How can we love beyond common sense?

Love is a mystery. It cannot be explained or rationalized. It does not obey reason, logic, cause or effect. It cannot be controlled or directed. Love IS.

Being so, of course it directly dethrones Ego-self.  ‘What do you mean I did not create or destroy love from free-will? What do you mean that love is an external force that does not depend on what I say or do?
My late husband and I met half way between a falling angel and a rising ape (I needn´t say who was who!). We had a totally different understanding of life and love. Where I was always yearning with an instinctive longing for fulfillment from Love at a higher realm, he was proudly bragging the love he could generate. One lived an ethereal reality, while the other was earth-bound and totally physical.
Those who identify with the capacity to see beyond what the eyes perceive,  sense a reality yet un-manifest, understanding Love as absolute. Those who limit reality to tangible truths, proved by deeds, need bodies to love.
Of course, experience integrates multiple realms of: a physical, psychological, rational and spiritual nature. Love encompasses all. It cannot be fragmented, though our limited perception distorts that subjective understanding of it. But even so, it is ‘lovable’. It rings a bell as if tapping into our unconscious knowing that love IS, far and beyond our experiencing of it. So when I love, I am isolated, separated from other’s experiencing of it and yet merged into a flow where I lose my self-conceived identity and become ONE with others. I can feel totally alienated, when I perceive such unfathomable love.
Common sense cannot contain love. It cannot understand it. No matter how it tries to define love, it ends up limiting it. Love cannot be held or contained in the present; nor in the past. Only the future can hold the ethereal possibility of love, held in HOPE.
The challenge is not to give way to doubt but Be-LIVE it.

Learning to LOve: Families

Families are containers for re-latedness. To relate (lat.: re-again; latio-side/beat) is to re-establish contact from a different side; to re-establish timing to a re- newed  ‘beat’. Both acceptions require the containing framework of an encompassing family. Thus, I can break away from my personal ego-centered stance and shift to the perspective of a loved one within the safety-grounds of a trusted environment. Change and ‘development’  is easier within this ‘envelopment’.

While in the Mexican Association of Sexology, we did a research on ‘families’, establishing up to 29 different structures: nuclear families, extended families, divorced…with ‘your’ children; ‘my’ children; ‘our’ children; adopted children; grandparents, uncles, aunts etc .It included indigenous structuring of families, where twins share wives;  where father and son share wives; even villages with a shared ‘wife’. They all hold love. ‘upholding strongholds as holdings’ held together by relatedness.

This Spring I invited my ex-husband to our family town house. I did it for him to get away and have a break from the hardships of everyday life (and aging), he started the year with. I was surprised, however at everyone’s reaction. Despite our having dinner together once a week, for over the 11 years we’ve been divorced, my daughter’s reaction and that of my step-children and sisters was one of ‘shock’. No, we are not planning on getting back together, again, but what is  wrong with ‘caring’ for each other, beyond the marriage vows? As Western society would have it, love is only allowed in marriage. We like to believe we divorced out of love. If we had wanted to hurt each other we would have stayed married to continue making our lives miserable!!!!

The experience was interesting. My parents shared mutual enjoyment with his presence, perhaps from the wisdom, borne of time, that values everyday as if it were the last. No strings attached; no false expectations; just ‘living the moment’ gratefully. I enjoyed the old comfort of knowing each other well, making it all, relaxing and easy-going. However, there too, were surprising changes. He opened the car door for me! And even thanked me for making his bed. ’Change’ is ‘strange’…both, with a hidden ‘angel’ within.

 In my understanding it confirms that love can be extended beyond what is socially acceptable. But it needs family.

 

Learning to love: Befriend your demons

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

 Befriend your demons

It´s hard to admit one is wrong, but harder still to re-cognize one’s a “bitch”. Yet, without it we cannot love. We tend to project our shadow-selves on others, blaming them for our worst fears.
Disowning the dark side of our soul is loving, ‘half-heartedly’.

I started thinking about this when my daughter twitted that she had stopped fighting her inner demons “…we’re on the same side , now” (@tandorantes). I was proud of her inner strength, so much stronger in her generation than ours. Hatred and evil horrify me. She takes them for granted. What horrifies her, she said “…is stupidity”. At first, I thought that was funny but the more I think out it, the closer to hard reality. Yes, man isgood and evil. That is a fact. Evidence proves it. But he has a choice, which can only be made with ‘intelligence’. To be horrified with man´s evil is to deny one´s own capacity to think, and possibly ‘react’ if given the circumstances, with the same destructive force.

“Actually”, says my daughter, “survival in this world needs demons. Only with them, can we have that added ‘intelligent edge’ which you can´t see when you´re blinded by ‘sweetness’ ”
…. So much for my blog!!!

 I suppose she is right. The more I think about it, the more I recognize the inner work I have to do, to accept my own inner demons. All this self-righteous ‘goodness’ cannot be real if it is not grounded by its shadow. Yes, I have been and am a ‘bitch’. So there!

Long before confessing or even repairing any damage I’ve done, I have to recognize: the wrath with which I hate anyone who cuts in front of me in the traffic…'I could kill them!'; my avarice that has me holding on to cluttering memories and ‘things’ that I can’t get rid of; my cowardice that prefers to smile, be stepped upon and play the martyr; my pride that looks down upon everyone, not because I’m haughty but with the certainty that  ‘I am better”.

Befriending my demons would require I talk to my shadow-self to try to understand why- the wrath, the avarice, the cowardice and the pride. Perhaps I’d learn that my wrath stems from repressed anger, for pain from constant abuse. Knowing about it, I can respond with anticipation, setting limits on time. I´d learn that my avarice comes from a hollow inner emptiness that yearns for recognition and I’d prepare for the day, asking my loved ones for an extra ‘hurray!’, so as to avoid begging for it from others at work. I’d learn that my cowardice comes from fear and insecurity, after having been rejected and made fun of so many times, and I’d learn to avoid bullies. I’d realize that my pride comes from over-confidence, from spoiling and getting my way all the time and try to do things on my own, despite my fear of failure.

So perhaps, we do have to get to know our darker selves, to enhance conscious awareness. Both foolishness and kindness may overlook negativity; the real fool, from ignorance; the kind man, from generosity.

The Kamasutra says that “virtue is a luxury, inaccessible to all”. Only those who know their inward capacity for evil can have patience and understanding for all.
It’s OK to be a ‘bitch’. It gives me the courage to stand up for myself and others, and to look at reality head on.  So look out, here I come!

                                                Even the heart has compartments unknown to itself.

Learning to love: Hate

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Hate

Learning to love requires reflecting on the inner movements of the soul. We have to develop spiritual literacy to ‘read’ significance into every day. ‘Reading’ actually means ‘piecing together’ and it is the associations we make of everything that happens, that allows us to thread a single pattern of meaning for that day.

Take yesterday. A friend told me of an inexplicable atrocity: an adopted daughter stabbed her adoptive mother to death. I was horrified and shocked at the evil we are capable of, as humans, as we destroy the very love we are offered. So I chose to contemplate on the meaning of ‘hatred’, questioning my Higher Self, as I looked for answers throughout the day.

Where does evil come from? Is it a natural quality in man or is it only some men who are evil. Does evil come from an external force or ‘d’evil’? Do we learn it? Is it inherited? Is it ‘payback’ for social injustice? If God created everything, did He also create evil? Perhaps it's all the above.

Undoubtedly we need Evil to know God-ness. Neale Donald Walsch wrote a lovely parable for children in “The Little Soul and the Sun”, where two little angels decide to play out a human saga where one has to hurt the other, for them to know and experience forgiveness and love.

“..But please, promise me you won’t forget who I am, when I hurt you”, pleaded the one who was to play out ‘the evil one’.

Hate is not the opposite of love. The opposite of love is fear…fear of being unloved, or worse still, unlovable. Such desolation (lat: without sun) renders us hopeless, unable to love and be loved.

Hate (which etymologically came from fate) is the end by-product of a growing chain of destructive attitudes, behavior and distorted interpretations stemming from anger, rage, wrath and envy. It is the shadow side of love. Evil is born of meanness  (stingy) and cruelty.

 I remember bearing a deep grudge with self-piteous resentment against my life-long sworn lover, when he left me. The passion of Eros (Life) he had enkindled turned sour into Tanatos (Death). I felt dead. Life wasn´t possible, without him. My soul was amputated and my heart literally torn out; so much so, that I couldn’t feel anymore. I became hardened and insensitive clamming my soul shut from love, much as a child throwing a tantrum and saying ‘Well, if this is the way it’s going to be, I’m not playing’.

Time, with its blessed drips of eternity, heals everything. Now, I thank my lover because he added a string to my heart and the music I now play is richer and infinitely more beautiful. So what we hate passionately, may be the pain of love.

However, the evil of this child, was still inexplicable.

By night, I saw a documentary on the different cerebral wavelengths registered in Functioning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI). They tested someone in deep anguish and compared it to that of a Tibetan monk in contemplation.  When he was asked to meditate on the word “Compassion”, the nervous itching of the spikes on the cerebral encephalogram stopped and regular long, lasting curves traced the paced register of peace. Suddenly, the answer to my plight struck me.

It’s not about extremes: Right /wrong; good/bad; evil/kindness but about the neutralizing effect of a third integrating attribute- Love. We have to recognize and dialogue with our shadow-selves to fully accept and understand our dual nature, in Love.

 

 

 

Learing to Love. Reparation

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Lesson 24: Reparation

Man has always punished vice, crime and sin, be it as retaliation from he who was wronged, as correction from the family, as justice from the State, or as penance from the Church. However, underlying excessive punishment is always vengeance and retrieval.

With the New testament, the old Mosaic injunction “thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” was reverted with a new law, the law of forgiveness. In His sermon on the mount Christ said, “Ye shall resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also”. The new law is about loving and forgiving our enemies. Princess Mary says to Prince Andrew in War and Peace, “Forget it and forgive! We have no right to punish”.

Saint Augustine said that God rightly punished the sins he committed for “every disorder in the soul is its own punishment”. Hobbes describes it with a theory that “intemperance is naturally punished with dis-ease; injustice with the violence on enemies; cowardice with oppression”. Freud said that seeking punishment was the psyche´s way to find relief from guilt.

In an unjust society, we may have to bear the injustice of punishment for resisting the state, in refusing to obey laws that go against our conscience as did Socrates, Gandhi, Thoreau, Oscar Wilde and so many self-governing leaders.

My plight with sin, whether real, fancied, or karmic, lead me to the Monastery, a sinner in penance; to becoming a social fighter, for meritorious indulgence; to co-dependent relationships, for joint reparation. This self-assigned injunction from love, held me restrained from inner joy. Here, the underlying wrong was the pride of making my sin larger that God´s forgiveness and rejecting Love. With the recent avowal of love from my fiancé 30 years ago, I vindicated my innocence and my right to accept love and for the first time experienced inner joy. It took me almost 60 years!

Reparation (from the Latin re-parare- standing up again) is not only for the wrong-doer but for he who allowed it. It is about conscious awareness of wrong-doing and the conscious decision to re-dignify our Higher Selves. We have to repair the damage done, not to benefit others, but to get ourselves back on our feet and hold our heads up high.

When I was young one of my teachers slapped me in front of the class. Smugly, I turned the other cheek and she hit me again!!!! My classmates were shocked and called me ‘stupid’ for my reaction and for letting it go without sanction. Forty years later, out of the blue, she contacted me and after exchanging life experiences, she said she was sorry.
What other way of loving is there?