If plastic string works just fine for cutting grass and weeds in a weed whacker, it should work equally well in a lawnmower. It would be better for lawnmowers to use string trimmer line to eliminate the risk of bodily injury: for example, severing your foot on the blades or being impaled or otherwise hit by projectiles launched by the lawnmower blades.
So, what would be the point of using a lawnmower in this case instead of just using a weed whacker? The same as it is regardless of what it’s using underneath: an automatically even cut and a wider area of grass being cut at once.
I think the only problem with this design is that string trimmer line needs to constantly be replaced, so it would be less convenient. But this could be mitigated by having a mechanism on top of the lawnmower or at the handlebars that lets you release the lawnmower’s hold on the string at the string trimmer head, feed more string out from the center, and reapply the hold.
Instead of having the line spool located down below at the place where the string is locked in place, have it located up above at the handlebars and use some some mechanism that grabs it inside the tube going from the main part of the lawnmower to the handlebars and pulls it down. Or have the mechanism right on top of the main part of the lawnmower.
The only problem then is seeing when you need more line and when you’ve pushed/pulled down enough. That could be made easier by having a transparent mower deck, made of plastic or acrylic or epoxy resin or something.
I often hear people say there’s no such thing as “your truth,” in reaction to perhaps more touchy-feely people who use the phrase. There’s some logical sense to the objection, of course; truth is considered to be objective and singular/universal, probably by definition (at least insofar as definitions aim to describe popular usage), thus leaving no room for personal truth. After all, if all truth were personal, then there’d be no such thing as being wrong, discovering that you were wrong, or showing anybody else that they’re wrong, and all beliefs about reality would be just as legitimate as any other.
However, this simple cold logic misses a lot of nuance. For one thing, regarding how the term “truth” is used in popular usage, people always call their own beliefs with certainty “the truth”, naturally, because if you didn’t consider it to be the truth then you wouldn’t believe it, and meanwhile everyone has different, mutually contradicting beliefs that they call “true”, so, it would seem to follow that “truth” refers to something subjective even according to popular usage.
And one’s “truth” in this personal sense of the word is often integral to one’s perspective/worldview, perception/assimilation of reality, emotional reactions, hopes, dreams and desires, etc., and it can be the rule against which they measure all other beliefs. This is what’s referred to when someone says “your truth,” and that’s why the saying is useful and conveys meaning.
Also, in some domains there are many possible perspectives one can have on the truth/reality that are more or less equally valid. So, different people can have apparently different “truths” that are all legitimately descriptive of the underlying source—i.e., reality. It’s like the popular meme:
So, don’t dismiss it and deride or rebuff it too easily when someone says “your truth”; you could be missing out on a lot of truth. ;P
Edit: Oh, and to get a little metaphysical and risk undermining all of my points above, I’ve come to think tentatively that your beliefs, expectations, and perspective can act as a kind of vehicle to take you practically anywhere. How you see the world eventually causes it to manifest according to your view. I theorize that, if you could see the ultimate level of reality, you’d see that everything is true or nothing is true; all there is is your assumed framework for assimilating and interacting with reality, according to which everything falls into place. I’m reminded of a quote:
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order. -Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
It believe it’s possible for one’s beliefs to change their reality despite not changing yours and mine because all possible realities or current-reality-states exist, and we navigate them with our consciousness. Those quantum branches/versions people who share the same desires or beliefs about what reality to find themselves in all share a reality in the moment, and their branches/versions that make diverging decisions then go on to share their reality with different souls/minds/consciousnesses.
(I know this doesn’t explain why some people in our reality have beliefs or desires that contradict this reality, but that could be explained if there’s some kind of delay in the quantum branching, or if it requires the beliefs or desires to be sufficiently deeply held—that is, held on unconscious levels of being; I think the desires have to be on the superconscious level and the beliefs/expectations have to be on the subconscious level.)
So, don’t be too shy to create your own universe. Sounds scary, risking being delusional? After all, “man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” But granted, it would be a huge leap to take just on account of taking my word for it. But at least you could give others the freedom to believe what they want.
Well, I’m not sure a belief that directly contradicts permanent fact like “the Eiffel tower is in Georgia” is likely to it to manifest in their reality (but it probably could if they believed on a sufficiently deep level and/or in a sufficiently advanced way), but there are other domains of perspective to consider. And even regarding the directly and permanently factual, it’s entirely possible that creating your own inner world that serves you, enables you and uplifts you is more important than “being right.” Or, maybe you’d prefer to be right than to live under a happy lie. But maybe some others wouldn’t? (That’s not meant particularly to support the use of the phrase “your truth”; it’s more about the statement “But at least you could give others the freedom to believe what they want.” I digress.)
Of course, I guess you’re unlikely to believe any of the above five paragraphs for a second, likely considering it “woo,” but nonetheless you should take the previous section of the essay separately on its own merits.
First, I’d like to make it clear that it’s really not all that important whether you believe in God or not. I’m not out to crusade, I’m not like those Christians of the past (I’m not even religious) who would slaughter anyone who disbelieves, and I don’t even particularly need you to believe. I believe that God can work with and through anybody regardless of whether they believe in Him/Her or not. Of course it’s that way, as there’s literally nothing else but God; you and He/She are one.
But I will write out my reasons for believing in God and what I imagine God to be, because I get tired of so many people staunchly disbelieving and attacking notions of God for no ultimately valid reason, so much so that it seems to be the norm in modern philosophical circles, which is a shame. And besides that, maybe my expositions on God can serve to inspire somebody to look up.
First, I will explain (or link to) why the popular reasons for disbelieving in God are invalid, then I will expound on the particular reasons I personally believe in God, then I will explain what I believe the nature of God to be.
Another popular reason for disbelieving in God is the lack of evidence. Of course, there can be no direct empirical evidence for God, because God is ubiquitous, nonphysical, unpredictable, etc. And for any entity you could prove the existence of who has any particular degree of power, extent, or knowledge, it’s always possible that its power, extent, or knowledge is merely great but not infinite; there’s no way to measure an infinite amount of power, extent, or knowledge. So, in this case absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Of course, that’s not in itself a positive reason to believe, and not believing in God due to lack of evidence is fair. But staunchly disbelieving, arguing with people who believe, etc. isn’t. And furthermore, as I say later in the paragraph about falsifiability, there are less empirically provable reasons for believing in God.
Another reason people tend to disbelieve in God is the patent absurdity of religion, which more or less has a monopoly on the conception of God in most societies; for example, in Western society, when one thinks of God they probably automatically go right to thinking of the Christian God, with its attendant characteristics, including vanity and neediness (in its demand to be worshipped), judgmentalism and condemnation, warmongering and encouraging homicide, etc., to say nothing of the self-contradictions and primitive morality rife in the Holy Bible and the absurdities of the more pop Christian beliefs, such as creationism which goes flatly against scientific knowledge and discovery. But the God I’m presenting here is not the Christian God, neither of the Old nor the New Testament, nor is it a God belonging to any particular religion at all. There’s just no reason to assume the nature of God must accord with some religion’s or another’s understanding of it. Though it’s important to note here that that doesn’t mean anybody who believes in religion or “the wrong God” is hopelessly disconnected from the real God. On the contrary, in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s dialogue series of books, God says that He/She’s “sophisticated enough” to work through any particular religion or belief system.
Another reason people tend to disbelieve in God is that they’re unable to imagine a mechanism by which God could exist and operate, and the proponents of a belief in God can’t offer one, either. But one should just accept that the universe is fundamentally mysterious, and we may come to reasons for believing in a particular thing without necessarily knowing or understanding the “mechanism” behind that thing, and not to mention that with our puny grey matter evolved primarily for foraging, fucking, raising kids, etc., we probably wouldn’t even understand the truth of certain “mechanisms” if they were presented to us.
Not that I think reality is necessarily completely mechanistic, which is why I put “mechanisms” in quotes, in order to indicate some more general type of working principle or set of principles. The assumption of mechanicalism is based on a false extrapolation/inference from the relative efficacy of science in predicting and manipulating certain limited classes of natural and artificial phenomena starting with Newtonian mechanics. The “anti-foundationalist” argument in two of the essays I link to above is very relevant here.
Another argument people use to refute God is the accusation that a believer is committing the logical fallacy of “onus of proof.” In other words, if I’m claiming God exists, then it’s up to me to prove He/She does, not up to you to prove he doesn’t, in order for you to change your (probably) staunch belief in His/Her nonexistence. The problem with this accusation of fallacy is that “onus of proof” actually makes a lot more sense if *any* side making a particular truth claim has the onus of proving it. In other words, if I claim God exists, then I have the onus of proving it, but if you claim God doesn’t exist, then you also have the onus of proving it. Otherwise, the logical fallacy is just used as a label to the effect of unfairly bullying people into submission in the context of debate, like most of the known fallacies often are. I wrote more about that here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Onus.
Another supposed problem with the idea of God is that it’s unfalsifiable. But unfalsifiability is really only a concept that should be a deal-breaker within the sciences, and the belief in God need not be (and indeed can’t be) scientific. There is meaning and metaphysical truth to saying “God exists” or “God doesn’t exist,” and there are observable consequences to that truth state. Scientific ideas may need to be falsifiable, but science isn’t the only legitimate means of knowing anything. It relies on hard empirical evidence, and there are more indirect, if indefinite, ways of inferring truths or probable truths.
To talk a little bit about subjects I brought up previously only to provide links to further explanations, only believing things that are provable/proven is too easy. (Simply analyzing whether something is proven or not is straightforward and relatively deterministic, almost algorithmic in nature and fear-based. The desire for social status is a fundamental drive of humans, so academics would fear believing in anything that they can’t defend on academic bases because they’d looked down upon. And there are other reasons we may fear the possibility of being wrong.) Making educated guesses based on personal experience, others’ experiences (while carefully weighing whether their stories are likely legit or not based on many available factors, rather than facilely dismissing them out of hand as “anecdotal”), heuristics, intuition, abstract/intangible perception, and whatever other bases puts more of our inherent mental faculties to work.
But enough about reasons not to disbelieve in God, now onto the reasons I happen to believe in God.
I spent many years as an agnostic, until I came across Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. Neale was at a very low point in his life, and out of frustration he wrote a “letter to God” asking questions like, “Why wasn’t my life working?”, “What would it take to get it to work?”, “Why could I not find happiness in relationships?”, “Was the experience of adequate money going to elude me forever?”, and “What had I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?”. He had prepared to toss the pen aside, when somehow his hand remained poised over the paper, then the pen began to move on its own. He decided to go with it, having no idea what he was about to write, and he wrote, “Do you really want an answer to all these questions, or are you just venting?”. That was the beginning of his conversation with God. God’s input eventually evolved into more of a “voiceless voice” in his mind. (God says He/She communicates with people all the time, especially via the imagination, and He/She only uses words when all else fails, because words are the most dynamic and hence the most easily misunderstood form of communication.)
Why was I so sold on this book/on the idea that it really was God he was talking to? Well, it’s because I’m really good at seeing all of the subtle flaws and shortcomings of people, maybe particularly in their writings, on a few levels: on the conceptual level, on the level of their actual motivations and intentions, on the level of grammar and whether they choose the best possible word for the job, etc.; and in the parts in the books where God speaks, it’s all absolutely flawless (in contrast to the parts where Neale speaks, which are more human). I’ve literally never encountered any other text or speech so flawless in my life.
And I know that, obviously, someone who’s purporting to channel God is going try to sound as perfect as possible, but this is a matter of subtle things, unconscious motivation, cognitive perfection, and talent and grace at using language that you can’t do just by wanting to. It’s just like how an intelligent person can play domb, but a dumb person can’t play intelligent, at least not to a discerning audience.
Furthermore, I perceived the “energy” behind the text—as in the messages it contains and the style in which it’s written, or maybe even something actually spiritual that’s inextricably connected to the text (as if the text is something like a “carrier wave” or signal to convey the psychic impression, much like how people have psychic insight into others’ mental processes while socially interacting without even being aware of it)—as being absolutely, 100% pure. It was so pure and neutral that it was almost unworldly. (I guess it’s problematic to say that it’s totally neutral, because arguably if it were then he wouldn’t have had a reason to care or to say anything, but it was neutral of biases or all but the most sublime desires/energies or whatever.)
Also, the book said some important things that I’d always believed myself but had never heard/seen anybody else say. I was so moved by one of those things that I dropped a tear onto the page.
Another thing that has made me think God likely exists is personal psychic experiences. I’m not talking about “religious experiences” or talking to God, but just witnessing my thoughts being shared with others, sometimes overtly enough to be beyond any reasonable doubt. The specific manner of some of this sharing, the way our minds are apparently connected, seems to indicate a level of unity or non-separation between beings, at least between beings that are close to each other in some way. So, I reasoned, if our beings are “locally” connected to each other, there are probably more and more universal/higher and higher levels of this unity, up to and including the ultimate level, a unification of all beings, which could reasonably be considered to be “God.”
Also, I did once feel what seemed to me like the presence of God; I’ll copy the story below:
Another time, I had to walk through the cafeteria of my niece’s elementary school while it was chalk full of children, and I didn’t have my hat on which I usually liked to wear to cover up my baldness. I actually felt like I looked a little bit freaky, because I had long wavy hair and was also partially bald. So I was really embarrassed, but I decided to have courage and just do it. A minute later when I was back outside of the building walking along the sidewalk, I could perceive this soft white energy filling all the space and surrounding everything in it, and I felt so at peace and comforted by this energy—like it was God or something—that I smiled a huge smile for this little girl that was walking toward me from the other direction, and it was genuine…It would have taken more effort not to smile than to smile. Again, this is extremely unusual in my experience. That’s actually the only time I can remember smiling and not being forced to, besides when I happen to be laughing at something. By the way, I was also carrying an open black umbrella over my head at the time even though it wasn’t raining, just for for the sake of fun and free expression. =P
So, those are all the historical reasons I believe in God that I can think of. Of course, any coldly, disembodiedly intellectual person will dismiss these as subjective and meaningless, but anyone actually more heart-based and open will see the authenticity and profundity in them and may be moved to at least take them into deep consideration.
Oh, yeah, the third section. What do I believe the nature of God to be?
The most important things to specify here are that God is not judgmental or condemning, is omnibenevolent/all-loving, is unlimited, and ultimately comprises everything. I say “ultimately” because there are more and less delimited ways of considering “God.” For example, you can think of “God” as specifically the highest, most perfect, most masterful, most unified aspect of God/life, or you can think of God more as every aspect of everything. In one of Neale’s books, God says, “I am everything that is, everything that is not, and everything in between.” This striking statement gives us a glimpse of the utter completeness, the fullness and the unlimited breadth of God. God also says that He/She contains both the profane and the profound, and if you only see Him/Her in the profound, then you’re missing half the story. I’ve also read that the universe is “the body of God,” but I don’t remember if that was in one of Neale’s books.
Another delimited way you think of god is to think of God as any God-realized being; it could be a smaller being than everything that exits, but it’s totally aligned with the divine, fluidly melding with the greater whole, and perhaps dynamically melding and unmelding in degrees as it changes, transitions from some intention/endeavor to the next, or travels. In one part of Conversations with God, God says that even He/She is just a smaller art of a much greater being, to give Neale a glimpse of the unfathomable vastness of life/the universe. Perhaps the alleged God-realized avatars of India (and perhaps in other cultures, just not called “avatars,” and perhaps unrecognized and/or more rare outside of India) are such beings, too.
There are other traits that I could mention, such as God is omniscient and omnipotent. (There are philosophical conundrums associated with the concept of omnipotence, so let’s just say that, according to God, He/She has “full power to match intentions with results.”) More fully, I believe in the God of Neale Donald Walsch’s books, but of course you’d have to read them to know exactly what that means.
One thing I haven’t stressed enough yet is that there is no real separation between us and God. In the books, God says that you are God, Godding. We are co-creators. And that our souls “knows everything there is to know.” And that you may change form all we want, but you cannot cease to exist. Because for you to cease to exist would mean God would have to cease to exist, and that is not possible. Also in one place God says something pertaining to His/Her maintaining the separation between Him/Her and Neale for the sake of discussion.
Another interesting thing about God is that He/She says, in other words, that He/She contemplated Him/Herself “for longer than you and I could collectively remember,” in the absence of being able to experience Him/Herself, until He/She eventually had the great idea to virtually separate Him/Herself (there’s no true separation in actuality, only differentiation) into many parts, or reference points, so that each part could witness the greater whole. And He/She was so elated by this thought that He/She exploded in delight, and that event corresponds with what we call the big bang.
Another thing I haven’t said is that, regardless of how much you read about God, nothing can fully convey or even prepare you to witness the astounding reality of God’s nature.
In one of Neale’s books, God says this:
God Life Love Unlimited Eternal Free
Anything which is not one of these things is not any of these things.
So, by that we can infer a few other properties of God. He/She is Life, Love, Unlimited, Eternal, and Free (just like we all are, at our most essential level of being).
Regarding what “love” means in the above, God says this elsewhere: “Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.” Of course, if God is love, then love must be everything, which raises the question of how fear can exist as its opposite. The answer—and I think I read God saying something along these lines in one of the books—is that fear is actually not as primary as love; it’s ultimately a manifestation of love or exists within love, as the illusion of its opposite.
God says that fear is the energy that makes you feel like have to do something. I suppose this is necessary because, as God says elsewhere in the books, “nothing matters.” (Of course, the statement that nothing matters should be taken carefully in the context of the rest of the book(s). He does say, for example, IIRC, that “nothing matters” can also be taken to mean that “nothing is matter” and that matter is of no importance to our life, but then he says that, paradoxically, matter is also of utmost importance. (God mentions the concept of “divine contradictions” or “divine paradoxes,” I forget which, in a few places in the books.) He also says somewhere that there are moments in life that we may want to take very seriously. And he also said something like, while we’re under no obligation to do anything, we may want to continue to providing for people we’ve caused to be dependent on us, such as our families.
But I digress; one thing sort of necessarily leads to another, and then another, until I’m talking about a whole different subject. =P But that’s okay, there is much in NDW’s books that is worth repeating (though I probably did a bad job at butchering and maybe even misremembering or hallucinating things God supposedly said :P).
First, let me make one thing clear: This is not an academic essay. In this essay I present a number of unproven or even unsupported “opinions” about the nature of love, life and reality. If one approaches this essay expecting to be convinced by reason and evidence of some position or another, they’ll automatically reject and dismiss the ideas expressed herein as unfounded. The reason I express the ideas or opinions that I do is in hopes that, for some people, they’ll seem to have the ring of truth, and those people will be inspired by the simple recognition of higher truth or likely higher truth when they see it. Or, if not that, that I’ll at least give some people food for thought, something to consider that will perhaps broaden their framework for asking and answering, or just pondering, questions about the nature of love, life, reality, metaphysics and ourselves. Also, just being aware of certain ideas will cause them to unconsciously be “put on the radar” to facilitate possible actual experience or apprehension of the truths if and when the opportunities arise in the near and/or distant future.
That being said, this essay is not entirely made up of unbacked opinions. There is a fair amount of reasoning involved and a modicum of reasoned argument, as well as a number of links to other essays of mine with reasoned arguments with varying degrees of analytical strictness, so don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!
Thanks for listening.
Lots of people assume love boils down to nothing more than a type of neurochemical reaction in the brain, probably evolutionary-psychologically developed for the purposes of encouraging things such as procreation; raising children; perhaps long-term unions between men and women so the men can take care of the women so that they can continue to live, procreate and raise children; and maybe people in communities mutually supporting and helping each other to help promote continuation of the gene pool.
This is a clever rationalization of the origin, nature and purposes of love that seems feasible and even likely under a physicalist, mechanistic view of reality, but this view of reality is way too narrow and limited to accommodate the actually maximally rich, full, open-ended and living nature of reality/metaphysics and all of the things, beings, phenomena, principles and story lines that exist within it. It’s literally unimaginable, at least if one’s goal were to apprehend it in its entirety. It’s like the Shakespeare quote you’ve surely heard before and probably dismissed as mere sentiment, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
While Occam’s razor suggests that any particular scientific explanation of a phenomenon ought to involve as few assumed existents as possible, this is for reasons that don’t apply to one’s outlook on reality as a whole. And, metaphysically speaking, why wouldn’t it be just as likely that reality is as rich, full and meaningful as possible as that it’s as simple and limited as can possibly imaginably account for what’s empirically observed? To say nothing of the profound implications of many things people regularly observe that violate our expectations and prosaic understanding of reality. I could say more about why we shouldn’t write off and dismiss such personal and anecdotal experiences due to known cognitive biases or the fact that they’re not scientific or proven, but I’ve done that in other essays already, such as here, here, here and here.
I’ve also shown why material reductionism is untenable considering the existence of consciousness, for different reasons here, here and here, and revealed the questionable reasons people tend toward physicalism somewhere in this essay and here.
This does seem to raise the question of why the physicalist interpretation of the reasons for love seems to coincidentally make so much explanatory sense. Perhaps the answer is that in the living, metaphysically rich world, things are generally designed or otherwise influenced to be beautiful and to just work out; i.e., to be beneficial and to interoperate in a way that’s orchestrated and efficient.
The physicalist interpretation of love (and of literally everything else in life) is sadly deadening/life-denying, bleak, nihilistic and depressive. This would be perfectly fine, of course, or at least perfectly fair, if it were true, but it’s not.
Another problem people tend to have with the notion of love is that it seems to be a nebulous term that can mean many different things according to context or to the person conceiving it. To this I might say that these are all or mostly various expressions of the same underlying thing, or I might also say that people tend to confuse things with love that aren’t love.
For example, most people, when you bring up the word “love,” think immediately/solely of romantic relationships. This is sad, because romantic relationships are a lot more selfish and limited than the expression of love in general. Romantic relationships are largely transactional in nature, as in each person is in it just to get something out of it from the other in return for what they themselves bring to the table. This is why most romantic relationships eventually end up with both sides mutually hating each other’s guts and never talking to each other again, as well as the reason for a lot of lesser fights between couples that don’t (yet) lead to a breakup. It happens because one person has demands and expectations for what the other person will do and be for them, because they’re depending on the other person to make them happy, rather than simply giving the person the freedom to do and be what they wish to and loving them regardless. True love, or love in its purest form, is unconditional and requires nothing.
Just to clear up any possible misunderstanding, this is not to say that a romantic relationship should only exist on a purely spiritual, saintly level; of course things like lust, sex, and other forms of physical affection are great and fun and encouraged, and in practice there may always be the occasional need to work some things out through anger and confrontation. But a good rule of thumb is not to see the other as “the problem,” but to see the problem as a third thing that you and the other are trying to solve. Also, I remember once reading of a study showing that the couples that make it the longest are the ones that react to potential conflicts with humor. There’s a lot more to be said about the nature of healthy relationships in the book Neale Donald Walsch on Relationships by Neale Donald Walsch. I also noticed that Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now contains a page or two in which it says some very insightful and illuminating things about the common nature of strife in relationships.
So, what is love really? Love, compassion, empathy and altruism are founded in transpersonal awareness/the liminal awareness of the unity of all beings, so that you value another’s wellbeing as much as your own, because you know that they’re you, or you see yourself in them—not necessarily your specific personality traits, but your fundamental divine spark. Though for most, being able to recognize more specific things about oneself in another greatly increases one’s ability to love the other.
This kind of knowledge, the knowledge of the unity of all beings, is far from obvious, and most minds never grasp it on a conscious level, though it does seep down into their conscious minds in degrees or in indirect ways, or at least it influences their emotions, desires and choices in unknowing ways.
This knowingly and unknowingly acting and feeling according to the unity of all beings, in other words the fact that separation is an illusion, is something universal that you can hardly help but do to some degree, because it’s an expression of what you’re made of, which is why love, compassion and altruism exist in this world. (See https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/01/28/why-altruism-really-does-exist/.)
Of course, any philosophical description or ideation of anything is only grasping at shadows and pecking at surfaces, so the above is by far not a full account of what it means to love. There’s more to be said (and of course, even this more that can be said about it is ultimately just conferring shadows, the understanding of which hardly approaches the reality of the situation).
Love is not just about the fact that all beings are ultimately one, it’s about and endless history over many lifetimes in many worlds, including parallel and current lifetimes, of interaction and communion with others, involving various dramas, bonding, playing, joy, saving one another, growing with each other, daring, working together toward a goal to serve a larger cause than you, etc. You don’t remember all this when you interact with them in this Earthly realm, but it trickles down nonetheless. You may see it in their eyes, feel it in their smile. It colors every element of emotional interaction between you, especially the joy. You may repeat certain aspects of your past interactions, conspirations and relationships with them without realizing it, probably many times over many lifetimes.
This kind of familiarity and interaction and love exists more between you and some people than others, which is why we say we have “soulmates” and “soul families” and why we sometimes feel like we’ve known someone we just met all our lives. And this difference in closeness between you and some from between you and others probably isn’t as absolute as our limited minds would naturally think; it’s probably only the case in some relative sense, expressed through the illusion of the linear passage of time. In other words, we’re just as connected to any other imaginable being in the universe with just as much interpersonal history, only in away that’s less “near” or perceptible or effective in the moment. And probably also, in the same vein, the more you “zoom out,” the more your past history with a loved one isn’t just one or the other specific collection of events, but a superposition or summation of many or all possible interactions or histories with them.
Why would the love in another’s eyes contain not only actual past interactions or histories but also possible ones? Because everything that can possibly happen or exist already happened or exists somewhere in existence, such as in parallel universes of a multiverse, and while these other universes may seem far away and separated from us physically, our consciousness ultimately transcends apparent separation.
The reason I precede “in parallel universes” with “such as” is that even the idea of a multiverse doesn’t do the breadth, fullness, unlimitedness or boundlessness, and completeness of All that Is justice. This is utter boundlessness and completeness expressed well in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s dialog series of books in which God says something like, “I am everything that is, everything that is not, and everything in between.”
(And just so I don’t mislead anybody: I specify “happen” and “exist” separately in the above, but that doesn’t mean I’m suggesting an ontology with exactly two or three categorically distinct types of elements: events and things/beings. Things, and perhaps even beings, seem to be ways in which we perceive and abstract certain kinds of happenings. For example, a whirlpool is just a vaguely delineated area of swirling water in a larger body of water, but we tend to think of it as a thing. Or a person’s body is made up of atoms, which are just processes involving electron fields oscillating around protons and neutrons, which are made up of vibrating quarks, which are in turn just local excitations of various ubiquitous quantum probability fields. And it’s not even like that body will “exist” forever; according to science, eventually its biological makeup will decay and absorb into its environment, and even later its atoms, and then their constituent subatomic particles, will decay into other things, with the end result being that all that’s left is light. And as for beings, there is no fundamental separation between any being and all of life, and even the material universe is most likely made out of, or is a projection of, life/mind/consciousness: see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/02/07/why-im-an-idealist/. And not to mention that as far as the individual being’s permanence goes, while a being may never die, it may cease to exist as an individual and meld with a larger body sometime, or maybe even break up into multiple smaller beings. If nothing else, according to the kind of mysticism I subscribe to, all beings will sooner or later become one with God.
On the other hand, come to think of it, it’s not clear what a “happening” even means if it’s not about motion or other change or fluctuation, and motion and other change or fluctuation seems to imply motion or other change or fluctuation of something, and that something would have to be considered to be existent, independently of the motion or other change or fluctuation itself that composes the happening. I don’t know, maybe those existents are themselves further happenings and it’s turtles all the way down. But even such infinite recursion doesn’t seem to necessarily eliminate the need for things and events as primary categories in an ontology, because you’d have to say one or the other is at the very bottom in order for it to be primary to the other, and there is no bottom. But does it solve it if we call the change of a thing a fundamental/inextricable property/aspect of that thing? I’m not sure. Maybe, because maybe it’s the problem of language that caused us to separate the thing from the change in that thing to begin with. But then, what if our whole ontology is itself just a construct of language in the first place, or at least fundamentally depends on/is based on it, with of course the additional element of empirical/sensory/experiential/intuitive input? Even then, perhaps we could say that we successfully unified things and events linguistically/analytically by calling change a fundamental/inextricable property/aspect of things.
*Shrug*, either way, in the end my sensibility tells me that an ontology should not have exactly two (or even three) fundamental categories. Maybe one from which all the others spring in a kind of tree of categories, or maybe a plethora of categories, but two or three is just unnatural. :d Actually, even two would seem justifiable if they were about life/beings versus supposedly nonliving matter, or perhaps something analogous such as self versus other, but the question here is about two different aspects of the material (notwithstanding my inclusion of being in “events or things/beings”). And even in the case of life/beings versus matter or self versus other, I think the distinction ultimately fails. See the essay on idealism linked to above regarding life/beings versus matter, and regarding self versus other, see Zen Buddhism and its concept of nonduality. And take the anecdote I once heard of a person recalling being a baby or toddler (I don’t remember which) riding in the backseat of a car, looking out the window and experiencing the entire landscape including mountains, etc. as being completely non-separate from him. He said it was blissful. This is probably the default state for babies and maybe toddlers, but we eventually learn to identify specifically with the body and hence lose that connection to everything else/the vastness of one’s being.
So, what possible alternative does that leave us? I suppose just a lack of overly formalizing and attempted assimilation of reality on the broadest/most overarching/most fundamental possible level, or in other words, the lack of an ontology altogether. Reality is endlessly deep and largely ineffable, especially to our puny human minds and senses, and more especially considering that we’re currently lost in cultural scientism/rationalism/physicalism/skepticism/left-brained thinking (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.inhahe.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/) and our more longstanding underlying immersion in language and representational thought (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/08/12/5718/). Though, that being said, at least an ontology that’s not hierarchical but rather web-like or something like that might be more natural.
But anyway, I digress. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…)
I suppose I’ll have to leave the rest of these gems on the nature of love to the initiate who’s made it this far into the essay, the truly tenacious thinker and truth seeker. =P
Our love, cherishing and adoration of each other, of everyone for everyone, on the spiritual level (or at least on some higher level of being and awareness) is greater than we can possibly imagine while incarnated. There is also a lot of care and perhaps a deep feeling of responsibility for each other as a result. And sometimes we have karmic connections and/or binding agreements with each other, spiritual unions or with each other, and/or a profound dedication to each other, that we can’t understand on this level. Sometimes we’re even the same soul and probably the same higher-level or essential/fundamental mind in two or more bodies, though I hear we don’t usually meet our parallel lives until we’re advanced enough to be nearing the end of our cycle of reincarnation, because the interactions are too intense. (It’s likely that we’re the same soul and/or essential mind as many other people, more or fewer depending on what level of soul/mind you’re considering, hence the popular term “soul group” and the existence of God, the level of mind and consciousness at which all beings are unified. But I digress.) Also, sometimes we’re working with others we know (or maybe don’t know) toward a shared goal/for a shared cause, the nature of which is too fantastical and immaterial for us to fully grasp on a conscious/egoic level even if it were explained to us. These goals or causes are always tributes to the greater good, of course, or in other words to a larger arena of life than the group itself, like labors of love.
As a past girlfriend of mine once said, “To love someone is to know that you love them. Not to love someone is not to know that you love them.”
Also, another important point is that your love for every individual person is wholly unique and particular to them, because it’s an appreciation of everything they are, of their true nature, and everyone’s personality and essence is unique. I suppose it’s also about your specific history with them, as explained above, and that would be unique, too.
One more thing I believe about love is that it’s possibly the fundamental nature of everything. Not only is it a natural characteristic of our beings to love, but we are made of love. And also God, being omnibenevolent and perfect, is made of love, and the whole Universe is in turn the body of God and is thus made of love. I don’t know if this is true, or if it’s an exaggeration or a misleadingly logical/linguistic interpretation of the truth, but it’s something that I’ve heard a few spiritualists say, and it struck me as deeply meaningful.
I know the assertion is problematic, as it’s not clear how physical things, mechanics, qualia, minds and thinking, other emotions than love, etc. could arise from love, or what “love” even means in this context. But again, the linguistic interpretation of this fact could be misleading by virtue of its being filtered through language or our logical/rational or rationalistic framework of evaluating and understanding.
Since I’ve brought God into this discussion, it’s probably important to explain which/what conception of God I’m referencing and believe in, at least briefly. Someone who read this essay complained that it’s unspecific and hard to follow because it’s not clear which God is being referred to. The most important things to specify here are that God is not judgmental or condemning, is omnibenevolent/all-loving, is unlimited, and ultimately comprises everything. I say “ultimately” because there are more and less delimited ways of considering “God.” For example, you can think of “God” as specifically the highest, most perfect, most masterful, most unified aspect of God, or you can think of God more as every aspect of everything.
Another delimited way you think of god is to think of God as any God-realized being; it could be a smaller being than everything that exits, but it’s totally aligned with the divine, fluidly melding with the greater whole, and perhaps dynamically melding and unmelding in degrees as it changes, transitions from some intention/endeavor to the next, or travels.
There are other traits that I could mention, such as God is omniscient and omnipotent. (There are philosophical conundrums associated with the concept of omnipotence, so let’s just say that, according to God, God has “full power to match intentions with results.”) More fully, I believe in the God of Neale Donald Walsch’s books, but of course you’d have to read them to know what that means.
Oh, I just remembered, in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s dialog series of books, God says this about love and fear: “Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.”
God also says in one of the books that fear is the opposite of love, but it’s also not as real as love, maybe an illusion, or that it doesn’t exist on the same level, as it actually exists within love or as a creation or expression of it. I don’t remember the actual words, but you get the gist. God says the purpose of fear is to make you feel like you have to do something. Perhaps that’s the fundamental motivation for a spirit to act, as God also says that ultimately nothing really matters, and I suppose the spirit would naturally know that, or would know it if not for the fear. Maybe I’m just totally misinterpreting the books in the last sentence, I don’t know.
Another thing I just remembered is that in Conversations With God, Book 3: Embracing the Love of the Universe, God says the following:
God Life Love Unlimited Eternal Free
Anything which is not one of these things is not any of these things.
I suppose one might also add Spirit and Consciousness to the list, and perhaps Soul. But maybe I’m just thinking too much.
So, we can conclude from this that, among the other characteristics of love I’ve elucidated, love is unlimited, eternal and free. And it’s also God and Life itself, which seems to imply that everything really is fundamentally love, that there is nothing else, as some spiritualists have said. Though admittedly that sounds like a form of monism, which I argue against in an essay linked to above. But I guess it’s really just a way of ascribing all of the characteristics associated with love to every possible element or substance in the universe.
Oh, another thing I just remembered is that God also says in one of Neale’s books that “love endures all,” though I have to admit I don’t fully understand that. I.e., if you don’t endure all, does that mean you’re not love? And how can one possibly endure all imaginable punishments for all imaginable lengths of time, anyway? But I suppose endurance happens on the deepest level always, the core of the self is not harmed or made to cease because it is love, and it may or may not happen on more relatively superficial levels depending on whether one embodies love in its more limited sense of being the opposite of fear with the aforementioned characteristics of its energy. Idk, obviously I’m being too analytical about this.
