On the question of Love...

This is no doubt a question that features on the minds of many if not everyone. What is love? A hit song by Geman-Caribbean artist Haddaway links love to hurt, with the refrain  - 'baby don't hurt me no more'. I believe those words echo the fear and insecurity of many billions around the world when they think of love in relation to others - in whatever capacity we see them - individual or collective. 

Why is the subject of love sweet love most often associated with joy and most fearfully with pain and hatred? 

Why, as humans do we use love to hurt those we supposedly love or intrinsically hate? 

These are perennial questions that I'm sure philosophers both qualified and armchair have pondered through the ages.  I am not entirely sure but have to rely on my intuitive thinking rather than logical deduction, to say that the answer lies in the human ego's constant need to compete in order to survive. 

The ego, reflects the sum total of who we think we are, the jetsam and flotsam of knowledge and identities we have accumulated through life and projected unto others in our bid to survive in what we consider or are taught to consider as an individualised and hostile and unforgiving world. However, the bible and other holy books teaches us to love one another as we love ourselves and that the greatest gift of all is LOVE and that God is love and the source of love. 

But where or why have we gone wrong in implementing this most basic principle as humans? Why do we organise each other both individually and collectively into 'goodies and baddies' constantly in love or at war?

I use the term 'we' because, like it or not, we are actually one consciousness with nature and with God, but since the fall of man, we have separated that consciousness through the filtering mind of the ego into individual and collective identities in a bid to survive one against the other. Thus we purportedly love our selves as individuals or as a collective bunch of individuals (group) but hate other individuals or groups that appear physically or mentally different from us. We believe we have to negotiate our love/hate relationship with those others and to love or hate them in order to survive. We tend to love individuals or groups that reflect what we love in or about ourselves and hate those who don't. Or perhaps we hate those who love what we hate about ourselves because in essence, we are one and the same.

As humans, in this game of separate identities, in our personal and collective relationships, we are an embodiment of opposites, good and evil, love and hatred and we can switch so easily between these opposites whenever our primordial instincts for survival are triggered, hence we 'love' to survive and 'hate' in order to survive in our relationships with others. This is the essence of a human race that has separated itself from itself in order find its place and survive in an unknown, unquantifiable and hence seemingly hostile world. 

But if we are commanded to LOVE by God, the universal creator of everything and source of our collective consciousness, if we are told that we emanate from God who is the embodiment and source of Love and that we are truly one with him, then why have we developed the capacity to hate? Is it because we (in the egoic identity that we have assumed in our learning through life) have come to consider ourselves as separate and different silos of consciousness, labeled and nurtured from birth to see ourselves as such and to defend our individual identities against the threatening identities of others, in order to survive? 

If we love one another as we love ourselves then would that solve the problem? I'm not so sure that in our fallen state this is possible. Humanity is so lost to the whims and caprice of its fallen and separated egoic self that it can not see anything else outside the construct of the ego, or even if it does, it is but an unattainable idyll - something that can only be attained at a higher level of consciousness. 

I suspect that that is true, that the most basic of human instincts - pure unadulterated and unconditional love with no strings of hatred attached can only be attained when we move away from the ego into a higher state of consciousness, in which we come to realise that our consciousness is one and unseparated and that the source of that consciousness is LOVE and that this simple equation can be expressed as G=L=M=O or GOD = LOVE = MANKIND = ONE, QED.

Who am I?

I have written this article for my 'Power of living in the now' blog for many reasons, most of which I'm not going to mention here as they are personal to me, however people may read between the lines from some of the things I will be talking about.

I am interested in a range of things, but most importantly, I am interested in the question of 'Being' i.e. why we are who we think or believe we are and who are we? These are questions that have regularly baffled and intrigued me ever since I was a child growing up and having occasional insights into the person behind the outward facing me, the body-mask staring back at me in the mirror. 

The honest truth is I have never seen myself but only a reflection in the mirror and from others, hence how accurate are those reflections of me? Do people see and interpret what I show them of myself or do they really know the person behind the mask? Is it garbage out to the world and garbage back from the world? 

I've come to realise that of course, I can't ever see myself in person, what I ever get to see as a living being is a reflection of what I look like - from a mirror and from others. Perhaps only when we die do we get to step outside that body-mask to see what we really looked like in in distorted form. But by then, it would be too late, as the real (hidden) you finally gets to see the body-mask posed dead in rigor mortis - in end form.

Those insights of me behind the mask, were very brief indeed, as I would catch myself having them in fleeting moments. Those very brief moments, lasting seconds rather than minutes, were astonishing moments, which I then reflected on. During those brief moments, It was as if the mask had fallen to reveal the real person behind the 'ME' parading itself to the world.

The real person behind the mask, the actual self, who in a material sense is a 'nobody' or to put it harshly a non-entity of sorts. In those fleeting moments, I questioned my rational for 'being' and I questioned who the real me was, the person behind the mask or the mask itself. The being doing the thinking, the engine running the sleek personality machine that parades itself to the outer world. Is that the real me? 

I always felt that the person or engine behind the mask was the real me, the indisputable me but because, in a sense - what I could observe in a mirror was my physical self, embodying all the traits that the mask had come to identify with and absorb wholeheartedly over the years of its existence - my little mind and my grown mind would undoubtedly always end up accepting and identifying with the Masked Persona.

As I now know, the 'outward personality' or the 'Mask' represents the bundle of characteristics that I have been conditioned to accept about myself from birth till present. Those characteristics, starting with my name, are formed and reinforced over the years by conditioning from my parents, siblings, teachers, education, religion, history, peers, friends, partners, co-workers, neighbours, community, media, society, nation, ethnicity, race, and the world at large. That sum total or bundle of characteristics often referred to as the 'ego' by philosophers and psychoanalysts alike, forms the basis of my presentation and reaction to the world around me.