Tuesday 24 November 2015

The Greatest Paradox



More on love.

I have been thinking a lot about Love since your blog..I even got asked to do a talk about it...I know you always say that what people come to describe as love cant really be love..because it results in suffering. And that the only true meaning of love must be synonymous with consciousness or Adhikaranam. So I have three questions...


 Looking forward to your truth as always.

A)how can someone challenge or deconstruct their false beliefs about love?

Hi Louis,  A)  The two best possibilities I can see are to learn to understand completely what this word ‘belief’ actually means. It seems that this should not be too difficult yet it turns out to be extremely difficult. The reason for this is that this question about the meaning of belief involves the meaning of all beliefs. So many of our beliefs are so deeply embedded and ‘believed’ that questioning the word belief requires a lot of preparation or work that involves questioning all beliefs. There are some beliefs that most people will never question because to question them would mean questioning our sanity. The other possibility is with love itself and involves a sort of paradoxical intention by starting with the premise that we or the ego is not able to love. If we can accept this then the possibility of finding what love actually is is greatly increased.  As with the first possibility this is a belief that most will find deeply unpalatable or repellent. The ego is completely unable to love and so if we believe we can love and this is not true it becomes impossible to correct. We are not the ego and so in order to find what love is we must first find what we really  are. Sorry no easy answers to this question.

b) what connection do you think there might be to the feeling of love and consciousness?

B) Feeling or physical sensation is very close to consciousness and therefore love but again the problem is that thinking and believing anything automatically diminishes our ability to feel or know our own physical sensation experience of reality.

C) I have read that Oxytocin is the love hormone. It increases trust and bonding behaviours both between individuals and within groups. This seems to have resulted from evolution, to improve survival. But as we become more conscious of our survival mechanisms, as we challenge our faulty belief systems based on survival, do you think we can move beyond survivalist strategies and survivalist biochemistry? 

C) Yes, the words want, expect and create are deeply connected if we could synthesise these three meanings into one we would begin to understand that what we want is actually what we expect and what we expect is what we came to expect based on experiences and conclusions formed early in life. Whatever we want or expect is created through the medium of consciousness, seen from this perspective our lives are a self created prison where we create every detail of our life experience and then completely forget what we have done. Through meditation or self enquiry we can diminish our self induced amnesia and remember the whole of what we have created and why we created it. Suffering is the key because in suffering we see the greatest paradox, if we can accept that what we have is self created then why would we create suffering? For me there is no doubt whatsoever that we do in fact create our own suffering . Biochemistry is created from what we believe not the other way around.
Ray

Wednesday 18 November 2015

Love and Power, a question

Hi Ray,

I wondered if you could help me get my head around something. Is it possible to love power? Or does power not actually exist? Is it just a belief? 

Hi Nick, power was the focus of my attention during the period when I was training for psychotherapy. To understand your question it is necessary to understand the two words you used, love and power. Both these words from the point of view of the ego tend to have no meaning or highly distorted false meanings. The origin of love is consciousness where all that is is composed of the same substance, there is no place or meaning for division. In Sanskrit this is referred to as Adhikaranam; this means substratum which is that which underlies everything. It is the substance of the Absolute , which is pure consciousness. In the world love is loaded with meanings that we find palatable these meanings are very limited and tend to have no lasting meaning which means that these meanings or beliefs do not work they break down when we hit the unpalatable. Power I take to be a potential rather than a belief although it is belief that drives this potential. If the belief applied is untrue or negative in any way then the power that is created is false power and like love does not work or results in suffering. Most examples of power seen in the world are created by beliefs that have an obvious or implied negative contained in them and so again do not work. In terms of potential it is possible to create true power, this could only occur if our conception is free from negatives and is aligned with consciousness. This is usually what I refer to as keeping your word. Keeping your word implies the above conditions of being free from all negatives and aligned with consciousness. In essence this would be truth. In this sense power is truth and it is certainly possible to love that.
Ray