Reasons of Love

It is by caring about things that we infused the world with importance. This provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it marks our interests and our goals. The importance that our caring creates for us defines the framework of standards and aims in terms of which we endeavor to conduct our lives. A person who cares about something is guided, as his attitudes and his actions are shaped, by his continuing interest in it. Insofar as he does care about certain things, this determines how he thinks it important for him to conduct his life. The totality of the various things that a person cares about, together with his ordering of how important to him they are, effectively specifies his answer to the question of how we live.

Harry G. Frankfurt is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton. He wrote those thoughts in his 2004 book, The Reasons of Love. Professor Frankfurt is explaining how our beliefs, along with our emotions create our reality. The importance of caring is deeply rooted in our belief structure. Everyone cares about something. We may not agree with what a person cares about, but that is an association, or a judgment, and it is related to our personal belief structure. It seems we experience this physical dimension for different reasons of love.

Each person chooses to care about certain things, even though it may not be obvious to them that they do care or believe about them. There is so much care around us, but at times we misplace and even misuse our caring.

The importance of caring is an individual association. We tend to group care and beliefs in a linear fashion, but we do that with everything. Our own feeling of separation creates a hierarchy, and we move it around at will. We are guided by our emotions. We react to them, rather than listen to them. We construct mental ideas around beliefs, and they manifest in some way. Those manifestations are usually what we want to believe about our reality.

The reasons for love are as diverse, as they are the same. Our expressions of caring and our believable and unbelievable actions about caring are all reasons of love.

Separated Sapling

This short story makes a mind print about what we believe and trust about the self.

The story incorporates two saplings, both exactly identical, both newly growing; one growing naturally, and reaching towards the sun, and basking within its rays, and drinking naturally of the rain, and resting to the moon.

The other is looking around, and is viewing the sky, and is seeing the sun, and is saying to itself, “Maybe I should be growing at night! The sun is very hot. It may burn me, or it may sap my energy, and the rain is very wet, and it get all over me, and I am not sure I am liking of this rain, and I am not sure that it is making me grow properly, and maybe I should be investigating where this rain is coming from, and I should be analyzing the sunrays to be sure that I am incorporating the proper vitamins, or maybe the moon is more friendly to my growth, and I would grow tall if I am growing at nighttime, while this idiot sapling next to me is being stunted by the sun!”

And in the morning, the natural sapling is stretching its newly formed branches, and uncurling its soft leaves, and growing within complete trust; and the other sapling, in the morning is viewing the same sun, and is looking at the beautifully formed other sapling, and it is looking like a deformed creation of itself that is confused, distorted and exhausted from pushing, forcing and untrusting attitude about its own ability to allow and just appreciate its own responsibility.

The Spaceless Aspects of Self

Apart from us where is time and space? If we are bodies we are involved in time and space, but are we? WE are one and identical Now, then, forever, here, there, and everywhere. Therefore we, timeless and spaceless Beings, alone are. . . What I say is that Self is here and now, and alone.

That interesting thought is from the Spiritual Teachings of Vedantist Ramana Maharshi. Time is certainly an idea construction of the self, and the spacelessness within that time is filled with other idea constructions, which fill that space, although we are not aware of them.

The realization that the mind is eternal, and in one moment the past, present and future exist at once is what we seek to experience in physical form. We create a variety of experiences through our beliefs, and each one brings us closer to our ultimate reality, which lies in the heart of each daily experience. All ideas exist within us from the beginning of the non-beginning, and these ideas manifest as we need them.

The Brilliant Side Of The Self

The progress of science has now reached a turning point. The stable foundations of physics have broken up. . . The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?

Alfred North Whitehead wrote those thoughts in his 1967 book, Science and the Modern World Whitehead may be describing what some folks call a shift in consciousness. A natural merging of the conscious mind with its counterpart, the unconscious mind, is in progress. Unconscious means the segment of the conscious mind that is not attached to the brain. This merging brings about a greater appreciation and understanding of the give-and-take that occurs between the ego and other elements of the self. Our unconscious is no longer an unknown. It is not the dark side of the self; it is the creative aspect of the self.

Normal behavior or personal characteristics that seem unusual and opaque before are now becoming clear thanks to this merging or as some people call it the transformation of the self. The shadowy side of the conscious mind is really the brilliant side of the self. There are a plethora of natural and spontaneous discoveries that occur as a result of this merging. We have reach a turning point in our consciousness. We are beginning to realize that there is great creativity and wisdom in our unconscious mind. In fact, it is much more conscious than the part our conscious mind that is attached to the brain.

Magnificent Cloud

Things which rise from the darkness of silence, from the wilderness of the unconsciousness, do not belong to the realm of human reflection and deliberation. Hence the mystics are the lilies of the field and the grass of the field as well. They are beyond good and bad, they know no moral responsibilities, which are ascribable only when there is the consciousness of good and bad. If this is the religious life, it is the philosophy of anarchism or nihilism. But the conclusion we can draw from the mystics of two widely divergent teachings (Christianity and Buddhism) seems to point to this nihilistic smashing of all human moral standards.

D.T.Suzuki in his wrote those thoughts and they were included in a work published in 1969, which was three years after his death. The morality that exists above the umbrella of duplicity is always present, but we mix it in a concoction of associations, and the end result is a distorted expression of beliefs. One example of this watered-down morality is expressed by an early Christian mystic:

To affirm God is actually to reduce him. To say that God is good, just, intelligent, is to enclose him within a created conception which is applicable only to created things.

This sort of thinking is not what we have been taught to believe, but when we give the self the opportunity to actually hear the message, we find another self that understands the message innately. Of course these messages are mystical babblings, which bear no resemblance to physical life. That fact confirms how separated we are from the self that expresses true morality. In order to affirm anything Iwe must use what we know, and that knowing is rooted in duplicity. There is a wilderness of consciousness within us, which does not belong to human reflections and deliberations, but is fully aware of those creations. In order to sense this aspect of self, we can enter the space of no-thought where images dance across our mind’s eye. These images come from impulses sent from the silence within us. It is within these images that we sense our innate morality.

The Roots Of Our Conscious Mind

A man is a bundle of relations; a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of the eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world.

Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light? The ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the lovely attributed of the maiden child predict the refinements and the decorations of civil society? A mind might ponder this thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.

Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue or has shared the throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his experience or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see to-morrow for the first time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1841 essay History, expresses some interesting thoughts about individual realities. Our conscious mind aligns with several specific areas of knowing as we travel through adulthood. Those areas are filled with physical manipulation and emotional activity. The conscious mind is trained to use its separating qualities before all others in order to feel those areas in the flesh. The roots of our conscious mind flower in the act of being human.

We see our flower grow and change as we add years to our individual mixture of reality, and during that process the mind connects to more of itself. It is free to use its inner abilities in unique ways. Our refined and focused mind adjusts to the contrasts of life, and moves into restricted channels of knowledge. In those vacillating channels of contrasting knowledge, the conscious mind assimilate as well as creates the decorations and refinements of a mass society.

The Ghost Cave

With one stroke I have completely mashed the cave of the ghosts;

Behold, there rushes out the iron face of the monster Nata!

Both my ears are as deaf and my tongue is tied;

If thou touchest it idly, the fiery stars shoot out!

Those thoughts are the thoughts of a Zen Master known as Bukko. He seems to be conscious of his unconsciousness. His conscious mind is expressing his subjectiveness in a very unique way. The cave of ghosts is physical reality, and the fiery stars are selves from other realities. These monsters roam the hills and valleys of his mind. Objective perceptions are distorted. They manifest as monsters that promise to consume him in their treachery. These self created illusions become real as he mashes his cave of ghosts. With one stroke of the conscious mind he finds himself in an iron mask filled with strange faces. Those faces are other aspects of the self.