Navigating Your Way to Love

Mind and Heart
Logic can be a useful tool, but logic tends to deal with abstractions. It is logic that allows us to look at a map and then navigate our way, but the map is not the territory. There are differences in reality, that maps can’t begin to contain, or reference. A map is an abstraction of something real. Like logic, the mind can be a useful tool, but it is a pathetic substitute for a self.

When you look with the heart, rather than the mind, you gain a different perspective of reality. The heart perceives a deeper sense of what is going on, of how things fit together, and even who you are. The heart can remember that you are more than a particular person, with a certain set of attributes. You are actually something which is in a constant state of becoming: not so much a noun, but a verb. Then, as you look around, you may notice that, not only is that true of you, but you are existing inside of something else, which is also in a constant state of becoming. There is this stream of “you” and also this stream of existence. Sometimes there is a merging of these two streams. The part is meeting the whole, and the whole is meeting the part. When this takes place, something else arises, greater than both the part and the whole together. One word for this which arises is love. Love is an existential language, in and of itself. It is a language which exists without the need for words, concepts, or abstractions. It is immediate. It is real. Love (real love) is here, now. Love which seems to be “there, then” isn’t love, but an abstraction, a concept.

The Indoctrination of a Human Being
In our upbringing we are lured away from this immediate experience of reality. This happens for many reasons. For one, we learn that the present moment is where pain occurs. When we hurt, it’s now! We begin to entertain the idea that we can avoid pain, by avoiding the present moment. We discover that we can desensitize ourselves from the pain of the immediate moment, buy mental distraction. However, in the process, our connection with the heart is diminished, and eventually severed altogether. We become identified with the head and lose contact with the heart. In the process, we literally turn our backs on love.

This is understandable, because love is risky. To love is to move into danger − because you cannot control it. The outcome of love is out of your hands, it is unpredictable. Who knows where love will lead? The mind is certainly not capable of knowing.

So, in our development, we come to trust in the mind, over the heart. And the mind, just like any other tyrant, tries to stamp out what it cannot control. The mind would tell you that with enough control you can be safe, that indeed, the control it offers is your only hope of safety. The heart, on the other hand would tell you that you already are safe, but the mind can’t hear this. When you move in love, you cannot calculate the possibilities or the results. You can’t be attached to control and at peace with being in love.

For love, the future does not exist. There is only the present. You can know love in this moment, but you can’t take love with you into a projected future, or an imagined past. Love doesn’t allow you to plan, because you cannot plan what you cannot control. This is why love is both terrifying and exciting.

Culture is not your friend. –Terence McKenna

The society, the civilization, the church, the culture, all direct a small child to be more logical. They focus the child’s energies in its head. Once the energies are consolidated in the head, it becomes difficult to come from the heart. Every child is born with great love energy, they actually arise out of love energy. But then culture comes along and teaches logic as the primary tool for survival. Children are taught fear, they’re taught caution and to be careful. All of these together damage the possibility of love.

Then, with a belief that fear and caution lead to safety, if a man falls in love with a woman, his thoughts often move to making her his girlfriend, and then his wife. In so doing, he would reduce her to a certain role, which is more predictable than the reality of a beloved. A woman, in love with a man typically begins to plot and plan to obtain a commitments, leading to the big one where he becomes her husband. We find that love leads to a preoccupation, a drive to possess the other, and this preoccupation is grounded in the desire to control this beloved, thereby bridging the, seemingly, unfathomable gap between love and safety.

The problem is that surrender is the juice which creates the clearing for love. Surrender is risk. Love is risk. When you constrain your beloved, to create them as safe, what you find is that they cease being your beloved. And then you turn to telling stories about how they changed and didn’t end up being who you thought they were, when it is us who changed the context of the game, thereby converting our beloved into a possession, annihilating our beloved in the process.

A husband seems to be something more solid than a lover. At least the law is there, the courts are there, the police are there, the government is there. They give a certain solidity to this abstraction we call husband. A lover seems more like a dream; not so substantial. People fall in love, and then gravitate toward marriage, such is the fear of love. Whomsoever we love, we start trying to control. That's just the way of it, until it’s not. It’s the conflict that goes on between wives and husbands, mothers and children, brothers and sisters, friends. It becomes a power struggle, a contest to determine who is going to possess whom, who is going to define whom, who is going to reduce whom to a thing? Who will be the master and who will be the slave?

Not very romantic is it?

The Way Out
Remember, the first error is that one becomes driven by the mind. The second error is that one starts substituting the need for love with the acquisition of things. We even attempt to turn our beloved into a thing, so that it can be possessed and controlled. This is a waste of life, and a waste of love.

Should you be fortunate enough to become aware that this is happening; not just on this page, but in your life, there is hope. Out of this awareness arises the potential to make a different choice. You can turn the tide and open to your heart. Check in, and see what your heart has to say about this. Although it may, your heart may not communicate in words. It may be as subtle as to come as a feeling, or an insistent longing. Making contact with the heart can undo what has been done to you by society, undoing all the nonsense that has been promulgated by your well-wishers. They may have thought they were helping you. They themselves were likely victims of their parents and their culture. It doesn’t help to blame them; you just don’t have to continue to believe what they taught.

When the head becomes dominant it squashes spontaneity. It becomes dictatorial. It does not allow the heart to even utter a single word; it forces the heart to be completely quiet. What is required is to listen again to the heart. It is helpful to loosen the attachment to logic, to having it all figured out. Become comfortable with not knowing. Love requires you to take risks. It requires that you step into something that “you” can’t control, and to live dangerously. When you develop a tolerance for these risks, you will move toward the unknown, and you will come to love persons, and not things. Love requires that you love what you cannot possess, and be willing to lose what you love. The moment you begin to dictate to love what must be, you turn from love. Love and surrender go hand in hand.

The automatic way of being for humans, is to fall in love with someone, and immediately your conditioning starts trying to possess them. My advice is to resist that temptation. Open yourself to the wound of love. Falling in love can be like an embrace in heavenly wings, and yes, there can be a sword hidden among the feathers. Falling in love can place you in the tiger’s jaws, having lost the chase. And then, the most delicious thing can happen. Something dies: something that clutched, and struggled, and worried, and fretted, and manipulated, and coerced. This something realizes that it is done for, and it lays down its weapons and surrenders. For many people, this doesn’t happen until the body is facing death. Then, when it is clear that death can no longer be avoided, the identity gives up, and peacefully, the heart steps forward, Spring time arrives again, and love is reborn from the ashes of a surrendered ego. I recommend going there sooner.

Whenever you start possessing you are killing love. You can either possess the person or you can love the person, but you can’t do both. It is not possible.

The ego actually thrives on error. The ego loves lies, because truth is the undoing of the ego. Lies strengthen it. This is so true that it doesn’t really matter what path you choose. Any path, travelled in earnestness, will lead you home, because truth is the path. So whenever you feel that your ego is winning and fulfilled, beware! You have consumed some poison. When you are in a state of surrender, you may relax. Surrender to What Is, is the antidote to the poison.

It comes down to a simple choice. You can tell the truth, and you can surrender to love, or you can listen to the mind, the ego. You can set out on its mission to prove that you are somebody, that you are a significant human being, who thinks significant thoughts, and probably, actually, the most important person in the world. You can collect the trinkets it seeks. You can possess lots of money. You can marry, and thereby possess, a beautiful woman or a powerful man. You can become famous and get the admiration of others.

Yes, those trinkets are there for the seeking, but only the ignorant or the insane would trade them for love. None of these trinkets will give you ultimate satisfaction, because they all require you to be separate, and what you want is to be whole. They require you to be in your head, and what you want is to be in your heart. They require you to view the world as an adversary to be conquered, and what you want is to know the world as your beloved, and to cherish it with abandon.

Another Map
In this writing, you have another map. The only value this map has is that you may use it to navigate your way to love.

© 2009, by carson boyd

Separating or Joining

We can always look for where others are wrong, and focus upon that. We can point it out to them, or just notice it quietly, again, and again. Or... we can look for where they’re right, and join with them. I notice that I like the experience of joining. The ego is the undisputed master of being right. We think so highly of being right that we have created professions of it. One of them is called attorney. Anyway, when I insist on being right, am I not throwing in with my ego and effectively saying, “lead on brother.” On the contrary, I could embrace being wrong, if for no other reason than, being right feeds my ego, and I have seen that my ego is not my friend. Actually, he is my torturer. I find what the USA did in my name in Guantanamo distasteful. In light of that, let me end my own internal torture, or at least cut off funding.

It occurred to me today to ask, what if we have the power to declare who someone is in our world? Then, reality has no choice but to say, as you wish. Then that person becomes for us, who we declare them to be? I think that’s actually the way of it.

When we make these declarations, I consider that perhaps we don’t have any choice in the matter. If that’s true, then there is no guilt. It’s just machinery running. If someone were to argue with gravity, we would call them insane. I say that to argue with any other aspect of reality is equally insane. Reality just is, what reality is, and the fact that it is that way doesn't mean anything.

So, "others should not misinterpret my intentions." Is that true? Apparently not. Not if we use reality as a measure of the truth, and could there be any better measure? I think not. Reality is the closest to the truth we can get, on the level of the physical.

As I’m fond of saying, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, where is offensive?

At my stage in life, I have come to the point of examining the payoff from investments made. The lack of forgiveness, or we could say guilt, is just way too expensive. It’s a loser, and it takes a fool to add it to one’s portfolio in the first place, and a bigger fool to keep it, in hopes that it will become a winner.

Whenever I’m tempted to write someone off, I sometimes remember that I will not be able to walk through the gates of heaven without having space in my heart for them.

I surrender. Ollie, Ollie, oxen free. Come out, come out, where ever you are. All is forgiven. Especially the one who most needs forgiveness. That would be me.

Would I rather be right, or happy? I’ll take happy, thank you very much. True forgiveness is to realize that what I thought happened, didn’t. I thought someone offended me. Oops, my bad. And, we begin now.

~ c a r s o n

Welcome to the Jungle

I live in this world that often occurs like a jungle, where a myriad of creatures come together to be, and express their individuality. The crickets sing, the monkey’s howl, the cats roar and it is a glorious expression; a symphony, with an unseen conductor. It is the sound of worship as each being trumpets their existence, and their gratitude to whatever it is that gives us existence.

We long to go into that jungle. We long to be our natural self. We long to cast our pheromones into the breeze and see what comes; to sniff the wind and see where we are drawn. And without a story of a separate me, it’s all just a cannibalistic orgy. I say cannibalistic, because there’s only one thing, and it feeds off of itself. I once had a strawberry say to me, “chew me up, swallow me down, I’ll be you.” People say that death is suffering. That’s a good one. I'm not so sure. This body can die, but I can’t. I was never born. As soon as Life is done with this body, I will gladly offer it to whomever wants it, for whatever purpose they desire. I say orgy because lust seems to be part of the program. We lust for whatever has been missing: for food, for love, for the smell of our beloved, for their touch, for their orgasm, for their surrender, for our own surrender.

We human’s are torn. On the one hand, we are committed to the fight. We long to vanquish those who have opposed us, to conquer the world and have it finally, at last, acknowledge us as its master. You may remember that was Satan's song in the garden. But on the other hand, perhaps more than we recognize, we long to surrender, to let it all go, to experience freedom. The fight costs us our freedom, you know? You realize that, right? You can’t be free, and at war, at the same time. For if you were truly free, wouldn’t you chose to be free from war?

What you really want is to experience your being without the encumbrance of shoulds. I should do this. I shouldn’t have done that. I can’t do that (even though I want to). I ought to do this. These all weigh us down. This world is upside down and backwards. We are told that keeping a tight control on ourselves will get us into Heaven, when actually it is the mechanism which keeps us in Hell.

What we want is the truth. It scares us half to death, and lures us at the same time (like so many worthwhile things). We’ve heard it time and time again:"The truth will set you free." Well, is it true, or not? It would be good to find out. My report is, yes, it is true, and that everything I thought I wanted, instead of the truth, is now seen to have so little relative value as to be worthless. Take it all, I won’t miss it: pride, prestige, respect, power, the illusion of safety. They mean nothing to me. I’ll take the love. I'll take the truth, here, now.

I was with a woman, night before last, and it was all the pleasure I could stand, just to lay next to her, in our afterglow, and breathe in her breath as she would exhale. The thought that keeps coming to my mind, day after day is, “Could it be any more delicious?”

Sign me up. I’m done. No, I don’t need to shop anymore. I’ll take Reality, exactly the way it is. This is what I want.