Carl Jung was right! This one minute video explains…
Aligning Feeling and Thinking
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Tag Archives: gigglinginthegutter
My Daughter
(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
Dialogue, Love and Joy
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”.
Buber quotes
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
The Dry Salvages
This penultimate poem in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets points to meaning, that lies in “the intersection of timeless with time”. Most of us only glimpse this in fragments of epiphany. These are what Eliot calls “the moment in and out of time” such as “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts”. These are the same flashes of insight to which Martin Buber refers in his 1937 book “Ich und Du” (I and Thou), where boundary dissolves and we feel joined to each other, nature or spirit.
Liberal Love
Liberal societies are healthy streams. Free flowing, oft times turbulent – but with a clarity and purity of involvement and liquid cohesion.
These are though under threat from two directions – Capitalism above, and Nationalism below.
Capitalism freezes flow and movemeent; cutting communities off from the clear air and creating false inward reflections and strange refracted images from the external world (where others are walking on the icy outer surface).
And below, Nationalism – the stirring of the rotting sediment of dead fears. Racism, an appeal to the worst archetypes of the other. Muddying and reducing visibility, so that all are trapped in isolation and separation.
How do we keep the liberal stream flowing, with our eye on the common good of shared humanity?
Whatever your faith – look to wisdom from our ancestors.
“ Love your neighbour as your self” Christ
“those who worship Me with love and devotion are very close to Me, and I am also very close to them” Bhagavad-Gita
Narcissism and Loneliness
Research discussed in Psychology Today from 2017 indicates that narcissism appears to be linked to reduced emotional empathy and feelings of loneliness. (Link to article below). It seems, if I understand it properly, that this all flows from a state called “borderline personality organisation”, where our sense of self is unstable or threatened. I take it that this leads then to narcissism as a kind of retreat or defensive mechanism.
This is an odd thought for this day which celebrates and reflects the ultimate act of emotional empathy and love and connection. I wonder why I was drawn to that article. No matter. Happy Easter! X
Little Gidding
A meditation on the meaning of time and the timeless. Imagine that time is a mirage, and that we already exist eternally and are infinitely connected. Our ego traps us into believing that we are separate, that all is material and that – heaven help us – we are the centre of everything. I can occasionally step outside my “self” – and there lies peace and belonging and joy.
You?
Dry Salvages
“The distant rote in the granite teeth, and the wailing warning from the approaching headland are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner rounded Howard’s, and the seagull; And under the oppression of the silent fog the tolling bell measures time, not our time, rung by the unhurried ground swell” Dry Salvages TS Eliot
“No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” For Whom the Bell Tolls John Donne
“Time and the bell have buried the day, the black cloud carries the sun away…After the kingfisher’s wing has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still at the still point of the turning world” Burnt Norton TS Eliot
East Coker
In my end is my beginning.
“Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning” TS Eliot
Burnt Norton
“what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous”
Parmenides