You, writer, are here again. Standing at the end of the first month of the year, with the ambition to consistently do something creative and healing here as fresh as it ever was.
Does it stay fresh because I never follow through?
I have ideas. Again. That’s something. I have a thesis – tentative answers to life’s biggest questions: Who am I? Answer: Loving awareness, which I borrowed from Ram Dass after watching him say it about himself while thumbing through his prayer beads. What is my purpose? To love unconditionally.
The latter is debatable. I’ve been practicing for several months now and I’ve realized some things. First, we are not wired to love unconditionally. As organisms, our survival depends on our capacity to make accurate value judgments. I will almost certainly always have that harsh critic voice mumbling in the projection room of my mind as I look for the Divine in everything. Then I have to turn that loving awareness onto the critic (or ego), appreciating her efforts to look out for me so I don’t experience further trauma.
I think of these two as separate consciousnesses sharing the same head-space, like two roommates in a situational comedy, among other archetypal and narrative arrangements. (Anyone up for a romantic sci-fi action comedy musical? Seriously. It’s already in progress and it blows my mind every time I realize it’s actually happening. I mean, there’s not a lot of action happening per se but that’s what fiction is for.)
Christians called unconditional love agape, “the love of God for man and of man for God.” This suggests to me that only a being such as God can love something as flawed as man, and that man can only love purely the purest thing he can conceive of, which is usually some abstraction of divinity. But the Encyclopedia Britannica says, “The term necessarily extends to the love of one’s fellow humans, as the reciprocal love between God and humans is made manifest in one’s unselfish love of others. See also charity.”
See also maitri, the Sanskrit word for “loving kindness.” Buddhists practice this as a form of meditation, beginning by offering unconditional love and forgiveness to yourself and then extending that loving kindness to all other beings, including people or circumstances that cause you to suffer. The thing is that the self can be even harder to love and forgive than that shit, so sometimes you swap the order you do it in.
So unconditional love isn’t this rare holy grail that will remain forever out of reach, though I sometimes act like it is. If there’s anything I have faith in, it’s that the essential nature of all beings is a pure, fully enlightened Buddha.
The thing I saw that surprised me in my practice over the last few months (it makes a difference when you decide that your only purpose in life is to love others without condition) is that unconditional love is foolish. It loves everything indiscriminately. So you can either look smart and cut yourself off, or you can be foolishly in love with everyone and everything.
That’s not right – I see as I’m writing this that I’m going ham on some dualistic thinking. I’m really too stupid to be self-guiding my spiritual quest, but what choice do I have? I ask for teachers, they come, I doubt them and then realize I need to learn how to hear and trust my inner guidance which is a direct link to the Divine, and that flies for a while, but then I’m overwhelmed by everything I don’t know or understand (which is truly everything) and I beg for clarity and teachers and the cycle begins again.
When I wrote the above over a week ago, I had bigger ambitions: to boldly announce that I’ll be giving my life an exciting new narrative structure. I think that’ll probably emerge as I write and post. We’ll have to see. I want my life to be an adventure. On the really good days – of which there are steadily more and more – I’m aware that I’m an advanced primate running amok in a powerful laboratory, with all of reality’s most powerful tools at my disposal. I throw chemicals together to see what happens.
For instance, [redacted]…
Because I’m seriously thinking of doing it. But there’s SO MUCH that could go wrong.
What if I just imagine what it would be like to do it, and put that story here?
BLOG OF RHIANNIMATOR 