in response to the themes in:
https://off-guardian.org/2022/12/19/a-howling/
Look into the eyes of those your meet and greet or you will look to images you raised instead. For we can mask in the forms of love or affection so as to learn ways of seeming to meet without really joining.
Why do we not - but what we expect to see is already imaged in mind to shape 'automatic' defences or reactions that 'prove' the belief that set them?
A little willingness is not a stare, but an opening to presence not pre-manufactured by a concept that carpets and blinds to a realm of shadows cast to a screen or cave wall.
The ideal of self-autonomy - to be as a god to our own life - runs an automaton of unconsciousness if running on judgements set by a past that sets them still.
To be as one with God in our own life is established in that we never did or can create our own existence, but that mutually agreed alignments in ways that selectively focus so as to collectively discard, deny or put out of 'mind' can and do put us out of the awareness of the Mind of God. If 'God' is too abused a term, choose for whatever stands clear when we 'thinketh not'. For 'Is' Is. And what we think cannot replace the field of desire that alights the moment of fulfilment, even if we so grasp as if to keep or possess for a 'self' we take from it. But who can hold focus in the world but by persisting an experience of a 'self-possession' that meets conflict, adversity in change and challenge through which an ego is both grown or developed and adapted to as an adjustment or compromise - through which we have the time of our lives, that is - we unfold our experience together through terms or contract of largely acquired and inherited patterns of a collective 'agreement' if only be default of running as result of not choosing differently, from a fresh evaluation. So the past stamps to present a future like itself as if THIS time, it will be different! And it can seem to escape, to win, overcome or prevail for a time until the core contradictions reassert the predicates that we assign to Others and to World (and to God).
Uncovering conflict in our own mind can be experienced as incandescent rage, putrid disgust - that is intolerable pain & sickness of 'self' that has no capacity to 're-evaluate' anything but every liability to project out onto our life, our relationships, our world in ways that may offer mitigation or temporary respite by casting or projecting OUT and AWAY from the attempt to manage what remains, and remake some sense of 'solidity' or normalise a masked out sense of self-protection.
Yet a 'protection' or a 'love' that is re-triggered to conflict and defence when its terms and conditions for 'safety' are not met. When love turns to hate, is it not that attempts to mask over or escape fear break down to reveal an attempt to DO love from a fearful sense of threat, disconnection and pained fear of loss?
Choosing not to join in hate or harm must abide it to the point of recognising we do not want it. And standing in that decision.This in effect gives up the attempt to 'fix ourselves', to a release that opens to That which truly releases us from self-reinforcing conflict.
Love that is impotent, is not love, but a substitute accepted in its place that will bind us to false or magic 'protections' that require sacrifice to maintain and can never have 'enough' control. For no amount of control will substitute for love, regardless the acting out of fantasy upon the body or the world.
A grounded reference point:
https://twitter.com/onemindinmany/status/1528364482828898306?s=20&t=7Qw0ul_fmxxrsfVkDIBPHw
