Looooove....

That's the way I often used to write the word love, given how little it means to most people it seemed to me to be a word that ought to be blurred most of the time.

I also wrote about feeeelings, which apparently caused most people to think that I was saying that they should be avoided. It's easy to point out that disagreeing with people being ruled by feeelings is different than avoiding feelings or trying to master or deaden your feelings and so on. A common mistake of ascetics is to consider deadening one's feelings to be self-mastery, although ironically you haven't mastered your feelings at all, instead you're just killing yourself.

On the other hand hedonists wallow about in their feeelings yet wind up in a similar state of emotional death after they will away all rational and principled limitation. I think that most people think it better to be a hedonist than a legalist these days, perhaps feeeling that it is better to experience the highs of bipolarity even given its lows. This is the sort of thing that keeps therapists in business, the supposed doctors of the soul and mind that often harm more than they help people already ruled by their feeeelings. "How does that make you feel?"

Well, it makes me feel like many therapists are part of the disease that they purport to cure, like bipolarity. Should one be surprised that there are poles to being ruled by your emotions? Of course hysterical laughter can have a sinister edge of anxiety and fear fueled by hysteria and so on.

The emotional and the rational are actually complementary patterns which lead to a better sense of the sensuous but the hedonistic mind seeks to eliminate all rational/logical reasoning out of fear that it will feeel unhappy. Ironically if it succeeds it will wind up feeling unhappy anyway. For what good would it do for a person to pursue happiness and gain the whole world, yet lose the soul through which they sense it? The poor souls... that type of mind will always need more even if given the whole world because it's eating itself away.

The reason I would write of loooove when writing to such a mind is because it lacks the integrity of true love and the difference between the two should be defined. Although none of us truly love the way God does and most people define who or what they "love" as whoever or whatever makes them happy, even selfish people mainly concerned with their own happiness can still see that true love is less selfish than: "Now I feel happy so I love you." and "I feel unhappy now so I don't love you." It seems that the bipolarity of being ruled by feeelings often emerges in selfishness because selfishness is rooted in feeelings of the Self and nothing more.

It's ironic that a more selfless person who shapes their feelings based on external principles will actually be a happier person. Being happy isn't the be all, end all, there are many things in life more important than being happy.

How does that make you feeel? ;-)