Perhaps one day we can all be the leaf and not fight with violence but instead with love and reason.
Few people would put "love" and "reason" together as you have. One is considered an emotion, the other a purely intellectual activity. But I completely agree with you. This kind of hits the nail on the head of where I try to come from. I'm not a rainbows and unicorns hippie handing-out-free-hugs-on-the-streetcorner kind of person whatsoever. I am very much a thinker. But I also strongly believe that without love, we all perish. Love is not really an emotion, so much as an act.
Perhaps one day we can all be the leaf and not fight with violence but instead with love and reason.
Few people would put "love" and "reason" together as you have. One is considered an emotion, the other a purely intellectual activity. But I completely agree with you. This kind of hits the nail on the head of where I try to come from. I'm not a rainbows and unicorns hippie handing-out-free-hugs-on-the-streetcorner kind of person whatsoever. I am very much a thinker. But I also strongly believe that without love, we all perish. Love is not really an emotion, so much as an act.
I just wanted to pop in to say I AM a rainbows and unicorns hippie etc...
And I am also a thinker. :)
I just wanted to pop in to say I AM a rainbows and unicorns hippie etc...
And I am also a thinker. :)
Ha! meet me on the corner. Those free hugs aren't gonna hand themselves out, ya know!
? Hey that corner may be a little crowded....
So what is intellect but a servant of heart & soul anyway?
Divine discernment, and lots of free hugs.... a good combo ?
Btw ... I always understood the sacred Unicorn as being a symbol of purity and light ... the medieval Unicorn tapestries were pretty awesome, and what they represent. The ' Unicorn in Captivity ' could be interpreted as the soul within the body perhaps ...
And rainbows? One of the most ancient and inspiring symbols of ... hope.
@stargazer @unkp @ghandigirl
Hey just to be clear, no disparagement of rainbows, unicorns, hippies, hugs, or even magic elves was intended!
Just that that is not me--- or at least that is not how I present to the world at large. ?
And @stargazer I like the idea of intellect as a servant of heart and soul. Otherwise there is no point to it, really.
This is a tough one for me but I feel compelled to write about my own perspective on all this. I'm going to write a story below.
Imagine that you live in a neighborhood, normal like every other. You have neighbors, they are all nice people. They invite you over for dinner, barbecues etc... Your children are friends with their children. All these years that you live in this community you never feel different from your neighbors. Except that you are different. You have a different ethnic background and a different religion. Now you don't care about your religion, you can't remember the last time you went to a place of worship but ancestrally that's what your people believed in.
Over time you see the economic life of your community decline, some of your neighbors lose their jobs because those factories close down and move to poorer countries where people look like you. Other neighbors lose their jobs because it is cheaper to hire immigrants from poor countries than home grown people like your neighbors.
Now none of this is your fault, in fact all of these economic trends affect you just as much as your neighbors. And in point of fact you were born in this community too, your parents were the immigrants, so your own children are not even first generation anymore. But slowly you notice that people are less friendly than they used to be, you get less invitations to social gatherings, your children start getting bullied at school and told to go back to where they came from.
All of this is confusing to you, why are people becoming so bigoted when they had never been so before, moreover you feel that worse things are being said behind your back than they are to your face.
Then a politician comes along and points the blame for all of the countries economic problems on people like you and the hostility rises even more. Your neighbors start posting that politicians signs on their lawns, wearing his paraphernalia and speaking in his slogans. People start openly being rude to you, aggressive even. Now it isn't everyone but still this begins to scare you, you hope it blows over.
One day someone knocks on your door, you open it to see a few uniformed government agents standing there. They want to look at your identification documents to determine whether or not you are an actual citizen or not. Turns out someone thought that you were here illegally and notified the government. It's not true you are a citizen but now for the first time in your life you have to prove it.
You hear about another neighbor of the same ethnic background as yourself who had lost his identification documents and been arrested pending deportation to a country he'd never been to.
You've read about the holocaust and Nazi Germany and you begin to think you're living in a situation that is heading in the same direction. Luckily for you that politician loses the next election and you can breathe again, things are normal once more.
But then the crimes of the previous government are fully exposed and you realize that they had in fact committed mass murder. You're shocked, you look at your neighbors who voted for this guy and are now starting to get friendly again. No one ever expresses any regret, remorse, shame or anything that can be construed as them realizing they made a mistake.
Life continues, it calms down, the economy improves and good times come back. One day your grandchildren ask you about this time period never imagining an experience like this themselves, they want to know what you learned from it.
You tell them that you learned never to trust, to always protect yourself and your family, that your neighbors will turn on you if it is convenient for them so never trust them.
Your grandchildren want to know if you hate the people who turned on you back then and you answer no you don't. You explain to them that hate does nothing except weigh you down, it's not a useful emotion. You understand why they did what they did, you can even be angry about it, but you don't hate because those people don't deserve that much emotional energy coming from you.
Your grandchildren confused ask if you have forgiven those people for their beliefs and actions. This one puzzles you, finally you say you don't know, on one level you feel that there isn't anything to forgive because you've learned to expect nothing from humanity anyways, but on another you're not sure you have, it's still a trauma to you.
You tell your confused grandchildren that evil cannot be externalized, because it exists within all of us, when we pretend that evil is something else outside of ourselves that needs to be destroyed is when we are capable of committing truly horrific acts. The wise person knows that within each of us is a darkness and a light and that it is our job to understand that and not to indulge our dark side.
But until humanity understands this you tell your grandchildren that they cannot trust others, because history has proven how little our neighbors care and how much they covet.
End of Story.
So why have I written the above? I don't know, I felt compelled to, maybe I am trying to express something that I can't fully grasp myself. In my story the protagonist is traumatized by his experiences, but his neighbors are also traumatized except that I didn't describe this. Maybe someone can weigh in, I wrote this for a reason I can't really comprehend.
Love
Natalie
Your grandchildren confused ask if you have forgiven those people for their beliefs and actions. This one puzzles you, finally you say you don't know, ...
@Natalie You have beautifully expressed something true and real that I too find hard to grasp. Here is what comes up for me.
A teacher once said that forgiveness isn't about condoning what they did. It is about understanding the forces that led to what they did, the forces within them and outside of them. She said that forgiveness is nothing more than acceptance of the conditions that created an action, accepting that it happened, understanding all that led to it happening.
Well I am able to forgive many people for many things. But when I allow myself to feel the hurt they inflicted, then I am unwilling to forgive them.
Then the wise teacher tells me, again, think of forgiveness as simply understanding the world the way it was when the offenses were committed. We can work to change the world, enlighten the world, heal the world, but we can't go back and change what happened.
So we are asked to accept what happened. Why? Because it happened and it is worse for us not to be able to accept what is true. When we refuse to accept what is true then we live at war within ourselves.
So I have done that and I still refuse to forgive someone. I don't want to give them that gift. Why? Because I am still hurting over what they did (whether it was to me or to others) and if I allow myself to deeply understand how they got that way, then I won't have anywhere to put that hurt and anger.
But forgiveness is not a gift we give to another. It is a gift we give to ourselves.
And what if the person isn't alive any more? Or what if the person has changed and is no longer a perpetrator? I may still refuse to forgive because my hurt goes beyond the perpetrators. It has become a way to avoid opening my heart.
So the question I ask you is what is the purpose of your unwillingness to forgive? What purpose does it serve you?