch out!
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June 8th, 2007 at 12:14 am
It’s only now that I can even pull the two apart. And it’s only my point of view, others’ variage may mily. We all know that. But, the first. Every answer to every question (and everything is an answer to everything’s questions) in my life has changed over time, except that one. It doesn’t seem to make any sense, as an answer, and I don’t know why it is that it’s always the same. It’s the first, and it’s both, and it’s too painful and impossible to cut them apart. Sometimes it lets you think you have, when carrying them both is starting to tire your arms.
You sound like you’re sorting things out, at least. I love the last paragraph.
June 8th, 2007 at 12:44 am
Damn it Tim. No rolling eyes. It’s a fucking good question, and I don’t know the answer.
mars, I didn’t understand yours, except maybe for this part:
or rather, I do understand it, it just doesn’t make me feel any better. but then, the real answers usually don’t.
June 8th, 2007 at 3:09 am
‘S’not a pretentious question.
I’m wit mars: the two are intertwined. Which probably sounds like a pretentious answer.
June 8th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Intertwining seems like the bhakti/devotional answer. One triggers the other but the point I think may be that the glimpse Love For One Person gives you of total unconditional love must then be used as the building block for applying that to the entire world, and most importantly to your self as well. Something something
June 8th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Ok, some quick poorly ordered thoughts:
We exist in matter with the potential of the divine. We are the microcosm within the macrocosm. Love exemplifies this longing to realize the divine within us and to help others realize their potential, as well. Love helps us to find a relationship between the two worlds we live in.
It’s this movement upward toward finer and finer senses that we ascend, we come closer to God through love’s prompting our own abilities to create love, first on the physical plane, then on correspondingly finer planes in the creation of works of art, a piece of literature, to a relationship, to ourselves.
I believe Love relationships have a special potential in developing spirituality, for in searching for and recognizing the divine within your beloved, you discovers the divine in yourself, and come to recognize that in all its forms, divinity is one and the same. I know that sounds horribly New Agey, but Love itself is the process, not the end in itself, acting as our conduit to the divine.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
This is really why self initiation sucks, no one to answer all these damn questions.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
[…] Last night I got to wondering along another very rhetorical line of questioning: how do you know if you’re ever really experiencing someone else? I mean, aren’t we always actually experiencing our own experience of someone else? How can we ever know if it’s really them or if for them we are ever really us? Poltergeist activity usually takes place when a particular individual is present - usually young teenagers at puberty who has emotional problems. A poltergeist is often thought of as a negative spirit attracted to these teenagers. Due to hormonal and emotional changes in the teenager’s body, negative energy may be thrust outwardly sometimes moving or destroying objects telekinetically. […]
June 8th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
I think Lilith and Tim have it. Intertwining is maybe not the best word. More like they’re laid one on top of the other, where Love For One Person is a translucent sheet covering Divine Experience of Love beyond. The former is always, in some way or another, temporary, and the latter eternal. It goes away, and you’re left with transcendent love. But you can’t, like, peel it off or pick exactly where one begins or ends. Sort of like just bleeding through each other, while not necessarily being one thing.
But yeah. Love For One Person triggers something, allows you to open up and see the Love of Divine Love for Love, and then you run with that. Or dance with it. Drink wine during a thunderstorm with it. Push it on a swing set. Something like that. It is a good question, and I feel like there are right and wrong answers, just not the same ones for every person.
June 8th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Oh, wait, I never explained why I value Romantic Love more than Divine Love. It was late or something when I posted. I don’t know. My brain’s been riding the railroad around the milky way. I told it to bring me souvenirs, but it’ll totally forget.
Anyway, it’s nothing fancy. It’s because with romantic love, there’s a person, right there, in front of you, and not a transcendent ideal ultimate reality, and you can touch them, and it’s real and more immediate than the love of the Divine. It’s like (to totally kill the romance) food. It’s closer to where you (read: I) are now, and you (I) just need it more. And the Divine’s not in any hurry.
I guess the trick is to integrate them more, and broaden your definitions of both as you go along. Sort of a let the love of the Divine dance with the love of the earthly and try not to be too stingy about it all thing. Well, we can try.
June 8th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Think of romantic love, like a set of training wheels on a bike, during our childhood we experience love of family or group based on the beloved offering a sense of safety, ie maternal love or paternal love. Romantic love is our first experience of flying without a net, the values we’ve assigned to love change, it grows as we grow.
June 9th, 2007 at 4:18 am
Holy shit