What is Love?
From: Mike Helsher
Date: Sat Jan 31, 2004 1:36 pm
Subject: What is love?
From the lectures on the Gospel of Saint John:
"Let us ask:-- What is
essential for Love? What is essential in order that one person
love another? It is this -- that he be in possession of his full
self consciousness, that he be wholly independent. No one can
love another in the full sense of the word if this love be not
a free gift of one person to another. My hand does not love my
organism. Only one who is independent, one who is not bound to
the other person, can Love him."
Mike:
Christine often writes that "Love is what you do" and
I ask, "what is it that we do before we actually move into
a physical action?"
Well, I never thought much about that while I was building up
a huge pile of Karmic goo during the first 3/4 of my life. Funny
how the lack of ability to think about "why' I might think
and do the things that I do, can contribute to such a pile of
goo -- or maybe it's not so funny. In fact, when I'm in it, it
aint funny at all -- "this sucks man...screw you...I'm outa
here...eat shit and die mother fu*%$#...aahhh, just kill-em all,
let God sort-em out." It's so easy aint it?-- hatred, discontent,
chronic complaints. It's hard to think of it as being useful
at all, and yet I swore at some jerk that cut me off yesterday.
For my self, I'm starting to realize that, as stupid as it seems,
I may have had to experience all this nonsense and exhaust my
willingness to dwell in it, so that I might develop the will
to try something different. At first thought, this idea seems
cruel don't it? Almost sounds like "you have to suffer in
order to find Love." Little me says that this is a fatalistic
world, and starts complaining about the injustice of it all --
and wa-la, there I am back in the goo again. Big me agrees with
the idea that "Love is the pain, of being truly alive."
The irony, is that the acknowledgement and evolving awareness
of my own Karmic goo, has led me to experience the utter loneliness
that has left me with a unique sense of myself -- painful as
it may have seemed at times. "There aint nobody in this
world quite like me" is something I heard and would say
to myself over the years, and that would give me a little rush
of euphoria on occasion. But the actual experience of
myself as an individual -- alone -- with only my thoughts, is
something quite different. It was/is experiences like these that
have brought me to my first experiences of my own thought process.
I learned that a percept has substance, and that the things that
I perceive with my physical senses, are given meaning when, through
my thinking process I create a concept. But what of the thoughts
in my mind that are not directly related to my physical senses?
What about thought itself? What is the substance of a percept?
These are all questions that I have probably read answers to
many times, but I have yet to fully experience. Hence my personal
evolutionary process, guided by the hand of my own free will.
It's no wonder there's so much hatred in the world. Emerson wrote
that "the reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken
in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself..." Well,
that sure fits for a description of my personal world. But as
Christine quoted from Emerson recently:
"...But in the mud and
scum of things
there always, always something sings."
I guess that something that sings in me is
my ability to think.
More will be reveled
Truth and Love
Mike
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Click to subscribe to anthroposophy_tomorrow
January/February
2004
The Uncle
Taz "Anthroposophy Tomorrow" Files
Anthroposophy & Anarchism
Anthroposophy & Scientology
Anthroposophical
Morsels
Anthroposophy,
Critics, and Controversy
