To forgive without humiliation, one must have a political objective.
Love seems not only the basis of striving for better relations among humans and between humans and other life forms as we meet our needs. It may also be the basis of the collaborative process of forming our goals, brain-storming solutions, planning, implementation, assessment of results, and a return to one or more of the previous steps, depending on the issue, the people, and the circumstances. Not saying anyone can do this perfectly , but love seems to involve striving for harmony between methods and goals. Likely will grapple, hopefully usefully, w/ the details of this for as long as I have a sound mind. T
A question for myself is why saying the word ‘love’, mentally, repetitively, and as a command is a good idea. I say to myself “do my best to love” or “love” as a verb, a command to myself to cope with the fact it’s hard for me to stop saying things in my head–hard to have a state of mind where I am focused on the sensory and emotional aspects of being. My guess is that the command to love I say to myself as a mantra is a type of will exertion. So, what would be the state of being that would be better, as a result of me not needing to tell myself anything ? In other words, it’d be preachy, over-bearing to relate to people about love in the way I have been relating to myself about it. In other words, if it’s good, in many situations, for me to focus on listening and being in tune to what others are communicating, how would I take the same approach in relating to myself? Maybe that involves mental states of wonder and awe ? Maybe that’s how I ‘listen’ to a sort of ‘spiritual’ part of myself and thereby become more able to bring that to my relations with others? Though I’m not likely to maintain states of wonder and awe for my entire waking life, I may be able to improve my relations with humans and non-humans by making wonder and awe a priority? Does wonder and awe involve loving myself and others whereas using the mantra involves telling myself to do so at some point outside of the ‘eternal present?’ I value love, but I mention this because loving seems to involve being in tune to others, and my usage of mantras —while better than obsessing– seems to indicate need for improvement in terms of me being at my ‘spiritual’ best. ( I mean that without reference to belief in gods, the ‘creation’ of the cosmos, or consciousness without a functioning brain.) I like to be open-minded, but I’d say it’s better –always, and not just generally—-to strive to love than it is to strive to hate. On some level is my understanding of the world based on two mutually exclusive extremes: ‘striving to hate’ vs. striving to love ? Guess most or all folk don’t actually strive to hate. Instead, we–myself included– are prone to allow other goals to take the place of striving to love. But what are those ‘other goals’ based on? Do we define it by what it’s not, by contrasting it w/ how we define love ? For me, it seems I often slip into ‘egotism’ and thereby lose focus on love. While it may be worthwhile to strive for less hierarchy in relations among life forms, ranking the importance of types of love might be good. Setting aside for now the question of how this ranking might vary from person to person, it might make sense for some people at least to rank ‘agape love’ as the most important, when we must choose between it and other forms of love. As for my delusional, messianic complex and identity crisis and nervous breakdown when I was 18, it now seems to have been an unhealthy and unhealthful expression of distorted self-knowledge. Freudian and other forms of psychology and various forms of spirituality—-well, however I look at it, it seems there are various levels of being, and that in 1986 when I thought the Judeo-Christian god was calling on me to sort of somehow be the second coming of Christ, —well, what it was instead was a part of my mind ‘sending forth’ a kind of signal. My current interpretation of that experience is that I was awakening, in very distorted and unhealthful way to my sense of myself as someone who might be capable of helping, in my own small way, with the making of better forms of ‘spirituality.’
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