Tag Archives: love

Change, Fear and Hope

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All is always in flux. Change is really all that is permanent. We have two attitudes to this. In one, we are backward looking. We want to slow or stop change, to live in the past. This leads to life full of fear. We are nonetheless dragged along with the movement of all that is. I guess there is another approach, which is to bury our head and anaesthetise ourself. Drink, drugs, materialism..

The other approach is to dive in to the flow and look forward with hope, expecting good. This does require us to abandon and live at least partly outside our ego – becoming willingly identified with all others. Effectively to love our neighbour as ourselves.

None of us, certainly not me, find this easy. But it seems to me that this is at least an aspiration..

Self and Reincarnation

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I understand that the “illusion of self” is a central tenet of Buddhism? It seems to me that this (the self) is an appearance of stability and boundary that arises out of continuous flow. This is borrowed directly from David Bohm ( “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”). John Dewey put it like this ;“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action” .

Why then, and on what basis do Buddhists conceive of re-incarnation. What is being re-incarnated? No soul, no self. What then keeps coming back? This seems to me to be a fundamental inconsistency which arises out of focus on boundary rather than wholeness.

Surely, if self is an illusion – then this is a release from self, itself?! Indeed a release from death. What is not there in the first place cannot presumably cease thereafter?

Teilhard de Chardin would have it that all of matter is evolving toward consciousness. Separately he has it that there will be an “Omega Point” where each realises that we are all-in-all to each other – and that all energy is Love and God.

In that case surely our “self” is an illusion. We are already part of what Martin Buber would call the “eternal Thou”. We only have to realise it. Put another way, for Buber our “I” does not exist except in relation to “Thou” – with a reality of “I-Thou” that opens us to our relationship with the “eternal Thou” (I think I have that right?). In that case our “self” doesn’t exist. Indeed ignoring the “Thou” only gets you to a kind of Freudian thinking – “I-It” materialism –  the self-reflective dead end of narcissism.

So. I am attracted to Buddhism, but don’t buy their take on reincarnation; or at least I don’t understand it. More work to be done!

Martin Buber, love and dialogue

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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.

I think that love and dialogue are closely intertwined ..

Genuine dialogue is about meeting, arising from mutual awareness. This can happen even as two strangers 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.

Is this not a call to dialogue, which is after all a direct way to become fully aware of our neighbour. A deep awareness which is a form of mindfulness. A mind full of the other and thus a way to expand your horizon.

This sharing of horizons is really a form of love itself. A Love which (I believe) underlies all of 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

My Daughter

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(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

We are together in no time

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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.

Dialogue, Love and Joy

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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

Liberal Love

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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

Little Gidding

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“All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” Little Gidding TS Eliot

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

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“The river is within us, the sea is all about us” Dry Salvages TS Eliot

“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

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In my end is my beginning.

East Coker Church
“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