This is a companion piece, so best to read the post Doubt-beings beforehand!
I've said I'd use this term love to describe what I'll talk about below, so even though the doubt piece proved that adapting language to new uses can be counter-productive, I'm pressing on. Bear with me!
There is the sense of the word love that follows everyday use, and this is emotional and interpersonal. People mostly love other people - I'll come back to why I think this happens, toward the end. One can talk about loving things, concepts and so forth, but most people recognise that such emotion is inherently different to what people feel about other people.
Although perhaps in one sense, it is not so different. Love is a term that is used in other contexts - I'm thinking of teachings on enlightenment. Love is the Buddha...all is One, and One is love. At least, that's what they tell me. Now this is not emotion, because emotion is a product of the self, it's constrained and relational. And as mentioned, here love is ALL.
Yet it relates to the humble emotion we call love in the day to day. Perhaps what we call love is a snapshot of this great constant Oneness, or better a flash of light through an iris opened by the reduction of the obsession with reflection on the self. True love feels like a very selfless thing. Is it just a play on words to suggest that this is because true love involves the exact same opening of being outward beyond the self, as enlightenment does?
I can't say that without addressing why everyone is not enlightened - most of my readers will know more than I, but anyway...it takes awareness to be enlightened, one must be aware that the self is not real, is an illusion that needs to dissipate - and that awareness is very hard to hold as well, because its a scary thing at first. (This is what I've read, at least. No Buddha am I!)
With regard to the snapshot idea, I am playing with this concept in respect of my own life, trying to see how love can occasionally and spontaneously explode for people and things I have no relationship with, for variable lengths of time and no apparent reason. Or how it can last long past the end of a relationship, although that relationship may have ended acrimoniously. Or how it arises for nothing, just because my state of mind relaxes, my concerns drop away for a moment, and the world around me looks very beautiful. This often happens when travelling - walking or on trains mainly. And a curious thing accompanies - very often I will start to notice a lot more detail about the world, like how the trees beside the path on the way in from the train station to my office are all curved the same way at the base, suggesting when they were saplings the prevaling wind was nor'westerly. Of course, such musings invariably become recursive, and I start to think about my own thought process, and the spell is broken. The self is back. Is this a familiar experience?
This kind of makes me think of what else may be coming through with the emotion of love (as I am describing it. Keep in mind as you read that your own experience - and thus idea - of love is going to be different, so its just a word). If the emotion itself is a window on a constant, does this suggest that the relationship between the self and the emotion is like the opening of a valve? OK, and what does the constant represent? I'm thinking of it like a pure recognition by the right brain of the sublime quality of reality. The whole thing is pretty amazingly put together, I think our best science supports that indubitably (see what I did there?), and art has known it forever. If we consciously get a glimpse of that, its a sublime feeling. Could it be that there is a substantive recognition of intrinsic quality in the Oneness of reality that leaks through as we experience the world without the processing mechanisms of our left-brain filtering system? This idea is not that far from Kant's ideas on aesthetics, as I understand them. It is not a world away from Robert Pirsig's Chautauqua on Quality.
Maybe it gives us another channel from the narrow self-oriented conscious left-brain to the wide-open undifferentiated unconscious right-brain...love as the non-filter, a time-division multiplexed interface with the beauty of reality where doubt (or discrimination, or whatever you want to call it) is frequency-division multiplexed.
...
Coming back around again to the common idea of interpersonal love. A lot is at stake here, as we hardly want to relegate this important facet of our lives to a mere mechanistic working of cognitive functions. So all I'll say is that if the emotion of love is a reflection of this Oneness constant, then falling in love, or loving your family, could be (in operation) a lowering of defenses and a reduction of concerns about the self. You enter willingly into a vulnerable place because you trust the other person you love, and that starts the process of stripping away the illusory trappings of the self and opens you to feeling the reflection of Oneness. You're not becoming enlightened (probably the opposite >:D ), but you actively feel bliss.
But the awareness that this process is beginning isn't present as it is when enlightenment is being sought, and the relationship with the other comes with its own cares, and so the self quickly reasserts itself. And so we get this flash of pure bliss, which is over quickly but cascades into associated positive emotions, and the whole thing is labelled by our categorising left-brain as 'falling in love'. And its great! But it has less to do with this other person, and more to do with our own state, than we think.
...
Final thought - can the self-oriented, analytical left-brain experience be trained toward the state of mind I have been talking about here? Could Flow be a left-brain version of this sort of openness of being? If we had a rigorous knowledge of either one type of experience or the other, we might have a better idea, but as I say (too much) in my work - that is an issue for future work*!
*the academic equivalent phrase to 'that would be an ecumenical matter' :D
Disclaimer: There is NOTHING about thinking this through that bears on the actual experiences involved - no clarity is gained with loved ones, no steps toward enlightenment achieved, no knowing what the next moment of a new relationship might bring. It's only words - but I enjoyed setting them down :)
7 comments:
“Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of you French fries without making them give you any of theirs.”
Chrissy - age 6
See what I mean about the confusion of appropriating language? Because I would say love is when you let someone dip their french fries in your ice cream...nium nium!
I still think you are taking on a tall order trying to describe this stuff. So forgive me if I ramble a bit in an attempt to make some kind of coherent point.
I think what you are trying to describe is that when one places something beyond the narrow definition of self (e.g. my body, my mind, my reputation, etc.) and puts the concerns and feelings of another person/persons* above those, you feel that sensation of "love" (which is ultimately self love, since your concept of self has increased to encapsulate a larger whole, stick with me on that one though).
*Of course, if this is born of attachment to an idea of a person that is in itself illusory, then it is doomed to the same type of break down as all relationships are ultimately. So, to be truly loving is to allow a person 360 degrees of freedom and to never try and make them fit some concept one has of them in ones own mind.
I suppose the love a mother has for her child is similar, since it is always completely selfless (in the narrow view of self I mentioned earlier)...no doubt any feelings of separation a mother might have for a child are hard to build since the child grows and emerges from her womb! (Although I believe there have been cases of mothers rejecting a child when it is born as somehow "other" and hence unable to love it).
I think somewhere in all this is a fundamental property of evolution, for as a mother gives birth to a child, the child and mother are self (the father is also involved as part of the greater self, but I will stick with mother for the reason I mentioned earlier, i.e. the very obvious physical connection). So, in that way the mother is developing a concept of self and passing it on through her progeny. So in many ways, it is self love.
I suppose to be buddha love you must threat all life in this way. No doubt such a path would lead you away from all attachments to family, to loved ones or too any concepts of "self" that are limiting or create boundaries. You would still love all these people, but you could not put them above anyone else.
This led me to a question earlier I asked Ben...in such a scenario I only see one possible reason for continued human interaction. That you accept all the events leading to the current as arbitrary and for the most part the result of choices beyond your own understanding and then begin to live in a completely loving non discriminatory state, but accepting that you must exist within a certain path or light cone (forgive this fluffy terminology) (i.e. walk the line, the middle way or path of least resistance, or whatever you want to call it.)
Or you lie down and die, and hope that you can simply maintain a blissful state, without form, without cause and effect, I suppose you would call it cessation or nirvana.
I cant decide if this state can be reached internally while existing within an external universe of experience (I hope so). Maybe this is where the left brain evolved, to organise the bliss into discrete events, simply out of absence of experience...in which case all events, with this as its source, should be able to maintain that bliss. Whether it is possible to do indefinitely...
Anyway, I am waffling and not making much sense. So I will stop. One other quick point though. Ben, you said:
"Maybe it gives us another channel from the narrow self-oriented conscious left-brain to the wide-open undifferentiated unconscious right-brain...love as the non-filter, a time-division multiplexed interface with the beauty of reality where doubt (or discrimination, or whatever you want to call it) is frequency-division multiplexed."
I don't see why the right has to be time division? I would have thought the left brain was the father of time, the great divider of the moment into discrete units of time. Cronus who ultimately consumes his own children :D
I would say all division, all creation of dimensions above *nun* http://www.egyptianmyths.net/nun.htm
are left brained. Right brain is the undifferentiated, undivided bliss. What a bore though! ;)
"I think what you are trying to describe"
I think that what I was trying to describe is rather lost in the terminology - I only wanted to add some small description of the emotional act of falling in love to differentiate it from the interaction between mind and reality, but it has become the focus...
"I don't see why the right has to be time division? I would have thought the left brain was the father of time, the great divider of the moment into discrete units of time."
Well it's time-divided in the vector of consciousness. I'm thinking of a momentary total grasping of greater reality, which is there and gone almost before the self-conscious mind can realise it happened, but not before it gives a flash of 'insight', or 'inspiration' or just 'bliss'.
This contrasts with the other filter I have described as doubt, because that feeds directly into the self-conscious mind continuously, but it has to cut down the input to allow the mind to cope. So it is more like frequency divided.
I knew I probably shouldn't use Comm. Eng. terminology, but I was lazy!
"Or you lie down and die"
Bear in mind that most teachings of enlightenment claim that it is a form of death, and that the complete annihilation of the self is recognised as immanent the closer you get to it...which causes the self to try and protect itself more and more, through fear and anger.
At least, so I've read.
"fear and anger" :) Well, I have neither to be honest. I hope my attempts at objective analysis do not come across that way!
I do get bored though sometimes so I tend to try and poke fun...
"I think I've learned exactly how the fall occurred in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, and Adam said one day, "Wow, Eve, here we are, at one with nature, at one with God, we'll never age, we'll never die, and all our dreams come true the instant that we have them." And Eve said, "Yeah... it's just not enough is it?" - Bill Hicks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr-Vxu_4ckA
"Maybe this is where the left brain evolved, to organise the bliss into discrete events, simply out of absence of experience...in which case all events, with this as its source, should be able to maintain that bliss. Whether it is possible to do indefinitely..."
This I agree with, and it bears on what I have said I think. Gives me some hope that the way I have envisioned the meta-cognitive processes I have described in these posts was recognisable to others, or jibed with their own thought - and thus is not just delerium!
However, Kris, just before this you say there are two outcomes of assuming Buddhahood.
"accept all the events leading to the current as arbitrary and for the most part the result of choices beyond your own understanding..."
and
"Or you lie down and die, and hope that you can simply maintain a blissful state, without form"
Both of these seem to me extremely passive, and negative in a sense. As a judgement, since we have no authority on subject, it's really a case of agree to disagree. BUT is it not a sign of your negative affect from the concept, which without splitting hairs correlates to fear?
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