Feb. 15-17,’17 ~QofDay~ Spreading Love/Valentines Day
On this Valentine’s Day, how can we help Unconditional Love to spread across the planet?
Just be really clear, that we can love the person even if we hate what that person is currently doing or has done in the past.
We all have our bad days (weeks, years, ….).
We all make mistakes.
All any of us really have is our best guess at many different levels.
We all carry many different forms of behaviour deeply rooted in evolutionary time – some built into our brains and bodies by our genetics, some implicit in cultural constructs we haven’t explicitly explored yet, some quite explicitly contained in things we mistakenly accept as true.
Every individual is complex beyond the ability of anyone to understand in anything but the broadest of brush stroke sketches.
Every individual is far more valuable than any “thought” they may currently have or any “set of thoughts” that may currently have them.
We each have the possibility of choice.
We each have our dark and chaotic sides.
We are each constantly engaged in an eternal internal battle of sorts.
That is what it is to be human – to be a conscious passenger atop a vast subconscious mass that is complex beyond conscious capacity, yet is a fundamental part of what being human is.
The science is clear, we are embodied cognition at many different levels, and the conscious part is just the tip of the iceberg, that can exert influence that is far less than control. Freud and Jung and company were all onto something, even if they had no real idea what.
Being human is being something so profoundly complex it is difficult to get even a vague sketch of the complexity.
We have so many different levels of systems trying to chunk things down to levels of simplicity that we can actually consciously deal with, that we continually over simplify what we are.
We look for simplicity where it does not exist.
We look for pattern where it does not exist.
We have so many levels of systems doing stuff automatically that we often have little conscious awareness of or control over.
Such are the parts of being human that are perhaps the most difficult to come to terms with – particularly for people like Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Eleizer Yudkowski and many others.
It can be really hard to accept (as Stephen Wolfram actually seems to sometimes manage), that we can be complex beyond any form of simplification.
Appreciating that, when one can, creates a lot of space for humility and forgiveness and acceptance – which seem to be prerequisites for the expression of love.
