A lot of people are abused as young children but don’t remember.
Sometimes they never remember, sometimes they do but way later.
They don’t remember, but still their body and heart remember and the Hurt eats away at them.
This is a thing that happens — whether anyone wants to hear about it or not.

Either there’s a Love that chooses everyone and is enough for everyone with infinite Love left over AND we can connect with, relate to, and follow that Love; or there’s no hope for humans to ever be meaningful to themselves — no hope for humans to ever travel with their own feelings, thoughts, and actions to their own conclusions: no hope for humans to be coherent within themselves: no hope for humans to understand, believe in, or care about their own feeling/thinking/acting.

But we can’t relate to anything without relating our ideas and feelings to it. And ideas and feelings are limited, but Love can’t be limited if It is to explain to us that and in what way it is True (not a relative truth, but an Absolute Truth [as in: this is not just an opinion, best guess, and/or hope — this is what’s really going on]) to say “We are all in this together”. Therefore, we cannot relate our ideas and feelings to Love literally, 1:1, or definitively. And to the degree we confuse our ideas and feelings for the Truth, we turn away from the Truth (we worship false idols).

So we’re seeking not a literal description of Love that we then unpack. We’re seeking instead to organize our feeling and thinking around Love, and to poetically (pointing adequately towards; rather than literally define or describe) translating Love into our feeling/thinking/acting.

Growing in wisdom is improving the relationship between one’s feeling/thinking/acting and the Love that shares our conscious space with feeling/thinking/acting (the Love is supposed to be everywhere; so It should shine through each conscious moment).

Wisdom is thus an ongoing process, requiring constant effort. It requires self-observation, -critique, and -adjustment. And it requires poetry: we let all our preconceived notions fall away and open ourselves up to a moment of life — which is prior to our ideas and feelings about life; and then we sing again; and repeat.

How boring were all those existential stands, leaps of faith, nihilistic pouts, and romantic grabs!

I will wait here, God!, for you to tell me the Way gently, carefully, and clear as morning sunshine through an open window.

I will wait here, Love beyond being and nonbeing!, for you to flow through my feeling/thinking/acting and guide me on the path of insight into You — insight into that and in what way it is True to say “We are all in this together, bound in and through the Love that never lets anyone down ever”.

I will wait here without any meanness or greed towards myself or anyone.

I will wait here for the Love that only helps and never hurts.

…

Ah, but I can’t, can I?
Or at least I don’t, do I?

I’d be your humble servant, matchless Love.
But I amn’t, am I?

How now, brown cow?

The panic seizes me.
I was planning on having a glass of wine with a late lunch.
At the garden I smell the roses and enjoy the well-lit and fragrant green spiced with yellows, reds, purples, blues, in all hues, shadings, and musings.
The panic growing.
And soon drinking to simultaneously feed and relax the panic.

The panic is what?

There’s a vague longing that underlies all our specific longings.
The vague longing is vague, and so by definition can’t be satisfied by a specific answer.
Yet we constantly attach specific cravings to this underlying craving, in craven and doomed attempts to address it.
In this way we are pushed on and on through life, never satisfied.
If one’s an addict, the situation is even worse: we desperately fixate on a specific solution not just to the vague longing, but to all that ails us; every hurt we gather together in a tense panic, convincing ourselves that with one more drink we’ll make good our escape and … well, there things get kind of vague, since clarity and honesty is the enemy of addiction.

What would you have me do, God?

I wake up tense in the shoulders and all through.
I feel the panic all through.
I try to stand up straight and breath the Light in at all sides, and rest there, pushing out from within into the Light. I breath the Light out that It might explode through me and break me apart, that It might shatter my daydreams about real and not-real, that I might disappear into what is prior to I and not-I, that I might flow with the Love that is, I guess, the Light.

But where does it get me?

The hurt in my gut so deep and so painful.
A wound.
Feels like a wound deep inside.
Does not feel like brain chemistry.
Feels like I was hurt.

I recall no such hurt.
Still the hurt is my constant companion.
It was worse for me when I didn’t feel the hurt.
Then I was falling apart for reasons unknown.
Now I feel the hurt screaming from the pit of my gut out, chaotically swirling, instigating mayhem through my conscious space. I feel the hurt tensing my shoulders forward and down, curling my gut and sex around, rolling me into a little ball.
So then I try to straight out.
I try to stand up straight within myself and uncoil the hurting strands, to let them bleed free and clean out and let the Love explode through them.
But what happens?
I don’t know.
I keep stumbling.

A wisdom meme is needed.

Something short and sweet that could help me live for real.

What is it?

“U stand tall and u be strong
U have ruthless compassion
For yourself and everyone
Yeah it’s hard but it can be done”

from Til I Whisper you Something by Sinead O’Connor.

Something like that.

We stand up straight within ourselves.
We let the Love pour in and let the Love explode out.
We have compassionate love for, and joyful delight in, ourselves and everyone.
We keep working to grow in, through, and for the Love that chooses us all.

I don’t know if that’s an improvement.
Maybe it’s a contemplation of her meme.

Stand up straight within yourself.
Let Love flood you and explode you.
Accept how the Love loves you and everyone.
Keep turning yourself inside out, opening up to the Love.
Let the Love guide you to gentle kind resolve for yourself and everyone.

Hmmm.

Stand up straight within yourself.
Let the Love beyond all being and nonbeing flood you and explode you.
Accept how the Love loves you and everyone.
Go with the Love to where It leads.
Start over and over.
Try and try again.

Hmmm.

… and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He [Jesus] said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. Love God above all else. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22:35-40

A dual motion inward to the Love and outward in the recognition that the Love is in everyone, binding us all forever.

Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.

“Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.

“Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.

“That is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self entities.

…

[https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation]

The practice that leads to the other shore is prajñāpāramitā: insight into the emptiness of all phenomena.
The Bodhisattva (awakening being) stands in emptiness.
This is known as the Prajñāpāramitā of the bodhisattvas;
not grasping at form, not grasping at sensation, perception, volitions and cognition.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajnaparamita#Themes_in_Prajñāpāramitā_sutras]

Beyond being and nonbeing lies a Love beyond being and nonbeing.
Why?
How?
What is Love?

The wise rest on the impermanence and interdependence of all phenomena.
The wise rest on the Love beyond being and nonbeing that explodes through, dissolves, and ultimately is all phenomena?

The Love is not impermanent, nor is It interdependent on everything else.
The Love is what really is.
It is not a separate self-entity.
It is an infinite explosion of kind joy, of delight in creation, sharing, giving, exploring.
Love is prior to being and nonbeing, but It loves playing at being and nonbeing.
And that play is Reality as viewed from the perspective of impermanence and interdependence.
But that play is also Reality as viewed from the perspective of Love as Love: an infinite explosion of kind joy prior to being and nonbeing.
Is that how it is?

How to perceive things as they really are?
We can’t perceive them — they are beyond observer and object.
We can only awaredly flow with them like water droplets noticing themselves dissolved into the river, noticing themselves as the river, noticing themselves as neither being and nonbeing and thus noticing themselves as what?
But that’s prior to concepts.
We cannot reason and/or feel our way there.
We have to open up and let all our daydreams dissolve.

Hmmm

Meanwhile the cut saws through your gut.
Meanwhile the hatchet hacks at your belly.
Meanwhile your shoulders are always tense.
Meanwhile a twisted sickness and broken-hearted sorrow fills you.
Meanwhile your broken inside and can’t find a way to be yourself, particularly where you’d take your stand as man, take some woman by the hand, leave this lonely land for one you share with one you love.

Meanwhile

What now?

Pull the hurt out?
Barf the hurt out?
Spit the hurt out?
Intoxicate yourself beyond the hurt?
Talk the hurt out?
Confess the hurt out?

What?

What can be done but the let the hurt bleed?
Let the wound tell the truth about itself.
Let it bleed and return to the practice.
Over and over again, you stand up straight within yourself, breath in, let the Love in, rest on the Love, let the Love flow out. The Love is everything inside and everything outside. Let the Love win. Let gentle kindness and shared joy win. Let Love rule. How does Love rule? Love rules by doing nothing except being Itself. And the rest of a conscious moment follows not because it’s commanded to, but because it loves to, loves to flow along with the Love that only loves, that does not pull-towards or push-away, but that only Loves like Light only shines.

Author: AW/BW
Editor: BW/AW
Copyright: AMW