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November 2009 
Who or what would you have the hardest time loving?
Posted on Feb 12th, 2009
by 
Little Big O
Little Big O
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for February 07, 2009:
This was originally written to a post by Kathy here on "Who or What would you have the hardest time loving?" that I was asked to weigh in on.
I believe that what many of us ultimately have the hardest time loving is the nature of our experience. We are in continuous pursuit of something ELSE.
To sumptuous denizens of Beingness,
First of all, as the Mayans say,"In Lak'ech!" "You are another I."
Can we venture together for a moment?
Let me ask you: what do the meditator, the activist, the addict, and the rapist all have in common in terms of what motivates those specific activities: meditation, activism, addiction and rape?
Consider that for a moment. What are they all trying to do that we are trying to do? Please note the phrase: "trying to do" which gives a big clue.
So here's a quote from Kathy that points to it and it's the crux of how Western humans relate to their experience, after 12-18 plus years of programming in schools to pick the "right answer" to "do the right thing" and I quote you.
"I see myself, and lots of other people (may be a projection) saying we’re in the flow. When really we’re still asleep and just responding from the firing random associations in our Pavlov-dog neurons. "
So there are times when we feel like we're in the flow, or say we're in the flow and then there are times that we're just Pavlovian-dog bio-bots, right?
Consider the rapist Kathy mentions. Okay, so he's chosen an activity which, on the surface, appears quite different than, say the meditator's activity, right? ...on the surface... There are times when the rapist is in flow and there are times that he's not, right? Kind of like sky-diving, meditating or something, perhaps, I don't know.
But what's a rapist? What is he doing? A rapist is someone who interrupts another human being's will to follow their chosen course and hijacks their experience into fulfilling their expectations for a totally different experience. They subject one human being to another's will.
Johnny sits at the window at school. It's May. Mrs. Stuart is teaching algebra. Suddenly a small, bright orange bird alights upon the sill right next to Johnny, outside. The birds head tilts and his eyes connect with Johnny. It's THEIR moment. He trills a short blast of thrilling notes that reach straight through to the pulsatile essence of Johnny's heart. Johnny's in COMMUNE-ion and LIFE is singing to him. There is only one movement and the entire world is a part of it.
Mrs. Stuart has something that she believes is much more important than Johnny’s experience, and she will bodily, even violently assure that Johnny grasps this. He is not in charge. Mrs. Stuart is in charge of him! Mrs. Stuart is not pleased to see Johnny looking outside and Johnny gets rudely called out of his experience into the experience that Mrs. Stuart intends for him. This interruption is the essence of rape. Please consider the dynamics that I am pointing to, not the judgment. As long as we allow our children to be interrupted, and as long as we continue to interrupt our children, rape will proliferate, because we acculturate each other into the belief that we can feel better by interrupting another person.
So rape is essentially believing that MY experience is more important than your experience and I’m going to gang-press you into my experience. This is the essence not only of rape, but of our educational system, our parenting model and majority rule democracy. Bottom line: “We have decided that you WILL do what we say AND, not only that, you WILL submit to the belief that it’s for your own good.”
How many times have you heard someone you're "close to" tell you "I absolutely need to talk to you!" Whenever you hear that you are talking to someone who is insane!
This is NOT the status quo amongst human beings, but it is in many cultures AND there are others that don't treat each other this way. I had some Cheyenne, Lakota & Klamath friends that I spent years with that very specifically did not do this. When I was with them, I began to notice that they didn’t ask direct pointed questions and very few questions at all. Already something as subtle as, “Kathy, will you drive me to the grocery store?” is understood to put you in a situation where I am trapping you into a choice about what I want to use you for. i.e. “Will you allow me to use you for my purposes?” Instead someone might say “in the air,” without making eye contact (and thus putting someone on the spot) “I want to go to the grocery store today.” Simple statement. Now someone can GIFT their aid or simply share the adventure. “Yeah! I’m going there shortly and there’s room in my car for whoever wants to go.”
Our cultures are very different. Notice how we are perpetually negotiating other people’s wills. “Hey, honey, will you do this?” “Honey, did you do what we agreed upon?” This is Western intimacy and it’s no wonder we’re all driving each other nuts. What we often miss is that we’re driving OURSELVES nuts too.
The vocabulary of "Honey, how can I make you happy?" & "How can I make myself happy?" has shared presumptions. This is the vocabulary of life as an artifact that requires manipulation, not life as LIVING. (And that's okay. As a matter of fact, it's beautiful! Our BEAUTY is inescapable. We can only choose to Taste! Taste! Taste!... or not...)
But we do treat each other and ourselves this way. After 12 plus years of getting perpetually interrupted in the mental institutions called schools, where our experience is reduced to a mental artifact, we are conditioned to believe that "performance" or "flow" or "feeling good" is a matter of doing something ELSE or getting someone else to do something, i.e. we are conditioned to separate ourselves from our experience and to decide whether or not we are PERFORMING as desired. Our lives are no longer authentic, they are pre-conceived, or pre-mentated performances.
Please take this in for a moment: Performance... "How do I perform?" "How is my performance right now?" "How is YOUR performance right now?!" "Are you doing this right?" "Are you Being right?!" "Are you grasping what Little Big O is telling you right?!"
HAHAHAHAHA!
We are crazy, beautiful beings.
Anything for you there?
So feeling is a performance. We are convinced that we will feel better when we DO something better. Of course we want to feel good right? We tell the world how good we feel. We are in pursuit of a feeling. It doesn't matter whether we are meditators, addicts or rapists, the fact is that we are conditioned to believe that by doing something, we can feel better. If we simply DO something, we can taste that thrill that is perpetually elusive. And we do things and we do feel better. But "better" doesn't last, does it? Soon we're faced with our Pavlovian self again... "Oh shit! You mean I turned into that Pavlovian fucking dog again?! Oh FUUUUUCK! I was so God-damn close to enlightenment and then I turned back into a lumbering, drooling 185 lb. Newfoundland slobbering all over the damn place! What's up with THAT!!!!!!!!"
Once we have internalized the culture of the Mrs. Stuarts, of the world and of our parents, our relationship to ourselves is one of perpetual interruption and evaluation. We become the next generation of interruptors. Interruption becomes intimacy. How do I show my loved ones that I care? I interrupt them. How do I show myself that I really want to improve? I interrupt myself. "See! Now I'm an adult. I don't need Mom, Dad or Mrs. Stuart anymore. I can interrupt myself all on my own and even find brand new ways of interrupting myself that Mom, Dad, & Mrs Stuart never even imagined: Tibetan ways, shamanistic ways, crazy no-way ways, etc. Now I have better vocabulary for what I SHOULD be doing than my peers. "Am I in flow or am I out of flow?" "Do I feel okay or not?" "AM I okay?" "Really?" "Reeeaaaaaalllly?" and we are perpetually seeking to feel better by some mental criteria. We want to improve ourselves. We have an IDEA of what "flow" is and we are trying to feel it in our emotional and physical bodies. We have an idea of how we could "be all that we can be," right? And even though we may not join the army, we're still going to gang-press ourselves into the IDEA we have for ourselves.
Is this wrong? No. It's not right or wrong. It's CURIOUS.
"Curious"
Let me offer you curiosity as a treasured, lived key, heart to heart, and beseech you cup your hands together and allow me to pour this bright tingling intimacy of this energetic relational key we label "curious" and pour it from my hands to yours, from my heart to yours, tingling up from our palms, up our arms to our chests, necks, heads, bellies, groins, legs, toes.
Curious, eh?
Can you FEEL that there’s something profound about loving wrapped up in this curiosity? Like if we were to discover passionate love together, its dimensions would be proportionate to how much curiosity we dared offer each other. Can you FEEL it?
Maybe there’s something already-here… Are you curious?
Yet we keep bumping up against this frustration of trying to achieve some state which very astute people keep selling to us as "better" than the state we're presently in. The depth of our access to our present experience is shallow because we are conditioned to perpetually interrupting it and playing Mrs. Stuart with ourselves and evaluating whether we are experiencing what we want to experience.
What's the alternative? Well, I think Michael Brown puts it quite succinctly when he says, "We can either keep trying to feel better OR we can get better at feeling." The latter process is one of venturing through the layers of what we are experiencing without trying to do something to it. If we feel "awful," we develop the courage to actually feel what awful FEELS like without making drama that we externalize and without trying to make awful "not awful." We begin to become curious. We begin to allow that in "awful" there is room to simply BE, to taste, to experience. We begin to experience that we don't get destroyed by "awful" nor does the world end in awful. Awful, once we FEEL it, isn’t actually awful. There are really no words for it, but the experience is vital, it is alive and we are living it. When the Zen people say "Not-two," what are they pointing at? You are already it! And then they say, "And if you tell me 'One' I will beat the living daylights out of you!"
Not One! Not Two!
Something is LIVING here. It is not separate from you.
Engaging in this process for many of us means reconnecting with a process of maturing our relationship to our experience that was interrupted at a very young age. It’s simply accessing this experience we are having right now and allowing, even for a short time, that we can take, say, 15 minutes a day and not interrupt our experience. Not chasing “enlightenment,” not “self-improvement,” just a simple willingness to come home to being THIS beingness. “Hello!” Settling in. Tasting the flavor of this. Maybe expansiveness. Maybe Pavlov’s dog with the long wet tongue.
We begin to redevelop familiarity with our felt experience beyond the perpetual fascism of continually “fixing,” “readjusting,” etc. And if we continually fix and readjust, we don’t fix that either. We fix and readjust and get curious in the midst of it. “Wow, look at me go trying to fix myself again!” “Wow, look at me go trying to fix my child, my lover, my world, my gaia friends again! How CURIOUS!”
Hahahahahaha!
“What’s here?” It’s okay to be just-this and NOT do something about it. Life can go on here. Life can move within us and we don’t have to interrupt or correct it. Then another intelligence that we are knit of appears. Not an idea and not no-idea. BEING is here. We are it! How curious!
We can smile, laugh then become very curious:
"O! It's me again! How curious! Hmmmm....."
I believe that what many of us ultimately have the hardest time loving is the nature of our experience. We are in continuous pursuit of something ELSE.
To sumptuous denizens of Beingness,
First of all, as the Mayans say,"In Lak'ech!" "You are another I."
Can we venture together for a moment?
Let me ask you: what do the meditator, the activist, the addict, and the rapist all have in common in terms of what motivates those specific activities: meditation, activism, addiction and rape?
Consider that for a moment. What are they all trying to do that we are trying to do? Please note the phrase: "trying to do" which gives a big clue.
So here's a quote from Kathy that points to it and it's the crux of how Western humans relate to their experience, after 12-18 plus years of programming in schools to pick the "right answer" to "do the right thing" and I quote you.
"I see myself, and lots of other people (may be a projection) saying we’re in the flow. When really we’re still asleep and just responding from the firing random associations in our Pavlov-dog neurons. "
So there are times when we feel like we're in the flow, or say we're in the flow and then there are times that we're just Pavlovian-dog bio-bots, right?
Consider the rapist Kathy mentions. Okay, so he's chosen an activity which, on the surface, appears quite different than, say the meditator's activity, right? ...on the surface... There are times when the rapist is in flow and there are times that he's not, right? Kind of like sky-diving, meditating or something, perhaps, I don't know.
But what's a rapist? What is he doing? A rapist is someone who interrupts another human being's will to follow their chosen course and hijacks their experience into fulfilling their expectations for a totally different experience. They subject one human being to another's will.
Johnny sits at the window at school. It's May. Mrs. Stuart is teaching algebra. Suddenly a small, bright orange bird alights upon the sill right next to Johnny, outside. The birds head tilts and his eyes connect with Johnny. It's THEIR moment. He trills a short blast of thrilling notes that reach straight through to the pulsatile essence of Johnny's heart. Johnny's in COMMUNE-ion and LIFE is singing to him. There is only one movement and the entire world is a part of it.
Mrs. Stuart has something that she believes is much more important than Johnny’s experience, and she will bodily, even violently assure that Johnny grasps this. He is not in charge. Mrs. Stuart is in charge of him! Mrs. Stuart is not pleased to see Johnny looking outside and Johnny gets rudely called out of his experience into the experience that Mrs. Stuart intends for him. This interruption is the essence of rape. Please consider the dynamics that I am pointing to, not the judgment. As long as we allow our children to be interrupted, and as long as we continue to interrupt our children, rape will proliferate, because we acculturate each other into the belief that we can feel better by interrupting another person.
So rape is essentially believing that MY experience is more important than your experience and I’m going to gang-press you into my experience. This is the essence not only of rape, but of our educational system, our parenting model and majority rule democracy. Bottom line: “We have decided that you WILL do what we say AND, not only that, you WILL submit to the belief that it’s for your own good.”
How many times have you heard someone you're "close to" tell you "I absolutely need to talk to you!" Whenever you hear that you are talking to someone who is insane!
This is NOT the status quo amongst human beings, but it is in many cultures AND there are others that don't treat each other this way. I had some Cheyenne, Lakota & Klamath friends that I spent years with that very specifically did not do this. When I was with them, I began to notice that they didn’t ask direct pointed questions and very few questions at all. Already something as subtle as, “Kathy, will you drive me to the grocery store?” is understood to put you in a situation where I am trapping you into a choice about what I want to use you for. i.e. “Will you allow me to use you for my purposes?” Instead someone might say “in the air,” without making eye contact (and thus putting someone on the spot) “I want to go to the grocery store today.” Simple statement. Now someone can GIFT their aid or simply share the adventure. “Yeah! I’m going there shortly and there’s room in my car for whoever wants to go.”
Our cultures are very different. Notice how we are perpetually negotiating other people’s wills. “Hey, honey, will you do this?” “Honey, did you do what we agreed upon?” This is Western intimacy and it’s no wonder we’re all driving each other nuts. What we often miss is that we’re driving OURSELVES nuts too.
The vocabulary of "Honey, how can I make you happy?" & "How can I make myself happy?" has shared presumptions. This is the vocabulary of life as an artifact that requires manipulation, not life as LIVING. (And that's okay. As a matter of fact, it's beautiful! Our BEAUTY is inescapable. We can only choose to Taste! Taste! Taste!... or not...)
But we do treat each other and ourselves this way. After 12 plus years of getting perpetually interrupted in the mental institutions called schools, where our experience is reduced to a mental artifact, we are conditioned to believe that "performance" or "flow" or "feeling good" is a matter of doing something ELSE or getting someone else to do something, i.e. we are conditioned to separate ourselves from our experience and to decide whether or not we are PERFORMING as desired. Our lives are no longer authentic, they are pre-conceived, or pre-mentated performances.
Please take this in for a moment: Performance... "How do I perform?" "How is my performance right now?" "How is YOUR performance right now?!" "Are you doing this right?" "Are you Being right?!" "Are you grasping what Little Big O is telling you right?!"
HAHAHAHAHA!
We are crazy, beautiful beings.
Anything for you there?
So feeling is a performance. We are convinced that we will feel better when we DO something better. Of course we want to feel good right? We tell the world how good we feel. We are in pursuit of a feeling. It doesn't matter whether we are meditators, addicts or rapists, the fact is that we are conditioned to believe that by doing something, we can feel better. If we simply DO something, we can taste that thrill that is perpetually elusive. And we do things and we do feel better. But "better" doesn't last, does it? Soon we're faced with our Pavlovian self again... "Oh shit! You mean I turned into that Pavlovian fucking dog again?! Oh FUUUUUCK! I was so God-damn close to enlightenment and then I turned back into a lumbering, drooling 185 lb. Newfoundland slobbering all over the damn place! What's up with THAT!!!!!!!!"
Once we have internalized the culture of the Mrs. Stuarts, of the world and of our parents, our relationship to ourselves is one of perpetual interruption and evaluation. We become the next generation of interruptors. Interruption becomes intimacy. How do I show my loved ones that I care? I interrupt them. How do I show myself that I really want to improve? I interrupt myself. "See! Now I'm an adult. I don't need Mom, Dad or Mrs. Stuart anymore. I can interrupt myself all on my own and even find brand new ways of interrupting myself that Mom, Dad, & Mrs Stuart never even imagined: Tibetan ways, shamanistic ways, crazy no-way ways, etc. Now I have better vocabulary for what I SHOULD be doing than my peers. "Am I in flow or am I out of flow?" "Do I feel okay or not?" "AM I okay?" "Really?" "Reeeaaaaaalllly?" and we are perpetually seeking to feel better by some mental criteria. We want to improve ourselves. We have an IDEA of what "flow" is and we are trying to feel it in our emotional and physical bodies. We have an idea of how we could "be all that we can be," right? And even though we may not join the army, we're still going to gang-press ourselves into the IDEA we have for ourselves.
Is this wrong? No. It's not right or wrong. It's CURIOUS.
"Curious"
Let me offer you curiosity as a treasured, lived key, heart to heart, and beseech you cup your hands together and allow me to pour this bright tingling intimacy of this energetic relational key we label "curious" and pour it from my hands to yours, from my heart to yours, tingling up from our palms, up our arms to our chests, necks, heads, bellies, groins, legs, toes.
Curious, eh?
Can you FEEL that there’s something profound about loving wrapped up in this curiosity? Like if we were to discover passionate love together, its dimensions would be proportionate to how much curiosity we dared offer each other. Can you FEEL it?
Maybe there’s something already-here… Are you curious?
Yet we keep bumping up against this frustration of trying to achieve some state which very astute people keep selling to us as "better" than the state we're presently in. The depth of our access to our present experience is shallow because we are conditioned to perpetually interrupting it and playing Mrs. Stuart with ourselves and evaluating whether we are experiencing what we want to experience.
What's the alternative? Well, I think Michael Brown puts it quite succinctly when he says, "We can either keep trying to feel better OR we can get better at feeling." The latter process is one of venturing through the layers of what we are experiencing without trying to do something to it. If we feel "awful," we develop the courage to actually feel what awful FEELS like without making drama that we externalize and without trying to make awful "not awful." We begin to become curious. We begin to allow that in "awful" there is room to simply BE, to taste, to experience. We begin to experience that we don't get destroyed by "awful" nor does the world end in awful. Awful, once we FEEL it, isn’t actually awful. There are really no words for it, but the experience is vital, it is alive and we are living it. When the Zen people say "Not-two," what are they pointing at? You are already it! And then they say, "And if you tell me 'One' I will beat the living daylights out of you!"
Not One! Not Two!
Something is LIVING here. It is not separate from you.
Engaging in this process for many of us means reconnecting with a process of maturing our relationship to our experience that was interrupted at a very young age. It’s simply accessing this experience we are having right now and allowing, even for a short time, that we can take, say, 15 minutes a day and not interrupt our experience. Not chasing “enlightenment,” not “self-improvement,” just a simple willingness to come home to being THIS beingness. “Hello!” Settling in. Tasting the flavor of this. Maybe expansiveness. Maybe Pavlov’s dog with the long wet tongue.
We begin to redevelop familiarity with our felt experience beyond the perpetual fascism of continually “fixing,” “readjusting,” etc. And if we continually fix and readjust, we don’t fix that either. We fix and readjust and get curious in the midst of it. “Wow, look at me go trying to fix myself again!” “Wow, look at me go trying to fix my child, my lover, my world, my gaia friends again! How CURIOUS!”
Hahahahahaha!
“What’s here?” It’s okay to be just-this and NOT do something about it. Life can go on here. Life can move within us and we don’t have to interrupt or correct it. Then another intelligence that we are knit of appears. Not an idea and not no-idea. BEING is here. We are it! How curious!
We can smile, laugh then become very curious:
"O! It's me again! How curious! Hmmmm....."
Access: PublicTagged with: QaR, loving, challenge, Michael Brown, education, domestication, negotiation, enlightenment, Feeling
I remember O, being in a boat of load of trouble at one time of my life a couple of decades ago. This is the kind of trouble that all “fixing” and “tries” are not going to overcome any time soon.
I was attending some ummm let’s call it required education. ;o) The lady leading the class started getting real, personal… I mean very real and very personal, uncomfortably so. She was letting it rip truthfully, tough lovingly, and real. I sat there being totally penetrated by the depth of her connection and searing stark truthfulness. The underlying feeling said more than her words ever would. Her presence, emotion, and depth emerged from her in the most Awesome Presence!
When she completed, she paused and asked, “Do you know my definition of love?” We all sat there blasted by the emptiness of truth, the profundity of her presence, the depth of the love of her nature totally blank, empty, and recpetive. She said, “Love for me is the ability to be REAL.” That was an understatement given her presence in the last hour or so. I lost track of time.
I don’t know if anyone else heard her or felt her, but I sure as hell did, and I was moved off the mountain of my beliefs to a place where something larger could penetrate me with the insight, truth, and reality of the surface I had been living and thinking I was. Maybe it is more accurate to say some shell around me crumbled to the ground leaving the naked pulsating aliveness of presence that could finally hear, feel, and sense truth in the raw unfiltered.
I never forgot her. I will never forget this sharing, this realness for it is in my book real LOVE from the heart and presence of being!
Rock On Brother!
I have found what you say to be true from experience and well worth looking at in the eye and the eye of being.
A little vulnerability and openness to passoniate presence has changed my life at key moments. This is one of them.
Deepest Bow!
z
I love this: “some shell around me crumbled to the ground leaving the naked pulsating
aliveness of presence that could finally hear, feel, and sense truth in
the raw unfiltered.”
Consider the practice of Radical Self-Acceptance and being the YES to the totality of what is experienced. ALL of it.
Resonating mightily over here with all of it, ALL OF THIS, oh yeah. This curiosity whereof you speak is just pure consciousness unadulteratedly ready to be in direct experience of whatever arises in THIS.
Yowza. So happy to add my M to your O and z. Mwah!
Thanks Mascha! So happy to frolic with you in Realms of curious Being!
O, I have to run get my shades, this is so brilliant!
You explain some things that help me understand some of my experience this past month. I never would have figured it out on my own, and as a result I would judge another person wrong for their response. I see now.
On another note, it is abundantly clear that most of my discomfort arises from people not doing/being what I want them to, and the rest of it comes from feeling somebody wants me to do/be what they want.
So glad I can just stop that now.
I read the entire blog again just now and didn’t recognize it. It was seen for the first time. And the funniest thing is that you are telling my life story, O, describing exactly my path, even the quote you picked out from Zennie’s marvelous reply is an image I’ve had of myself countless times:
I’m a crab whose shell was cracked when my human ‘I’ took the jump from a balcony at great height and fatally splattered on the pavement. Now my innards are spilling out, a soft, slimy goo that is eaten up by two white doves. The next thing I know is these birds of peace have turned into two powerful horses, one male and one female, both gleaming white with thick legs like Clydesdale’s. They’re galloping across the sky into the cloudless distance….
I am all these simultaneously and in succession.
Cracked, outta the shell,
your m
I read this again, just now, because of Satya-Seer’s link.
” cultures are very different. Notice how we are perpetually
negotiating other people’s wills. “Hey, honey, will you do this?”
“Honey, did you do what we agreed upon?” This is Western intimacy and
it’s no wonder we’re all driving each other nuts. What we often miss
is that we’re driving OURSELVES nuts too.
We go to therapy to learn how to negotiate, we spend thousands in workshops to learn this negotiation, and mostly it is outright manipulation. If I stopped at reading this with my mind, I’d feel trapped by my inculturation.
When I listen with my body, I relearn freedom, as you say for 15 minutes a day. Or at least 5.
What about you, O?
Yes, Carla, thanks for reminding me to listen to what I'm saying, hahahaha…. and seriously. What would our culture be like beyond this manipulation? What would MY culture be like beyond this manipulation?