LOVE and HEART

LOVE… HEART... Hate is Love from a Disappointed Heart

As a boy, I watched Superman on TV. O to be able to fly… to fly faster than light into deep space!.. to let bullets bounce off my chest, to leap over skyscrapers… to land in front of and stop speeding trains… O to overpower that which is bad with big bulging muscles! Upon receiving a Superman suit replete with red authentic superpowered cape… an urban myth relates how a boy after donning it… attempted to fly. He jumped off a roof. I have to confess, flying like Superman was to my super-stimulated imagination a possibility and super tempting.

The point here is the human imagination. Is our ability to fantasize alternate realities… and believe and act as if they are real. I am well aware that nearly the whole of the human paradigm is the stuff of fiction, of make-belief. Human civilization is the melding of imagination into belief systems. Such is how humans become civilized. Our groupthink, our mass-belief overlays a hallucinatory faux-reality upon that which is actuality here as space and time and Earth. Today, Friday February 14th is Valentine’s Day, in the year of your Lord 2025.Me, a hedge fund web designer, I am feeling guilty stuck here across the border in Windsor, Canada… why haven’t I wired a card and flowers? O these damn time zones are so confusing and anyway it is an American holiday. I don’t have any Canadian Dollars. Should I transfer some Satoshi’s into Pounds to let my wife who is in Glasgow consulting with the British government on establishing a new maritime preserve know I love her?

Ah, love. I use the word “love” a lot in my verse. And the word “heart”. Do these nouns name two actual realities? Or are they the product of our ability to imagine and believe in fanciful conceptualizations? I am never entirely comfortable using either word. But they are convenient. They assume a lot. They are nebulous, nuanced, and a bit fantastic. English has a dearth of terms for higher inner states… unlike Sanskrit… which has a half-dozen or so terms for the sensations we lump together as love.

What is “love”? What is “heart”?

I surmise we moderns have inherited these conceptions of “love” and “heart” from the ancients. It seems likely that the intuitive reasoning of the ancient Greek and Arabic cultures came to the notion that the physical heart produces “love”. Yes, feelings seem to be centered in the chest and do have a bit to do with blood flow and heart rate. But, still, actually it’s just a metaphor. That our pumping hearts produce a substance that is “love” is fanciful... it is fantastic but intuitively believable. In reality, the chemical/hormonal brain/body messaging systems that produce the sensations of emotion and feeling are messy… are not simple and sweet and able to be rendered with emojis. Such doesn’t make it on to Hallmark cards:

“Please secrete Oxytocin for me. I am secreting for you”.

“Heart” serves well as a metaphor and does lend itself as a platform for higher, inspired sentiments. It is the home-base for that critter we call “love”. It allows us a shortcut… allows us to quickly paint with a broad-brush our inner feeling. For the likes of a poet, or for that matter, a scientist, the use of the word “love”… the myriads of notions conveyed… is fraught. Liking, lust, attachment, appreciation, affirmation, admiration, affinity, empathy, fondness, dependency all fall into love’s big bucket. Me, I have used… misused… confused… “love” … used it to elevate what was my lust. I have seriously abused it as a hyperbole for the word “like”. Of course, listening… listen to many a “love-song” and what you’ll hear in reality are lust-songs or co-dependency songs:

“O my Darling, I love your kisses so. O my Love, you will remain in my heart forever”

Is there an accurate definition of love? No, nope, nada, I don’t think so. Dictionaries all refer to such as the above list of synonyms. I would like to offer one. Love is the experience of an essence inherent in the act of being alive. It is within life, it is within breath… it is a default… it is within consciousness’s engagement with living, with creation. It is involved with the creating force, it is the fundamental motivator… it is the inspired enthusiasm at our cores. It is innate. And we perceive it when our brains focus upon it. We are “touched by love”. When we are stirred by this innate enthusiasm, we feel… feel the bump, feel the high. The biological reality is that as we focus that essence and then “feel”. Feeling happens as our neurons are prompted to release a cocktail of messaging chemicals, and we become moved… we are inspired/we “love”. Is “love” just the doings of oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, et all? My answer is, “Yes and no”. Lust, liking, empathy, and such… are reactions to situations and are manufactured by the brain. They involve the doings of neurotransmitters, but they are not the experience of our inherent forceful essence. What shines from the eyes of a baby, what is held in the eyes of one’s dog (and oh especially puppies) attest to that inherent essence.

A friend once joked he was a “love gun”… and the joke did not refer to his libido. He was what people would call a super loving guy… a guy full of love... of touchy, feelie, huggee love. The force within him, that quality of unqualified love, that which empowers, elevates… he had chosen to put front and center… to use it full bore. He and, yes, we… we all continually tap into it. Our beings use it like a love-gun… or better said, as a love beam. Or so I experience. And as I experience my self, I am accessing, I am channeling consciousness as this beam of love. Sentience focuses our naturally enthused consciousness into a beam of perception and cognition. A film projector comes to mind. Light photons are an essential component of reality. A movie camera records these photons as images of reality. In a theater, the projector focuses a brilliance thru the recorded images… and we watch an artful film… watch absorbed in its reality. The metaphor goes that as light is the essence of film, our innate enthusiasm, or “love”, is the essence with which we focus awareness thru to perceive qualities of reality. Yes, for me, anybody… everybody… for me I see we all are walking about entirely ecstatically blissed out…. BUT… but unfortunately… to function in civilization, our minds have been normalized to a state of disconnection from being... from the bliss of being. Yup, we are oblivious to our inherently ecstatic hearts/cores.

Being here and now, existing in a state of transcendent focus… such a state holds the experience of that organic default… bliss. And I, among many others, am a practitioner of the art of consciously focusing on the experience. Having been initiated in the practice of Self-Knowledge, I know this primal enthusiasm, this pure “love”… I know this within me as the divine. I have found this state of transcendence is rooted in the timeless. Here in the timeless is the ecstatic home of consciousness … here steady on is the love emanating from one’s core. Here awakened, here knowing the inherent feeling of life… here is the intersection with the immortal divine. Yes, it is maintained that consciousness is a universality… is inherent to all of creation. I would go so far as to suppose that consciousness is that very enthusiastic essence embedded in, is a quality of the progenitor of spacetime. Creation is an ecstasy! Yes, our sentience channels ecstasy, channels the divine. Creation has an intention.

The Greek word Enthuse translates to “to be infused with the divine” (yup those intuitive philosophers!) Consciousness feels, craves life’s primal love. The Big Bang (or the on-going Small Bang if you subscribe to the alternative theory)… can be thought of as an outburst of enthusiasm. Life has arrived as an expression of this enthusiasm. Our dear brains, our flesh, and O, all of the gazillions of our fellow species are expressions of creation’s eager intent. Operating with intelligence…. being possessed with subtle feedback loops and a prodigious apparatus to record and remember, we are fashioned with a height of self-awareness. We are capable of comprehending, or better, “feeling”, creation’s intent. With training, we may focus on this intent within us. Breath rises and falls… rises and falls enthused with the “love of life”. Yes, we are capable of comprehending, engaging, uniting with the divine.

And the definition of divine is?... is? one might ask? Currently it seems vague, mystical, anthropomorphic, and fraught. What the divine is, for me, is not what religions would have us believe. To me, the divine is a fact… is a tangible fact like sunlight is a tangible fact. Over the millennia… millennia fraught with superstitious conceptualizations… the notion of divinity has become a clusterfuck of confusions. We have been led (as usual) by the murk of wishful, anthropocentric, fantastical thinking… have been led by a patriarch of self-serving assumptions and dogma. In the monotheistic religions, God the Almighty, God the Creator, God the Lord is the one and only divine… is the divinity who is as a magical (male) super-human… is mysteriously ominous and is quite beyond our frail comprehension. As HIS humble creations we need but to worship and fear HIM as an all-seeing, all-knowing, fate-dealing Father. This is mass belief at its most delusional … this is an insane manipulation of our imaginations. That the divine is an Elsewhere… that HE is a supreme and separate entity who exists away in some other elsewhere of a kingdom… that HE is the omnipresent, omniscient arbitrator of the living... and that HE is our Overlord is an aberration of the actuality…. of the truly kinder, gentler, organic actuality. Obey HIS laws or be screwed forever! Such a slippery slope. It gets so funky. So many believe in such a God and in the reward (for a life of disconnected suffering) of a forever afterlife in an imagined paradise (with no suffering)… believe that the divine has designated a correct and narrow way to interacting with HIM… and that believers must follow unquestioningly what has been revealed to be HIS rules (revealed to whom?).

In polytheistic religions, divinity is a realm wherein divine beings reside. They are magical spirits that control the world we humans occupy. These divinities have powers which influence existence positively or negatively. Worshipped, they are beseeched, usually with bribes (via priests), to intercede on one’s behalf. Hey, ya, sketchy… ya so funky, so purely mind control… ya, so witheringly repressively socially controlling.

The Divine, rather, is the beingness of everything… is the grand IS, is the timeless singularity from which, in which the Big Bang imploded… is the creative essence, is the potentiality of the quantum field’s probabilities… is that which was before our universe and will be after… is that which presents as spacetime… is that which presents as the here and now… this… call it the I AM, call it Buddtha, call it the Great Spirit if such helps clarify it... this is the divine. It is the Source that is unformed, is what becomes formed and empowers. And thus, it is what is us (and all). It is within us and perceivable to us (no scary capitalized creepy peeping-tom of a HIM needed). It is like the pressure within pipes of water… it is as electric potential is to an electric motor. The divine is not so mysterious. The divine is the essence we experience as love. Stepping back, back into the big, the largest, the grand picture… into the whole… the fact of the divine is obvious. It is obvious. To say the divine is what IS… and as such, is within everything is much like declaring everything the ocean is., does contain water. With one’s cognition attuned to perceive, the divine is a reality like the air we breathe. I think few theoretical physicists would go so far as to call their notion of the progenitor of quantum events the divine, but it seems but a matter of terminology. Yes, the divine is beyond the measure and mathematics of science, but yes, the divine, as I have mentioned, is directly experiential… is viscerally realizable. And as a practitioner of Self-Knowledge, I have come to realize that consciousness… that consciousness is of the divine and is with the divine. Consciousness belongs to the divine. The realm of consciousness is the realm of the divine. The implications of this are beauteous and joyful. But elaborating is not for this treatise. The Hindu and Buddhist saints have written volumes over the centuries about this intersection of the divine within us (just in case you are game for scriptural reads).

Love, love, love… is the enthusiasm, is the enthusiastic primal intent that is the divine. And our imagined “hearts” are its imagined home. I love being alive and as such, I love all that has been created. I love mosquitos (but I’ll kill any I can… my biological duty).I love bacteria, fungi, and algae. I love bull-briars and poison ivy. I love gophers, round worms, sharks. I love you my readers, and I love all you others… love even you who act as antagonists. I am alive and the force of life necessitates… it is organic, it is the default state of consciousness. Again, take note of the innate and innocent love-light in the eyes of babies and dogs. It is the primal intent. They and I, we the living focus the divine within. Alive, we cannot help but be this light of consciousness.

Know, I do not love your mind… I cannot love your mind… I can’t love your mind’s opinions… I can’t love your behavior (however pleasurable to me). Your mind manufactures, controls these…I can only like or dislike them. Love is unable to enter the realm of ideas and thoughts. Our temporal minds are the creation of our brains. The imaging, thinking, discriminating realm of our “selves” is not real… it does not exist in spacetime… it is a figment of a voice within us. It is a tool created by our biology. Our brains have fabricated this conception we perceive as our selves. It is the reactive processing function of our neural networks. Yes, our thoughts may lead us to ideas of the divine, but they can’t, will never be able to enter into the actual divine experience… into the experience of being presence. Love enters there; life’s enthusiasm lives there. (take note therapists)

To be… to be is to be in love… being is loving. What our minds often call love is the reactive feelings we generate toward what inspires us. The stuff of thoughts disconnects us from being… from being in the moment, from loving. To perceive and merge with one’s presence, with one’s state of love… with one’s essence… is to merge with the divine. For the living, this is the reason… this is the purpose. One will never arrive at the timeless Source, the Whole through reasoning, logic, thinking. With self-knowledge and proper focus comes the conscious union. And this state produces a liberating, joyous, grateful feeling. All life is primed with this enthused intent, with this divine relationship. Being there is as easy as breathing… getting there for our minds is a hard surrender. 

Jai Satchidananda! Hail the truth within consciousness… consciousness is bliss!