Comments on: How can you stretch your dollars?

By: Tim Boucher

Tim Boucher — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 09:18:20 +0000

Holy shit

By: Lilith

Lilith — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 03:24:01 +0000

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.

By: mars

mars — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 03:09:23 +0000

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.

By: mars

mars — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 02:54:09 +0000

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.

By: Happiness You Can Eat! - Pop Occulture

Happiness You Can Eat! - Pop Occulture — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 02:53:08 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: Lilith

Lilith — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 02:14:43 +0000

This is really why self initiation sucks, no one to answer all these damn questions.

By: Lilith

Lilith — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 01:57:54 +0000

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.

By: Tim Boucher

Tim Boucher — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:27:21 +0000

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

By: speedbird

speedbird — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 08:09:55 +0000

‘S’not a pretentious question.

I’m wit mars: the two are intertwined. Which probably sounds like a pretentious answer.

By: Brooke

Brooke — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 05:44:55 +0000

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:

itâ€™s both, and itâ€™s too painful and impossible to cut them apart.

or rather, I do understand it, it just doesn’t make me feel any better. but then, the real answers usually don’t.

By: mars

mars — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 05:14:24 +0000

Whatâ€™s more important, True Love for One Personâ„¢ of just the Beautiful Divine Experience of Love at Largeâ„¢?

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.