Not long ago, Joan of Arghh! chided that the result of all of our philosophizing was that it seemed that Love "...has to be caught up into an intellectual subset, or pre-set, or something.... The Meaning of Life. It can't be all about building consciousness; it can't be all that mechanical-- flowing in a straight line, spiral, or any other geometric description. ...'Oh please!' says my heart, "Please let there be mystery!" else God is less than I am. .... If it can be contained in words, in thoughts, in a glance or an appeal to the senses, it is less than I.”
Cosanostradamus, a comment friend from One Cosmos, having recently had a family friend struck down by an act of pure senseless evil, stated "But when it gets close, there is a visceral red gut reaction that comes from the deep. We don't live life just in our heads; we have far more investment here than that.... Our spiritual core must be hands-on or our philosophy is worthless."
I agree, what use the words and intellectual subsets. What use indeed. Cosanostradamus's situation brings that question into stark demanding relief.
What use maps? What use words? What use knowing anything ABOUT anything?
Philosophy helps you to grasp the terrain of your ideas, of your mind. The purpose of modeling it is to enable you to hold such things in contemplation before you, at arms length, so you can see, reflect and foresee reality as it is taking shape in the future, and what future you will consciously seek to approach.
But it is a lifeless map; the life within it must come from you. Recall that when we discuss principles, Right and Wrong, Morality, it is as if discussing the interstates, turnpikes and highways we are driving on... which route to take, which route to drive upon? That discussion can be an abstracted discussion, but if you should forget that you are indeed traveling at 75 mph (I can't drive 55), or forget that the curve on the map means that you'd better take care, slow down and look for cross traffic before you as you are driving, you run the risk of likely suffering a frightening, perhaps even mortal, collision. The map corresponds to life, but it is not life - but if you don't both consider the map and apply it while driving, you may lose your life, or lose your way.
We use many illustrations, they help us to understand and appreciate in our slightly out of sync minds, the life we are living, in order to better understand the actions we must take in our lives that we are living, right now.
When I speak of the One Cosmos as one united and massively integrated whole, it is an illustration, but I try never to lose sight that the illustration I spin is of the reality I see, feel and live within right here and now. In my AHA! posts, I put out the idea that our minds Integrate ideas and values with time and action - and that when we make that conceptual connection that enables us to bring 2 and 2 together and realize that it makes 4, at that moment of integration, we get the AHA!, the spark as it were, of separate electrical cables - coming together and sparking on their integration, welding themselves into the whole of the mind. Your conduits expand, more juice flows through your conception of the whole expands.
We are Truth seekers - but not just seekers, we are Truth assemblers. We crave it - that sense of integrating one thing, one value, one understanding with another - deepening and expanding your grasp of the whole.
Watch a toddler, nearly everything is new and unknown, and each moment is surging with such integrations - a Childs life is one nearly continuous stream of AHA!'s "Oh, I let go of the fork and it falls!' "OH! It always falls DOWN!" "This yellow stuff... it tastes GOOD! I bet it has a name, it does! And I KNOW IT NOW!"
As we grow older, and the new discoveries either dwindle, or we've become so sotted on them, that they become like a sip of wine which no longer brings a noticeable buzz, we forget the sensation, but occasionally we are able to reexperience that integrating Aha!... perhaps as we chance to discover something new, or someone tells a joke. What is a laugh, but something that jolts us from the sudden integration of several seemingly unrelated items in an unexpected context unlooked for truths unexpectedly united - from that we get the kick of an AHA! a Laugh. The bigger the disparity between the items, or the more unlooked for the integration, the larger the voltage which we display as a belly laugh.
Philosophy, Religion, help us keep on the right track... and it is important, because we can get turned around, reversed. There is a 'charge', a 'jolt' a spark that can be seen and felt when you yank a connection apart as well, and that can be experienced from disintegrating truths. If you aren't careful, if you aren't fact checking your map with reality, you can pursue the quest of disintegrating, disassembling the whole, pulling apart, pulling down.
Here is the darkness lit by the flashing sparks of torn cables and exploding transformers. Those without philosophical and religous schematics can mistake these flashes for light in the darkness, but it is a light that doesn't grow and doesn't glow, it only requires more and more distruction to provide a flickering half-light to see by.
Describing that, as if a schematic, helps me to understand the wiring so to speak, but just as an electrician doesn't live to become an experienced electrician if he doesn't also keep in mind that the actual wires he's handling while following his plan, are something far more energetic than his schematic. I, we, must do our best to not lose sight of the fact that we are speaking about real life - the life we are living now.
It is of the utmost importance that we continually and honestly check to see that we are in fact integrating, not disintegrating, for sad to say you often experience a larger jolt from blowing a circuit than from making a connection. Look carefully - don't seek to shade your eyes against the clarity of seeing reality as it is, with shades of what we wish it were - live this life here and now - guided by our maps and overviews, yes, but never mistaking them for the reality of the life we ARE living. Are you putting together or tearing down, or just coasting along and doing neither?
Our Values, Ideas, likes and dislikes, preferences - when we find something which brings them together in experience, we enjoy that, we seek that out. Such activities we become known for enjoying, for practicing. People that enjoy the same enable us to experience those joys and pursuits in an even higher form, drawing them up from the horizontal plane of life, and into the Vertical, conceptual, moral experience of life - these are integrations that sustain, that open the conduits to deeper flows of spiritual energy. The more a person unites our interests through them, who enables us to connect to larger numbers of these values integrations, or perhaps only one or two, but INTENSELY so, these persons rise up our hierarchical ladder of vertical experience into the level of friends, Friends and Dear Friends.
Those pleasures which we find united through our friends - the more perceptual, horizontal, they are, the more limited the friendship will be if based upon them alone. Some people you can have a blast watching football with, but when the game is over... time becomes very noticeable..."Right... well then, see you next week!".
With other's you find that your experience with them flows more directly through their minds and hearts, higher up than the perceptual. At this level you find you integrate and approach more, many, even infinite shades and applications of conceptual, vertical thoughts, shining, glistening and glittering; it is upon the horizontal we see them, yes, but it is a horizontal lit from their minds fire, and that fire leaping between theirs and yours - these are our close and dear friends.
Love occurs when a person seems to embody a significant amount of your highest values, pleasures, admirable qualities - like caps upon a pyramid, they reach down and outwards, from a single focal point at the top of the hierarchy, they cover much ground. They seem to embody many of these pyramidal caps, not only in their words and ideas, but in their actions - even in their person itself, their fleshly form, their eyes and touch. They move, walk smile, and deep in your mind and heart, all of these values you hold dear are touched, stirred and connected, strummed and integrated anew - a constant almost unbearable rolling thunder of AHA!'s - and the jolt of it causes your soul to absolutely surge with it - this we call love.
This leads to the integration of our bodies in touch, in sex, and eventually perhaps in a child - the physical, moral, spiritual integration of your two lives and loves into a new life to be loved.
I can speak of this in words and illustrations, but you and I should never forget, never lose sight of the fact that these words and illustrations are of the life you and I are living, RIGHT NOW, here, in your breath indrawn through your nostrils. Mark it! Feel the breath pass into you, flow into and through your skull, down your throat, into your lungs - it is crisp, there is a tingling charge in it, can you feel that? Can you reach beyond the routine, pushed to the background of sotted familiarity, of the known and expected, and FEEL it? Now? You can, if you apply your attention. You can touch you life as it is being lived. You must. We must.
Make a practice of applying that attention in your daily 'routine', of Seeing those around you, those you like and love. Routine doesn't mean assured, routines can be disrupted in a blink of an eye, an accident, a disaster, a thoughtless or evil act can remove those routines from your life - or you from theirs - don't let that be what wakes you up to the fact that though much of the living of life will almost inevitably become routine, it is, and they were and are unique, irreplaceable - the values that spark your life.
Use Philosophy to grasp them deeper, make them more conceptually clear, perhaps foresee how to better understand and touch them, but always remember those symbols of word and thought are of realities felt and lived. They represent your life, but you are your life and it is your Life that they are about, not the other way around.
As Joan said, "It's something Bigger, pulling us through the fog of forever. I take that personally."
Yes indeed, very personally. Don't forget. It is easy to. My kids are upstairs watching a movie... they'll be in bed soon, I could do this after - why now? Sometimes it seems that words, even those honestly pursued, pursued in search of truth, can subtly shift and become ends themselves, shades drawn down between you and your life that you should be living. This isn’t what I intended this post to be about, but there it is. I'm tapped out, more on the rest tomorrow... later. I'm going upstairs.
You can touch your life as it is being lived. You must. We must.