There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same. - Jacques Lacan
Man makes plans, God laughs. - the Koran
For a moment, when we are born, we are open, brilliant, faithful, living our most essential nature. Over time, through the common suffering of life, from having all too human parents with all too human limitations, from the simple friction between the natural and social, we begin to withdraw. We hide the essential parts of ourselves and present those which get us love and approval, or at least which limit the pain we face. The issues and details vary, the intensity of the fall may be different. Each of us fills our emptiness with a different dream. However, no one remains the pure open-hearted child, unafraid of life, curious about experience. We become separated from ourselves, we hide from each other, and we guard ourselves from the world. The innocent intimacy of a child with it's mother, the wonder brought by the first taste of strawberries is finally replaced by the sophistication and cynical cool (or passionate fear) of anything we can not control. All inner work, whether in the context of psychotherapy or in the countless spiritual traditions, seeks in one way or another to address the state of separation, the tear in the essential fabric, the loss of faith in the natural support of the world and the compassion and generosity of those we spend our lives with.
The challenges and knowledge and skills required to become ourselves are no different than the challenges of love or marriage or the raising of children. Over time, you come to see that your life is your life; that who we are is a beginning point for who we become. We do not become different. We become ourselves. Without some taste of ourselves to begin with, we are lost when we seek intimacy, we are lost when we fall in love. We want to be loved, we want to love and have that love returned in kind. We hold as true two mutually exclusive beliefs.
First, that we deserve the love we want, the love objects we crave; in exchange for our simply being 'ourselves' or more accurately, what we imagine ourselves to be. It is an entitlement, a God- given inalienable right.
Second, the modern equivalent of original sin, that love is always just out of reach, never quite deserved, never quite earned. That however hard we try, the profound peace of love will elude us.
The thesis here is that all too little care goes into understanding the realities of romantic love, that the actuality of love is obscured by the mythos that surrounds love in this culture. Further, that a clear understanding of these realities will lead to changes in our vision, beliefs, values and behavior. The conventional and stereotypical notions held by both men and women regarding what it is to be a man or a woman, regarding relationship, intimacy, sex, and marriage, reinforced by childhood experience, social mores, mass media, and simple ignorance are often dysfunctional and unrealistic. There is no pre- existing one-size-fits-all ready to wear pattern for being an authentic person, for being a 'real' man or woman, for living a satisfying life, for romantic love, or for intimacy. These must be discovered, uniquely crafted by each individual and by each couple according to their own nature, their own view, their own vision of life and love. People, all people, are unique. In their fundamental humanness, men and women are no different. They must be discovered, explored, cherished for who they are. They blossom when treated with respect, curiosity, and compassion.
For those people willing and able to sacrifice their fixed ideas and preconceptions, their egotism be that egotism in the form of grandiosity or in self denial; love and intimacy are inevitable. To explore this broad domain requires insights on two related domains. The first relates to the externalities and include the population dynamics, the ethnology, biology, ethology, cultural values, mechanics, strategies, wiles, appearance, resources, etc., related to finding a lover, and to creating and sustaining love. The second can be framed in a variety of ways. What does love objectively require? As distinct from infantile fantasy and adolescent narcissistic dreams, what does it take to become the kind of person capable of offering, creating, sustaining and accepting love, intimacy, pleasure, openness...capable of living with passion and an open heart in the world of form complete with TV commercials, traffic jams, beautiful sunrises, and dreadful politicians? These two issues are inextricably linked. In part by the nature of life on this planet. Partly because however conscious one is (that is: emotionally, psychologically, intellectually and spiritually developed) one becomes less than enlightened where survival, reproduction, and pleasure cross paths. This is the realm where desire flames highest, where instinct and society are inherently at odds. A lost promised land of priceless wonder.
Those who triumph, compute at their headquarters a great number of factors prior to a challenge. - Sun Tzu
Happiness is the maximum agreement of desire and reality. - Stalin
An ethnological study has recently been published where the mate selection criteria in 37 cultures in 33 countries were analyzed. They were virtually identical from the aboriginal deserts of Australia to the Brazilian coastal plains. As in this culture, generally, men choose the women who are youngest and prettiest. One can hypothesize that these are as proxy for assessing fertility (see also: Darwin, 1871; Williams, 1975; Davenport,1977). Women prefer men who have high status. They prefer potential mates to be somewhat older, have the best financial prospects, be ambitious and industrious. Presumably, these are as proxy for a guarantee of economic support, safety and security for woman and potential offspring.
The observation that females prefer mates bearing greater gifts, holding better territories, or displaying higher rank, which has been confirmed in many non-human species, now has been extended to humans. The study's findings represent no great surprise, aside perhaps that being so universal these are likely biologically driven breeding criteria arrived at through evolutionary natural selection which have become embodied and exaggerated as societal norms and cultural biases. Those men and women who remain single much beyond their exit from school are often alone for some good reason. This may be a result or by-product of: seeking a higher level of accomplishment; perfecting one's self or one's art; true genius; having more demanding standards for who they wish to be intimate with than can be satisfied by the available population; having developmental goals that required longer latency periods; needing professional training or education; and simple preference. For whatever reason, they are left over from the mating/matching process through some combination of conscious and unconscious elements. Equally, they may be single as the result of unresolved psychological issues or a failure in emotional development which have damaged the pair-formation mechanism. Lacking self-esteem, traumatic or painful life experience, a dysfunctional family background, phobia, incapacity, disability or any of these can be crippling. Likewise, their universe of possible mates may be unrealistically limited due to cultural, biologically or psychologically driven preferences.
The parent-offspring bond in any species (in humans, the object- relationship formed with the parent of the opposite sex) may in adult life lead to 'bond-confusion' when the particular characteristics of the individual parent are taken as more than an imprint as to which species an individual is to mate with in later life (getting it right clearly a priority of evolutionary design). Interference with the sexual pair-bonding process, stemming from a persistent parental image can lead to a particular mate-selection which, in all other aspects, is highly unsuitable. Conversely, an otherwise thoroughly compatible mate can fail to achieve a full relationship because he or she lacks certain trivial but key characteristics of the partner's parent. ("My father would never do that." "But I'm not your father." - Desmond Morris) Any combination of these making pair-formation and intimacy impossible, unappealing or threatening. That is, absent change, they may be terminally single.
Love, love, love; all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating, and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness. - Germaine Greer
I call them rock bimbos. They don't really work, they just go to tanning salons and clubs in miniskirts and thigh-highs and live for being able to say, "My boyfriends in the band." - Christina Applegate
When you learn to distinguish between the container and the contents, you will have attained wisdom. - Idries Shah
To take a closer look we must shift our gaze deeper. 'The young and the restless' have a decided preference for those of like temperament, that is narcissistic, self-centered, hedonistic, materialistic, and ideally hot, beautiful, and a bit nasty. Likewise, modern urban professionals have a limiting preference for those of their own class. That is, those who have relatively predictable life courses, are great for playing sports with, having a good yuppie time, warming the bed without hearing when the heavenly choir sings, when the 'I' dissolves in the moment, and where discrete identity is both irrelevant and distracting. Consequently, if one is with a lover who is egotistical, narcissistic, without essential substance; such a relationship is prophylaxis against having to love. One need not cross own's own internal Rubicon, where the 'other' matters to the point of bringing up all the desperately yucky stuff like fear of abandonment, wondering idiotically what the other thinks, that panicky phase of realizing (falsely), that the other now carries the seed pearl of your very existence. While this is perhaps only a reflection from a limited perspective it is tremendously frightening to those with identity and investment in being some 'I' in particular, as opposed to riding the wind and playing it as it lays. The structure of inner life, the sense of 'self', of 'I'ness, derives first and foremost from the child's relationship with its mother. This becomes what is thought of as 'normal', the standard, the baseline for who we are, what love is. Against which mean the rest of life is judged. Love is often confused for transference. The present is recast in the mold of the past. Incongruities are whacked off and people tailor themselves (collude) to make each other, literally, feel at home. Conversely, in intimate relationship, the greatest growth and the greatest risk comes when love spills over the boundary of that structure and becomes a new ground for being and experience. If you look at where people flip out with each other, it's where they find themselves 'out of control', made aliens to themselves by love. The reality, of course, is that they have stepped behind the Potemkin village of their own identity and can see at least some of the wide open and entirely undeveloped heart land.
Know the other and know yourself One hundred challenges without danger Know not the other and yet know yourself One triumph for one defeat Know not the other and know not yourself Every challenge is certain peril - Sun Tzu
There is an interesting paradox that the people who are possessed of abundant marketing appeal, who have a talent for acquiring lovers often for exactly the same reason are the people who have the greatest difficulty with sustained and sustaining intimacy. The question worth posing in addition to "would this person make an exciting and passionate lover" is "would this person be a good parent to my child". The point is not about children, the point is that what makes a good parent is what makes a good lover. Love requires the ability, over an extended period of time, to be essentially present, intimate, to nurture, to support growth physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Hot, sophisticated, beautiful, rich, powerful, however attractive these qualities are, must take their place alongside: real, wise, decent, open-hearted, honest, aware, responsive, generous, competent, compassionate. In sum, what we could call being capable of intimacy. Without that, without the capacity to be fully present, to love without being overwhelmed by fear or greed, everything else is mere entertainment, perhaps even great entertainment, but no more than that.
Here's the rub. Love is predicated on 'being' together; on essential contact which is both tremendously appealing and very frightening. 'Being' is antithetical to egotism and its theatre. This creates conflict, tension, intensity, feeling out of control, feeling vulnerable, revealed. Folks don't care to, or can't keep up, find the pace too intense, the interaction too concentrated, the loss of control, or at least the lose of the illusion of control, too shattering. This is not a matter of either intelligence, education, wealth, social standing. One can have essential contact with shop girls, cabdrivers, dancers, artists, investment bankers, beautiful, ugly, wealthy, poor. The simple truth is that some people are awake, present, essential, alive...and some people live their lives in the shadows, faintly, without passion, without fire, without joy. Not as a function of natural endowment. Rather, as a matter of choice in what one values, of what risks one is willing to take, of what price one is willing to pay. Unfortunately, we live in a culture which values some fairly trivial things. One is never too far wrong if one adopts an approach which recognizes the egotism, the materialism, the emotional immaturity, and the intra-psychic naivete of most of the people one comes across. The more successful or beautiful or rich people are the less reason they have had to go through the often painful, difficult, unpleasant, frustrating, time consuming and expensive task of becoming sane and self-knowing, much less to become fully human. We are all in our own way incompletely developed. Like muscles and money, growth requires sustained, unrelenting effort. And time, lots of time.
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you got it made. - Groucho Marx
The bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans, as fake as the data pressing them from all sides. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. - Philip K. Dick
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. - Henry Kissinger
It's not how you feel, it's how you look. - Billy Crystal
To be in the game, one must have the marketing appeal, the camouflage, the mystique, the juice, enough flash or plumage to attract a candidate. Mystique and charisma, however annoying, are also attractive and intriguing. They create a desire for completion, for the resolution of tension. The process is a lot like fly fishing. The bait must be often just out of reach. Not so far as to cause loss of interest but not close enough to allow detailed inspection and evaluation according to what the one always believes are God given or at least rational, objectively based preferences. For many people, frustration consistent with unconscious conditioning produces that elusive sense of 'rightness' mistaken for the beginnings of love. A lot of that mystique and tension derives from maintaining and being aware, however intuitively, of the optimal transference distance. This in part is the answer to why certain men (and women) vanish after sexual contact 'too easily won', why some women (and men) flee when treated well. The underlying truth of what has been characterized as the 'madonna/whore' syndrome of men and of the observation that some women only love men who treat them poorly ('boyfriends from hell'), is not that there is too much pleasure too quickly. It is that there is too little tension, frustration and pain.
'Too close' and 'too far away' emotionally, 'too easy' and 'too frustrating', for most people derive from deeply unconscious patterns established by the relationship they had with their parents and from the relationship their parents had with each other. The first question of a prospective lover needs to be, "Were you loved in a healthy way as a child?", which of course is no simple question. If the answer turns out to be "no", then one must proceed with great care. It is rare, even with massive amounts of therapy, to completely overcome deprivation, much less abuse. Their model for an intimate relationship drives them to create an environment in which they feel at home; and their home is not a place you much want to be.
My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity. - John Barth
Among men, sex sometimes leads to intimacy; among women intimacy sometimes leads to sex. - D. Symons
Those who have supreme skill use strategy to bend others without coming to conflict. - Sun Tzu
The human animal is basically and biologically a pair-formation species. As the emotional relationship develops between a pair of potential mates it is aided and abetted by the sexual activities they share. The pair- formation function of sexual behavior is so important for our species that nowhere outside the pairing phase do sexual activities reach such a high intensity. It is this function that causes so much trouble when it clashes with various non-reproductive forms of sex. Even if procreation sex is successfully avoided and no fertilization takes place, a pair- bond may still automatically start to form where none is intended. It is because of this that casual copulations frequently create so many problems. If the copulator has had his or her pair-forming mechanism damaged in some way during childhood, so that he or she is incapable of "falling in love", or if there is a temporary or deliberate suppression of the pair-forming urge, then the casual copulation may succeed and be enjoyed without any later repercussions. But it takes two to copulate, and the partner in such an encounter may not be so lucky. If his or her pair-forming mechanism is more active, a one-sided pair-bond may start to form as a result of the emotional intensity of the sexual actions. The inevitable outcome of this is that society becomes littered with 'broken hearts', 'hang-ups', and 'abandoned lovers' who subsequently find it extremely difficult to form a new pair-bond with a fresh partner. - Desmond Morris
There are no objective standards, no ready-made rules for when or whether two people become sexual partners; thus a source of much frustration, coercion, "morality", and humor. Nor is there a certain way of predicting whether a healthy and viable pair-bond will form in any given set of circumstances. To make matters worse, the potential dangers of each new sexual encounter are accelerating. There are presently more than 25 viral or bacterial sexually transmitted diseases (STD) present worldwide in epidemic proportions. In the U.S., HIV infection in non-risk factor (that is those neither homosexuals nor I.V. drug users) populations is 1:500,000, although the associated hysteria and fear are pandemic. For the population as a whole, hepatitis B is 1:140, genital warts, (human papilloma virus, a significant cause of cervical and genital cancer) is 1:5 and genital herpes is 1:4. These are all viral infections which may be contagious even when the carrier is asymptomatic. All four are incurable. Two of the four are life- threatening. The merely obnoxious STD are even more prevalent. The potential risks of each new trial have risen to unreasonable heights. What is certain is that for love to develop, the needs, the capacities, the dreams of the people involved, and the potential emotional and physical risks must be understood, acknowledged, honored and dealt with compassionately and straight-up. Otherwise, in a Judeo-Christian culture where non-procreative, non-marital sex is sin, in an increasingly anti- sexual, forward to the 1950's society, under the shadow of an epidemic, the underlying natural facts combine with personal history and cultural factors to produce a violent confusion. Nature and society at war; sex becomes a matter of manipulation and control. Love become battlefield.
Courtship...is characterized by tentative, ambivalent behavior involving fear, aggression, and sexual attraction. The nervousness and hesitancy is slowly reduced if the mutual sexual signals are strong enough. - Desmond Morris
When opponents open a doorway, swiftly penetrate it. Locate beforehand their deepest attachments, then inspire subtle expectations. Follow the rules and accommodate the opponent, all the while working toward the decisive challenge. - Sun Tzu
In our species, for healthy individuals of both sexes, natural pleasure produces emotional bonding. Bonding at least potentially creates continuity. Continuity almost always creates expectations, which may or may not be realistic or held in common by both partners. Expectations lead to the demand or at least the desire for satisfaction and security in the form of commitment. Likewise, society and almost certainly child rearing demands time extensive commitments which are at their root agreements. These are enforced at best by an enlightened knowledge of the local requirements of life on this planet; and at worst by law, by a deadening sense of obligation, by convention, or still worse, by sheer lack of imagination. Paradoxically, for all the work that goes into finding 'that special someone', very little work is done to convert 'let's be together' into a conscious, clear, joint, skillfully crafted, explicit understanding. Much is naively assumed as to the congruence of vision, goals, values, methods, style of life. Who decides what? Who takes out the garbage? Who supports who economically, for how long, under what circumstances? How much money, time together, work, sports on television, sex, particularly erotic play, is enough? Too much? These agreements are often ambiguous, poorly defined, unconscious, and unrealistic. In fact, aside from a general agreement to "togetherness" or "marriage", exactly what that means is rarely dealt with fully. To the extent that the expectations of a couple are divergent, there is the basis for mutual misunderstanding; feeling betrayed, misunderstood, not appreciated. In the absence of a clear contract, each person unreasonably assumes that they know what the mutual view is. Lovers are ennobled and transformed by love. They are on their best behavior, their most expansive, their most generous during courtship. They also tailor themselves to each other or at least pretend to. When the smoke clears, who's there? Marriage is frequently taken as license to be one's bad self. The prize is won. The 'other' is all too often taken for granted, is part of the home team, no longer special. Under those circumstances, paradoxically, marriage is the end rather than the beginning of life together.
There is another more intriguing paradox. Since life can only be lived in the present moment, intimacy inherently exists only in the now. As such, any projection into the future or future oriented commitment must be made in contemplation of that fact. Worse, many abandon the pearl which exists in the present in favor of a caravan of dreams which always recedes across the desert. We have at hand a long ignored, highly successful model of intimate relationship. It is time tested, adaptable, robust, unlimited in scope; well worth exploring in the context of romantic love. This is not to suggest that there are not unique problems that arise in sexually intimate relationships. Rather that by considering the alternatives, by experimenting with different modes, we can gain insight, parallax, a change of view. If one contrasts how one treats one's closest friends and how one treats one's lovers, it becomes clear that intimate friends are treated to fewer expectations, greater compassion, more generosity, more freedom, etc. than are lovers. We take our friends as we find them without imagining we have the right or duty to change them. Since friendship is sustained by action rather than existing as a contractual union, we keep our friendships cultivated with effort. For we know that our friends remain our friends through kind attention, freely given, balanced in the giving and taking. If you talk to people who feel they have great marriages there is one consistent common factor. Their lover is their best friend.
Intelligence cannot be employed without enlightenment and intuition. Intelligence cannot be used without humanity and generosity. The work of intelligence cannot succeed without subtlety and ingeniousness. Subtly, very subtly, nowhere neglect the use of intelligence. - Sun Tzu
We can best tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs. - Gloria Steinem
Intimacy requires one's becoming a psychologically healthy adult. Separately and together, jointly and severally. This requires the balancing, aligning, harmonizing, (no, not 6 black jazz singers acappella) of one's subtle inner life with one's outer conventional life. Separately and together. It is an art rarely focused on in these times of desperate upward mobility. People treat each other, their lives and their experience as if disconnected and discrete, individual pearls on a strand rather than a continuous tapestry. We have finite resources, finite lives, finite time. Apart from our own propaganda, the truth is our values are revealed in our actions, not in our words. Love requires time, attention, caring. Love must be valued to endure. Money has become the idol, the modern golden calf. A friend, who is a managing partner of a major law firm, works obsessively seeking wealth without much regard for anyone else (in the name of efficiency), has a beautiful wife, two great kids, a multi-million dollar house, and all the paraphernalia that goes along with, none of which he has time to enjoy. In unguarded moments, he makes the puzzled comment that when he and his wife were just starting out, broke, in a modest apartment; that he was the happiest he has been. He sometimes wonders whether he hasn't taken a wrong turn. Whether God, the universe, or whatever has a preference for or against wealth, success or anything else in particular is not the point here. Rather, what sense does it make to pile up undigestible treasure? In fairy tales, there is the dragon in it's lair with gold, jewels, and a virgin princess, (what use after all do dragons have for gold or virgins).
In Tibetan Buddhism, the image of hungry ghosts, who have huge bodies, giant appetites, big mouths, and very little necks, (that is their desire always must exceed their capacity for gratification). Sooner or later, and hopefully before one's next heart attack, divorce, or breakdown; or perhaps worse, before one's life runs its course... doesn't it make sense to take as a matter of life/death the question "What is the point of all this effort?" This is not to sell other-worldliness, nor for that matter anything other than for being such smart people, folks sure do act dumb. Humans, like forests, perhaps should be cultivated (that is, cultivate themselves) for sustained and sustainable yield. A balanced ecology may make more sense than land rape when such actions are taken in the broader context that the sins of the father are visited on the son, that life is precious and irretrievable, that love is rare and worthy of respect, that life is a means without ends.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. - Sir Isaac Newton
In a society that holds up an increasingly punitive work ethic above any ethic of love or compassion, it is risky indeed to assert pleasure as a legitimate social goal. If the "real issues" are economic deprivation, the threat of nuclear holocaust, the destruction of the environment, and so forth down the grimly familiar list, then we should perhaps acknowledge that the issue of human pleasure is not, after all, so marginal or secondary. For the "real issues" only reflect our vast, collective separation from the body, from the earth and other life on it, and from the possibility of delight in ourselves and each other. We may have come to the point where we no longer have the luxury and Puritanism can be a perverse kind of luxury of dividing what is "real" from what is only personal; what is public, from what is most deeply felt. We may finally be obliged, by the very threats we have created for ourselves, to rethink pleasure as a human goal and reclaim it as a human project. - Barbara Ehrenreich
So, what's the alternative? It is to live the truth known to every other organism, that life itself is paramount. Paramecium do not need philosophers and psycho-analysts to move toward food and away from threat. Plants turn toward the sun without metaphysicians or theologians. Without first requiring revolution, religious conversion, psychotherepy, a change in socio-economic status or what-have-you, we can take time for the simple living of life, time for love. Balance, the golden mean, the middle way, valuing awareness before all else, holding no false idols in the place of God ... this is not new news. The point is made in Tibetan tantra that the true path is not to consume all experiences indiscriminately, although they are all in theory potentially food for transformation. It is instead to metabolize, understand, and transform the experiences one has had into wisdom. Merely an understanding that the consumption of experience has no necessary relation with it's digestion and metabolism. Where those practicing tantra differ from monks is that there is no preexisting prejudice as to what is what; that it is not desire but the attachment to desire which creates suffering. In a culture far from natural life, the process of an individual's or a couple's emotional and psychological development proceeds in quantum steps, a little like shooting difficult rapids. There is a wild ride followed by beautiful stretches of isolated beautiful canyons, unreachable aside from by that very ride, and at night, sleeping out under a blanket of stars. Given courage, work, understanding, curiosity and skill, the journey itself is a prize well worth the effort, the risk, the adrenalin rush and the terror. Fearing the rapids, people pull out and dangle their feet in the river and call it living life to the max. They then build resorts by the river to obscure, with neon and fast food, that they have become consumers of experience, part of a least common denominator mass market that provides McFood and McLove and McEntertainment. Now the good news is it keeps them off the river. The bad news is that the waters of life are being drained to flush the toilets, wash the cars, water the lawns, and fill the water coolers of these folks. As for myself, they make me sad.
Man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man's concrete being, his 'world of life', has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start. - Husserl
Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love. - Peace Pilgrim
In choosing to live a natural life we are paddling upstream against the flood tide of our own culture. Violence, force, manipulation, control, power, propaganda, obedience, emotional and political fascism, lies...have all been perfected. For the short term, they are effective methods. The wisdom, compassion and non-violence of the Tibetans was no match for the Chinese army when they conquered Tibet in 1950, just as Maoist theory hasn't a prayer against Japanese consumer electronics. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. held hegemony over much of the world for 50 years. No longer. All finally fail. Empires fall, dictators are deposed or die, revolution can be delayed but not denied, all people finally wish to be free to live their lives and to earn their bread. The meek may not inherit the earth, but the strong eventually weaken. Somolia, the war in the Persian Gulf, the slaughter in Bosnia, the collapse of the economies and governments of Eastern Europe and the former USSR, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the Alaska oil spill, political corruption, homelessness, car-jacking, drug addiction in the ghettos, the destruction of the Brazilian rain forests, and toxic waste, are each possible only through a pervasive blindness and ignorance of natural law. Any given event can be blamed on power-maddened despots, geriatric later-day Stalinists, Exxon, Democrats, Republicans, the Medellin cocaine cartel, institutionalized racism, short- sighted Brazilian peasants clearing the forests, and greedy corporations. Whether true or not, it is almost entirely irrelevant. Our lives and loves have become a predator's ball. We treat our world and each other with such universal disdain or at least indifference that we are in real danger not only of loveless lives but of destroying the environment piecemeal and of destroying what is finest in ourselves and our children. These are not separate problems. War and peace, violence and non-violence, exploitation, and sound development are as much states of being as they are the states of nations. The failure to recognize the fundamental indivisibility of one's own life; the indivisibility of life on this planet, is tragic. Passion, being loving, being truly human, being responsible, being compassionate; all flow from a common source, that is life itself. The resolution of the battle of the sexes must finally be peace, not victory. Love made life. We triage our own lives. Our values are told in our actions, in how we spend the time of our lives. Our choice of intimate partners and how we treat them reflect and give life to what is truly precious for us. We are ourselves, personally and directly responsible for the quality of not only our lives and our loves, but like a pebble in a pond, for the world around us we can directly effect. The revolution of freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe was rekindled in a shipyard in Poland. One nameless man faced down a column of tanks in China. We are, each of us, the face in the mirror. Simply put, if not us, then who, if not now, then when?
The way to do is to be. - Lao Tzu
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. - Philip K. Dick
I'll play it first and you tell me what it is later. - Miles Davis
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