It's all pointless... or none of it is. It all has meaning... or none of it has. It's all important... or none of it is. It's all very serious... or not at all. Essence or Form. What are you seeing? From which origin are you looking? Who you know yourself to be depends on the answer to these questions. Who you know yourself to be will determine what you see. Where is the reaction? Follow the reaction. Follow it within. Let it guide you to the error. It leads to the heart of illusion.
Don't make me hit you with a Douglas Fir branch. (I hope you're enjoying this early storm as much as I am.) As for love, there are many definitions. x
I wouldn't dare! Oh wait... maybe I would. Oh yeah... I'm loving it. It feels a bit like autumn, but I'm sure that's just a tease. This area is well suited for me, even all the rain... I find it beautiful. Yes. Or none. (ducking out of the way of the Douglas Fir branch).
There are a number of different ways to respond to your question, neodude. Here are a few.... Who is it that needs definitions? Can any definition truly capture the essence of "it"? The answer really depends on the perspective of the one looking. The mind seeks definitions. The Self is aware of what lies beyond definitions. Is the question arising from mind or from awareness? You could also say that Love is what naturally arises when there is no attachment to or identification with a mind-made sense of self.
Love is what existence is composed of. Like Buddha said "Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared." God Bless +
From A Course In Miracles: Your task is NOT to seek for love, but merely to seek and FIND all of the barriers WITHIN YOURSELF that you have built AGAINST it. It is NOT necessary to seek for what is true, but it IS necessary to seek for what is FALSE. Every illusion is one of fear, WHATEVER form it takes. And the attempt to escape from one illusion INTO ANOTHER, MUST fail. If you seek love OUTSIDE yourself, you can be certain that you perceive hatred within, AND ARE AFRAID OF IT. Yet peace will never come from the ILLUSION of love, but ONLY from its reality.
Ah, zero sum, the essence of lazy politics. How about Some of it is pointless, some of it isn't. In order for a thing not to have "a point", we must know what point we think it should have. Some people take the fact that, one day, our sun will burn out as some kind of evidence that the universe is pointless. Which is incredibly egocentric, when you think about it. Does the fact that one day the universe will be gone forever mean that it's pointless? Maybe that is the point of it. Some of it has meaning, some of it doesn't. It's no binary choice. Meanings come and go. The notion of implicit, intrinsic and universal meanings is rather archaic. At the same time, I doubt we, as people, can ever really experience a thing devoid of meaning. In the same way that, even in a totally silent place, we hear the sounds of our own bodies, our blood pumping and our neurons firing, in a place devoid of meaning, ours bodies will make meanings. It's basically involuntary! Some of it is important, some of it isn't. Important to whom, and for what purpose? This one may be a little more zero sum than the others, I think, because importance isn't so fluid and doesn't flit back and forth so quickly. Something which is important one second and not the next is hard to imagine - most of us would simply interpret that as unimportant - but to different people, a thing might have great importance or none at all. Some of it is serious, some of it isn't. Not even sure what you mean here. Seriousness is a purely subjective state. If one is about to be burned to death, that's seriously bad news for one, but business as usual for the fire.
This is, in fact, the exact opposite of what I was saying. I was pointing to a recognition of the difference between duality and non-duality. There's no such thing as a little duality (some of it is, some of it isn't). The world of duality has relative truth, from within the paradigm of duality... but from the perspective of non-duality, it is false.
I think I understand your point less as a result of that explanation. I wasn't trying to agree with your opening post. I was arguing against it. I feel like duality and zero sum are used as excuses by many for lazy reasoning; they'd rather believe that bundles of things go in one piles and their opposites go in another, and you can't have one thing; you have to have the whole pile. It's how people end up having big ideological arguments about poverty at UN summits, and at no point think that there's anything off about the 19-course banquet laid on for them because they're obsessed with the big picture. I think some people would rather reach an impasse in a zero sum argument than think about what actually is mutually exclusive and what isn't. I don't get why, except that escaping duality leaves you without a fallback; instead of just putting x thing with y thing out of habit, you have to think "do those things have to go together, really?".
I think we're speaking apples and oranges here and I find there's nothing more that I wish to add to the conversation. I'll leave you to your own conclusions.
Meaning, purpose, importance, these only occure in the subjective world. Purpose gives meaning, meaning fills emptyness. Without meaning, a empty soul remains, only wandering naked in a world in wich his existence is just part of the action-reaction universe, roaming around in the mazes of his mind, blindly walking in to death ends over and over again. Meaning, purpose, importance, they define who we are, and who we want to be, yet it does not exist, yet without it we cannot exist, in that way it becomes part of the objective world, as it is part of our true self. don't know if that makes sense, probably a bunch of random bullshit .
Meaning's virtual. It exists by virtue of our mass belief in it and the resultant impact that it has on our lives reinforces that belief. These are things which we have invented, but they do not go away because I stop believing in them, because everyone else still does.
