Seventh Perspective

Love and Strife

1            All things interact.

2            If love unifies, how can it separate – which follows from the idea that love causes strife? In answer: Consider how light is manifested as particles in one medium, and as waves in another medium. Similarly with love – in one situation, it unifies, and in another situation, it separates.

3            Unity is the feeling of love. When we identify with something or someone, we feel at one with that object. This is the sentience of love.

4            I hate mendacity because I love the truth; I love mendacity because I hate the truth  ̶  either way, I love-hate Love; contradictions and all.

5            With the consciousness of love and strife, I identify what actually is occurring at any given time.

6            Everything is in relationship; nothing is on its own. This statement, “Nothing is on its own,” can be taken negatively; meaning: the absence of everything; or positively: the essence of everything; which is not itself a thing.

7            Love is attraction; strife is detraction (repulsion)

8            Agitation –-storm-strife; and calm (love).

9            Love causes strife. I feel sorry for my son that he has to be alone. That causes me pain – strife.

10          Change is the way of strife, the way of life, the way of the world.

11          Strife is the generic, collective, universal name for pain, conflict, dissension, agitation, discord, desire, etc.

12          Desire is the pain of separation from the object of desire.

13          Instead of being blinded by strife, by being aware of it, you can experience it in another dimension.

14          Love is youth, uplift, and joy – to mention a few such positives.

15          You will come to a time in your life when your aspiration is to live more of the essence of your life than the sustenance of your life. And what is that essence? : your meaning in love.

16          First you generalize the situation by seeing it as either love or strife; then you particularize it by seeing it as either pain or pleasure, want or need, or self.

17          Living in the consciousness of love and strife, you are living with two mighty forces – yet, in Reality, only one POWER. That is the wonder of it.

18          I am in the constant presence of the two mighty forces of life and the world (universe, cosmos).

19          Strife is here in my midst. What am I to do?  Face it with itself: its other side: love.

20          We have to respect with magnificent reverence these two mighty themes. Now we are in love, then in strife – in one form or another.

21          Love is nothing we can know; it just is. We experience its effects, but not It. It is nothing in the realm of knowledge, consciousness (awareness), or feeling. We experience it traces, but not it itself; just as we cannot see the elements of an atom; only its traces. And the trace we feel is the sense of unity, oneness, identity, with another person, animal, plant, object, or even life itself.

22          For something – love – I cannot know or experience, I certainly am writing much on it. How do I explain this?

23          These thoughts on love are coming through my intuition; certainly not by analysis or reasoning. It is   as though, I’m in touch with love, with the essence of me, life, and the world. And through the medium of language, I am able to convey my intuition of the inexpressible. So my words are merely images expressing the inexpressible. It is one thing to be able to express what love is in words, and another thing to be love.

24          Love is of the energy of the world. The more you love, the more energy you have and expend.

25          Strife is love transformed – by matter in flux.

26          With more love there is more energy – vast reserves of energy especially for secondary things to do, or things you prefer not to do.

27          Here comes strife! This person loves his own good rather than my good.

28          Consider the following lyrics for the sake of argument: “There’ll be trouble in the world / sex and the single girl …” (“Omega Man”, Bee Gees). There we have our indisputable burden, our strife, in a single line of a song lyric.

                  Now I ask you quite openly:  What can Love in all its purity, such as   ̶  (“Would you believe me if I told you your tomorrow is my yesterday / The world keeps on moving but I’m holdin’ still . . .  living to love is the reason we shine”  [“Living Eyes”, Bee Gees]  ̶  do for us given this bio- psychological male-female sex impulse; or rather, instinct? Not much, I would think.                           
                    Considering its deterministic sway, its oceanic flood, its straw to the “lust of the blood”, in man-kind; since, livingly, it is Nature’s way to perpetuate itself regardless of human will or consequences  ̶  Is it simply a matter of, humorously, “I can resist anything except temptation.” (Oscar Wilde); or Christ’s defeating, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”; or Helen of Troy’s beauty that “launched a thousand ships” (Homer); or King David’s lust for Bathsheba who made sure her husband was killed in the front lines of a battle; or simply pedestrian, “After all, I’m only human; what do you want from me.”?

                  If so, then there is no question that so far as sex pleasure, positively and negatively, is concerned, strife certainly does rule life: one’s own in particular, certainly – even animals almost   universally fight for the right to mate. It’s like “we can’t help ourselves “; it ( ‘it’ being that       warming “beast of sex-desire” snaking round our entrails) just comes upon us unintentionally (not so intentional subconsciously, I venture to say), “just like that”, without thought or image – and so we embrace lovingly or fall lustfully in one way or another into its magnetism. Natural enough. From mainly adolescence to infirmity.             

              All I can say up against this immensity, not despairingly, is that firstly, sex may be life’s prime force in life, but it certainly is not all of life’s worth; we have all matters of interests and values and beliefs and creations and discoveries, and friendships and male-female relationships, good heartedness, all the limitless diversions and entertainments, and all else, that short-circuit the forfeiting seductions of the attracting, mighty sex-impulse.

                   And secondly, let me say right off, in keeping with the undercurrent of Love in this book, that Love does help significantly in one way or another in its personal and social dimensions; in its endearing, inspiring, caring, creative, moral, selfless, spiritual, intellectual, artistic, revolutionary, and so much more, aspects  ̶  then let me say from experience, that with the saving grace of Love, humanly, humanistically, and transcendently, that would be our salvation toward our peace of mind, and achievements. Yet, do we always want ‘peace of mind’? – strife it is!

              Given that we aspire to peace of mind and achievement, then for this salvation to be effective overall, we do have to get beyond our self without, however, sacrificing its worth and balance. How we do that is to keep in mind daily Love in practice, reflection, or meditation, or contemplation in    between our, obligations, responsibilities and tasks taken willingly upon ourselves; always with        Love in mind quite in tune as Lennon-Beatles sang, “Say the word and you’ll be free”; and “Love is all you need … Love, Love, Love”; or chanting it, or praying it. Keeping always one’s concern to live in balance (rather than in conflict) between our humanness and our transcendence.

Boredom, depression, “the blues  ̶  what to do
when  either spreads like wildfire through-and-through;
weakens resolves  to resist the siren call
to “go to wreck”  with not a care at all?
Only a saving “grace” can save your “soul”
And that is your Love-Grace to keep you whole.

Not only does “living for, to, Love  free our minds but makes it receptive, to the grace of Love experience, none of which can compare to the mind expansion of, immersion in, the totality of being beyond your ego-will unintnentionally. Everything willful of our ego-sensuality dispels of its own accord, one would think, such that it remains in the background, of no interest whatsoever. That state of consciousness – rather transconsciousness – is all that matters so far as the  ego-self is concerned. Love beyond this ego-self rays; you seem to be in love with your Love-self rather than your self-love. It takes one word in search of  consolation to trigger that grace: the grace of Love.

Boredom, depression, “the blues  ̶  what to do
when  either spreads like wildfire through-and-through;
weakens resolves  to resist the siren call
to “go to wreck”  with not a care at all?
Only a saving “grace” can save your “soul”
And that is your Love-Grace to keep you whole.

              The Grace of Love! our salvation.

              The Grace of Love! our self-freedom.

              The Grace of Love! Our God.

              The Grace of Love! Our Meaning.

              The Grace of Love! Our Divinity

              The Grace of Love! Our Mystery

              The Grace of Love! Our strife.

Yes, our ‘strife!  How otherwise would human or trans-human nature function interactively, interre-lationally?  There would be no function; there would just be Love-Itself; which belongs not in the psychological equation of human biological nature; which is to say that there would be no human nature.

Is not the concept of the word “strife” a summation of all the dualities inherent in human and nonhuman determinants? What would love be without strife; or strife without love – at least, or at most, in the world? Would love even be, exist, not to mention strife beyond the world or universe?

The two are inexplicably bound to each other: love to attract and strife to repulse all elements of matter through their energy.

To support this overview, the ancient Greek philosopher, Empedocles, had this to say:

“For it is by earth that we see earth, and by water water, and by air glorious air; so, too, by fire we see destroying fire, and love by love, and strife by baneful strife. For out of these (elements) all things are fitted together and their form is fixed, and by these men think and feel both pleasure and pain.

. . . These [elements] never cease changing place continually, now being all united by Love into one, now each borne apart by the hatred engendered of Strife, until they are brought together in the unity of the all, and become subject to it.

Let us say, then, that both principles of love and strife determine  ̶  not create  ̶  the world of flux (change). If so, then the obvious, ̶  I hope not specious  ̶  question, would be:  What created love and strife? Empedocles’ answer would be the All. This “All” could be interpreted as anything from God, to nothingness, to the void, to the One (or Oneness), to Eternity, to Divinity, and whatever else of which reason would postulate. But these all reduce to a metaphysical, spiritual obscurity rendered incomprehensible; meaningless, as the language-oriented philosophers would claim.

They would request, and rightfully, something more empirical, meaningful. Meaningful, they say? Alright, How about the concept: Meaning. :  The Meaning of love and strife? Or if not Meaning, then randomness? But then we have to ask, What is the meaning of randomness … or of any other concept, for that matter, “meaningfully”?

So cautiously accepting such a notion, what we would have then is that love attracts that is, integrates (a body) and strife repulses, that is, disintegrates (a body). And that (this word I emphasize) such a process exists could very well be its meaning.

Let me leave this subject for now deeming it simply as an hypothesis that makes very good sense to me; and close with this simplification: “ love as accord and strife as discord. And should one prefer accord between others, then love is the answer; if discord, then strife is the answer; and may “the twain never meet” except through their human meaning and transcendent Meaning.

29          Love is not knowing; love is BEING, with an existence of Itself.