Just look at the state of the world. It is right there in front of us: the greed, the aggression, the violence of human beings.
What matters most: to look or to know that we are looking?
Sorry, I don’t understand the question. Try again?
We have made a mess of our lives. Are we willing to look at it together? Not with answers, explanations, justifications; not with the veneer of our intellect; not sentimentally, romantically or idealistically; but we are just looking.
It is probably asking us to do something that is the most difficult thing of all for our conditioned minds to do. But love works like that; it doesn’t mind the difficult.
Also we said that freedom in relationship can never be an illusion. We are free to look together. What we see depends entirely upon the quality of our looking. If it is a looking that is concerned with achieving a result, with reaching a conclusion or with holding on to an intellectual position, it is an enquiry which is still tied to the content of consciousness that forever seeks more of the same thing. Freedom is a totally new state of being. There won’t be any doubt about it.
Hi paul
Yeah it is there in everyone of us, no need to separate.
We are a mess … no big surprise we mirror that in the world we built. Yes we’re willing to look.
More insults to make your point.
I don’t see the difficulty. My consciousness is limited to its memories; so I can deal perfectly well with practical problems if my memory contains the solution. If not, I have to look elsewhere, to an expert in such matters. This is the same for both of us. That’s our consciousness: our memories and our knowledge. It is a very limited consciousness held together by thought.
Over time, thought has gone in the wrong direction by attempting to increase the limits of this consciousness. But it always remains limited; and the continuing desire to escape this limitation has brought down upon us all sorts of horrors.
Thought only escapes its own limitations when it comes completely to a stop. There is then a wholeness beyond the limited activity of thinking.
Exactly! Where is the insult landing? What is it that is getting hurt?
Precisely! Who is it that assumes the insult hurts? An insult doesn’t have to hurt to be an insult. Once issued, an insult says more about its source than its target.
The outer mess is a direct consequence of the inner mess, which is me. Looking at it together may not bring about any immediate change to the outer mess. First of all, our only responsibility is to change the nature of our looking.
Then I am glad you are not hurt. But why do you call yourself a target?
Why do you insult people?
I am saying you are not serious in this dialogue, that’s all. I have had far worse comments thrown at me. Move on.
Yes. But once the outer mess gets going, it takes on a life of its own, at which point the inner and outer messes sustain each other, a feedback loop. Politics is a good example of this.
Responsibility to … ourselves, humanity, all living beings, the planet, existence, truth, God?
To feel responsible, we need to know to whom we are responsible and for what.
For being in conflict?
Yes, that makes sense. We make and sustain conflict.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? Energy comes from conflict, and if the conflict doesn’t go so far as to become destructive, it can intensify a relationship in a positive way. (Playing devil’s advocate.)
That’s what passes for relationship.
We love our conflicts, if they don’t arise on their own, we manufacture them. I wonder why?
Are you sure about that? The processing runs very deep. It is centuries old.
No, sir, just to be a responsible human being. You are talking about duty, obligation; and then all sorts of feelings will come into it that fight against the very thing you care for. There is nothing and nobody alive to whom we are not responsible; and we meet all living things through the senses. So our first responsibility is to ensure that our senses are equally alive, not corrupted and deadened by generations of feelings and thoughts.