There is a love which underlies our individual lives. Love which forms the very fabric or the world, which is waiting to hold us – together. Waiting, waiting for us to stop competing one with the other and to realise that we are not alone. Underlying and beyond rivalry is a commonwealth of security and joy. Let us look to that..
Carl Jung was right! This one minute video explains…
I am convinced of the one-ness of the universe, and our continuing eternal changing place in it. It is indivisible.
Why then are we born into this existence – thrown into it – with a boundary all around us?. Leastways, as tiny babies we don’t feel separate from our mother; yet alone-ness is the harsh lesson of “growing up”. Separated. Divided from others, and with a yearning to reach out for love and comfort across the boundary of our ego. To touch others and so re-experience the joy of connection and integration. This is fleeting though, at least for those of us who are not able to escape the prison of our embodied ego.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave us an insight. In early works (The Structure of Behaviour, The Phenomenology of Perception) he considered our embodiment as the way we become ourselves in the world. Reflecting that world whilst also creating it through that process of mirroring.
In his last work – the Visible and Invisible – he took embodiment further still. It take this to be a concept of the “flesh” (chaire) of all that is within which this mutual reflective creative process occurs.
I don’t understand the fine detail of what this all means, and I’d love to hear the views of others. However, it does seem to me that here is a kernel of the mystery. Perhaps rather than Visible and Invisible it could be – Divisible yet Indivisible?
Fortune
I was lucky because I had a stable loving family and 3 elder siblings
Misfortune
Alas, my siblings were all brothers, I was sent to a boys boarding school and so never understood girls. I thought they were were out of reach. On a pedestal and an object of physical desire.
(I didn’t realise that the urgent need was for real relationship).
My Mum was one of five sisters, so also was a little out of tune with little boys and girls and reality…
Miss Fortune
Isn’t it brilliant then that my wife and daughter and son (a gentle-man) have helped me.
If you keep hoping then good news finds you, Thank you Miss Fortune.
With time comes loss, and its companion. Grief. Suppose this is just an illusion? Imagine a different perspective if you will. Suppose that time is, as in the words of TS Eliot “eternally present”, and that to be conscious is to be outside time. This is not some crazy notion, indeed Einstein showed that time and space are one – space-time, and that time is relative. For instance as you go faster, so time slows. Many phsyicists and philosophers also subscribe to “panpsychism”, which holds that all of the universe and all matter and energy is conscious. Reality is just more than we normally perceive it to be..
If then all time is then eternally present, then it is our experience which designates it as a flow. It is one perspective amongst many.
I prefer the reality. Every moment is eternal. So then, my brother and my mother and father are still with me at tea in the sunshine of my childhood garden. Always, and no less true than this particular moment sitting alone in a park in a foreign northern city.
Without time – outside time – in our shared consciousness all of these fragments are with me in our treasure house and library.
This is a point of view that also calls me to live fully and lovingly, since also the ripple of my unkind actions remain. Always.
(how I love you)
Smile and the world smiles upon you
In mirrored reflection of joy
Words weighted and precious as dew
From you then, as a boy
Supple-muscled lithesome and deft
Your kindness unfolding to strength
Your life an high arc-flighted ball
Both the speed and the length
Your mouth-curving happiness gifts
Quick flowing compassion for all
A tide-race of laughter that lifts
Smallness up to be tall
Rythmic and upbeat engagement
Your motto “We will, and we can”
Scottish Bass Rock protectively
Noble you gentle-fine-man
(how I love you)
You join up the dots of the stars my love
With your patterned impassionate being
Reflecting below what’s mirrored above
Rich-sequined your fabric of feeling
Casually spendthrift the joy that you’ve sewn
Causally spindrift, engagingly freed
Harvesting concepts, organically grown
Wittily warm anthropological creed
The gilded arpeggio of moonlight
Which butterfly soft-wings your thinking
Fritillary froth-daffled the insight
Of your Mesopotamian a-musing
disarmingly charmingly, conspiring
In a furnace of creative inquiring
I find this poem from Dylan Thomas immensely comforting. It speaks with hope and glory of death and of his vision of rebirth.
Thomas wrote intensely about life of unity, relationality and process. In his introduction to Thomas’ Collected poems John Goodby puts it like this:
“According to the ‘process’ view of the world, we are not merely born to die, or even know that we are dying as we live; conception itself is a death, ‘the golden shot’ of semen ‘Storms in the freezing tomb’ of the womb. The embryo dies in being born into the world, and elbows other beings into the grave; but their deaths are, conversely, ‘entrances’ into the life of decay and re-entry into the natural cycle. Thomas horrifyingly compresses what is ordinarily drawn out, as if in some time-lapse film, while continually contracting and expanding a poem’s scale of reference from the microscopic to the cosmic. Fusing zygotes ‘unwrinkle in the stars’, ‘clocking tides’ pulse in the blood, manifesting the amoral ‘force’ which surges through the universe, and to which everything must submit. Linear time is yet another illusion; for Thomas it is as relative as anything else, and he finds equivalence between conception, gestation, adolescence and death in poems such as ‘From love’s first fever’. From cosmic flux to quantum foam, the only certainty is that there is no certainty: even energy is matter, matter energy, and time and space are spacetime”
Imagine
.. that there is no time. Rather perhaps, there is only all time. A rich and fertile landscape of meaning and sunlit connection.
This is the glorious loving immensity from which we cower within our fortress. Behind walls which we have fashioned from our insecurities, in our solitary confinement away from from all that is. Looking out from our our lonely turrets we see a long avenue which we call “the past”, and in the other direction a hazy road named “future”. Both of these vistas appear to fragment at distance. The past appearing as a river with many tributaries dissolving into mists, the future fanning into possibilities that shiver with terror, excitement and danger.
Imagine
.. that you step outside the walls that we have built. There are no roads, no journey, no loneliness and nothing to fear. All is now in the embrace of every present. Every way, always.
Loss and separation? These do not exist. All of our mothers, daughters and sons are here with us. And all of theirs withall. Here, close within my heart. And I am with them. It is separation and loneliness and fear that seem odd, from this perspective outside the prison that our body’s ego has made.
A new question arises within me.
Since I am part and also a-part, what is this boundary that distinguishes but also enjoins? This division that falls away on blessed occasion so that we are at home with each other. If that is the question, here is a prayer. Let these moments gather and coalesce so that I feel our ocean rather than the raindrop within which most often I have lived.
The great existentialist philosopher – Martin Buber – speaks about dialogue and distinguishes it from love. I have included some quotes at the end of this note from his 1929 essay “Zwiesprache” (Dialogue) below, together with a short note about Buber and Jesus.
Here is my thought
Genuine dialogue is about meeting, arising from mutual awareness. This can happen even as two stranges glance at each other in passing. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant by “Love thy neighbour as thyself”; that is, become as fully aware of and in sympathy with your neighbour as you are with yourself. This perhaps also applies to Jesus’ second injunction about how we should love God (with all our heart).
Are these two commandments a call to dialogue?; so that we become fully aware of, and turned toward our neighbour. This is something one could then practice, something similar to mindfulness. I have always wondered how you could just conjour up “love” as a feeling, an affect. There are so many of us now who do NOT love ourselves. How then can we ‘love another as ourself”?
Whereas perhaps we can more easily practice becoming fully aware of our neighbour. That might indeed be the road to love; a Love which is the joy that I believe underlies all creation.
As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says
“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God”.
Three types of dialogue. In his 1929 essay Buber describes dialogue as genuine meeting with full awareness. He developed this later (I and Thou,1937) into a whole philosophy of relation; where all meaning is contained in the relationship between (zwischen) people and the “other”. Here is the first quote:
“There is genuine dialogue – no matter whether spoken or silent – where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them. There is technical dialogue, which is prompted solely by the need for objective understanding. And there is monologue disguised as dialogue, in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources.”
Dialogue and love. In the second quote he distinguishes between dialogue and love:
“I know no one in any time who has succeeded in loving every man he met. Even Jesus obviously loved of “sinners” only the loose, lovable sinners, sinners against the Law; not those who were settled and loyal to their inheritance and sinned against him and his message. Yet to the latter as to the former he stood in a direct relation. Dialogic is not be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, and company in with the other, the love remaining with itself – this is called Lucifer”
Buber, Zionism and Jesus. Buber was an intellectual Hasidic Jew. He was a lifelong Zionist, but who strongly disagreed with how the new state was constituted. He thus refused to become the first president of Israel. He “favored a binational state that encompassed and honored both Jewish and Arab ethnicities, and centred on mutual love and respect. He believed that Jesus was the greatest of all Jews and that his message was the flower of judaism. He describes Jesus thus:
“from my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother”
T