Love: Not Just A Pesky Human Feeling

A few thoughts on love, collected from various conversations with seekers along the way.

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Love isn't "just" a fluffy human feeling/emotion. It is actually a moving/living force which has the power to create or destroy, depending on the intent and will of the practitioner.

Without love, nothing gets done. Others may argue that it's sheer intellect that drives them, but I would challenge that belief. If one doesn't love life, one has no reason to go on breathing. Even if you hate your job, your friends and all your inbred relatives, there is something inside you that loves life or finds a reason to terminate it (whether immediately or in the long-term). Love is what drives us to do anything and everything - if you are willing to stop and actually think about it. Silly example: I might rightfully detest my unscrupulous competitors in our business, but it is my love of seeing them fall on their face that keeps me going. Even anger has its roots in love if you are willing to look deep enough.

Ultimate folly: trying to explain love to someone who refuses to admit its existence.

Love can either be used to create, or suckled at like the teat of addiction. Too many people seem to think love is about what you do for others or some funny feeling in the pit of your stomach when you're really just feeling an urge to make whoopie. But real love is probably the most selfish thing of all. It is what moves the Will. Without love in some form, there is very little reason to do anything - if you stop to think about it. If not... then love is just lovey-dovey, frilly-willy, hippie-dippie.

Some insist love is delusional – that it doesn’t exist at all. If you think love is delusional, why bother saying so... unless you just need to bolster that belief in yourself. Clearly, anyone who believes that has no real clue what unconditional love actually is, and such statements are typically made from a perspective of fear, even if it's masquerading as intellectual posturing.

As far as love from a Toltec perspective, I'm not even saying love is necessarily an aspect of Toltec. But there is more to life beyond even Toltec - something that seems to be difficult for Toltecs to comprehend. In that way, Toltec has become just another religion for most who claim to follow it. And if they are truly following it, they have missed the point altogether since true Nagualism advocates losing all programming, including its own.

I don't make comments or posts on the internet to entertain people, and certainly with no delusion that I can teach them anything. Put another way – you can't teach a pig to sing. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig.  Nobody is really listening, so why are we even talking?

The only devil is religion itself.

Every time I even use the word “teach” in any form, someone is sure to accuse me of trying to convert others in some weirdly religious manner. Truth be told, I'm as far from religious as it is possible to be. Religions are the quantifiable "devil" they try to warn everyone else about - hiding in plain sight... and a lot of Toltecs fall right into quasi-religious adherence to Carlos Castaneda's methods, even when it becomes obvious those methods might not be working for them as individuals. But because Carlos said so, it is gospel, and therein lies the dark danger of religious quackery.

The problem is - so many of the "practices" are followed willy-nilly, when Nagualism must be practiced as a system of knowledge. But people don't want to hear that because it means real work and not just adherence to a single aspect, such as dreaming or stalking or recapitulation. It also means throwing all the books away and forging our own path to freedom and not just to an altar piled high with someone else's books. If not practiced impeccably, Nagualism (like anything else) runs the very high risk of becoming just one more cult following (not unlike Catholicism).

Another commenter on a group I belong to spoke at length about meeting Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner, and others in the Toltec community who were contemporaries of Carlos Castaneda. But as I told him, who you met is pretty much irrelevant. *shrugs* I met William Shatner on numerous occasions, but that doesn't make me Captain Kirk. I had ample opportunity to meet Castaneda but never did because I recognized the allure of his celebrity and the tendency humans have to become infatuated with it and to even draw false conclusions about the person based on their own projections. So I chose not to go down that road, but to walk my own path with heart... alone. Not a decision I have ever regretted.

If we're talking about meeting others in Dreaming, that's a different category altogether. I once met Carlos in a dream, and he was with a "witch" who attempted to stop my heart. It was an interesting encounter - a test of the type that tells me exactly why I have no great desire to play power games with people who like to play power games. What's the point? I won't be put in a position to have to prove myself to anyone - I have nothing to defend, after all, nothing to prove. So I told Carlos and his witch to take a flying leap, which they did. Did I win? Did I lose? Neither. The only winning move is not to play.

It’s been argued that love is dangerous or delusional because “love forces you to fall in love with it.” Actually, no. Love doesn't want you to love it. It isn't sentient in and of itself, so it doesn't give a rat's ass one way or the other. Love is a force and a motivational tool. You can pick it up, and you can even put it down if that's your choice. But to think it controls us... I can't help but see that as a manifestation of fear rather than a reflection of reality.

Another commenter said: "None of these emanations [Editor’s note: love, fear, hate, all human emotions] have any reason for existence except to supply sentience and sentient beings. Otherwise I doubt they would even exist. And as such, I believe sentience created them for their own purpose."

That's circular logic at its best and really doesn't make sense in the big picture. You would have to assume sentience existed in the first place, and that is getting perilously close to belief in a deity or creator of some sort - a belief with which I don't personally align. I choose to think all emotions come from us (from all living things - not just humans, but all living things) and that each one serves its own purpose. Even the so-called negative emotions have a purpose. Anger can give us strength. Fear can enable us to run when something wants to have us for its dinner. Even the darkest emotion of hate can keep us safe from something that wishes to harm us. Love, on the other hand, gives us reasons to do things we might otherwise never do. These things weren't created by sentience, but by necessity - in the long and arduous process of evolution.

The path of the death defier is rooted deeply in love - love of life, love of being, love of this Earth. Sure, we could dig up other words for it, but I think most of us know what the word means even if some feel the deep-seated need to banish it to the realm of "delusional." It is love of life, the unknown, the mystery, that makes me choose the path of the death defier. Maybe some can choose that path from a purely intellectual assemblage, but I think that would become sterile and dull after a century or two, and probably a lot sooner.

The only way anyone knows of Love is by allowing the assemblage point to assemble it. We learn by doing, in other words. Aside from that, it's all just psychobabble while the ship is sinking.

To those who would say that love is an addiction, or that “Love makes you fall in love with it, so it is therefore an attachment…”  I've found that, with clarity, a warrior can have love without needing love. Kinda like... I can have a piece of cake without needing it. I do agree that some (most) people seem to believe they need love. That's part of the program - absolutely! Everything in our culture promotes that belief because love is a commodity to be sold and profited from; but the warrior with clarity knows love isn't something that can be bought or possessed. And there are so many different kinds of love - most of which are transient but nonetheless useful when they come around - unless they are allowed to turn into obsessive love, at which point they aren't really love at all... but that's a whole other discussion for another day.

Bottom line - only unconditional love is unconditional. Up to and including the part where we realize we can have it without needing it. Love becomes part of us. I'm sure most warriors would argue that we need clarity and power. I don't disagree. I just think we also benefit from unconditional love - which actually boosts power and clarity for anyone who is willing to step past their fear of it and experience it directly instead of trying to analyze it from a safe distance.

Another thing I find troublesome is what I consider to be absurd speculation - the time-wasting variety. "What if Trump is the anti-Christ?" That's a good example of absurd speculation, since the debate would hinge on whether one is pre-programmed and pre-tenderized by the Eagle to believe in an "anti-Christ" in the first place. "What if Carlos made it all up?" One of those have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet kinda questions. First, no matter what answer you give, it's wrong. And second, there is no way to know whether Carlos did or didn't invent the whole concoction, so... it’s wasting time/energy just discussing it. But contemplation is a necessary part of the path (like love).

Assimilation is simply putting together
the pieces of what you've learned.

One thing my mentor stressed was what he called "the art of assimilation." At a certain point, he said, "I've taught you all I can for now. I want you to take what you've learned and slam it up against the real world to see how it fares in the harsh light of day." The result was that assimilation is the process that forces warriors to integrate what they have learned into their day-to-day life and into their spiritual evolution. Without assimilation, it's all still just information. So, yes, contemplation is part of the equation, whether contemplating the potential effects of whether Castaneda made it up, or contemplating the statement that "We are beings who are going to die."

My concern also arises when well-meaning believers (in just about anything) pass their erroneous beliefs on to the next generation. It's one thing to tell your kid fairy tales about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. Maybe even that is a touchy subject with some; but to fill the heads of children with a belief in a punishing, vengeful deity that demands their lifelong and unwavering belief and worship... It's that kind of belief that creates whole new generations of fearful bigots who polish up their pitchforks and turn into angry mobs in the name of some (imagined) "God." I agree that all should be free to find their own path, but where do we draw the line between that and the fact that while they are in the process of finding themselves, they are often a very real danger to every other living thing on the planet? It's a rhetorical question - but one that needs to be asked. I realize we can't legislate against stupidity, but there is clearly a problem that can no longer be swept under the elephant in the room.

Sex, Love and the Man On the Moon

So many people equate sex with love and love with sex, when the reality is that they have very little to do with one another. Maybe nothing at all. Nature/biology designed us in such a way that we are driven by our hormones to mate-or-die. In that way, Vulcans and their pon farr got nothin' on us horny, sad little hoomans. But sex ain't love and making babies ain't love. It's biology, straight-up and often ugly. (Thus the term: bumpin' uglies. It's a medical term. Look it up. Really, really!) It makes us crazy. We'll fight for it. Risk life and limb for it. Even kill Captain Kirk for it! But it still ain't love... just sex. Nothin' more, nothin' less, so sorry to burst anyone's fragile belief hymen.

Some humans go to the bother of "falling in love" in the aftermath of sex, or in the advance anticipation of it, because nature also designed us to be at least somewhat partner-oriented in the raising of all those babies we accidentally or even deliberately make when being driven to distraction by the mating dance. Back in "olden times" it was vitally important to have a nurturing mother and protective/providing father. Sloths and mammoths and warlords, oh my! Nowadays, maybe that kind of partnership isn't required as much, but our biology is still hard-wired through DNA to the past even though culture/society has evolved (de-evolved?) around us and we find ourselves in "the future" without having even a gnat's ass comprehension of how we got here.

No matter... point simply being - there's a vast difference between The Mating Drive and the creative power of love as a spiritual/evolutionary force. Knowing the difference can save a lot of hurt and herpes, and keep one out of shrink's offices and divorce court.

To argue against love is to argue against life.

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A Related Article On this Blog:
Love: The Catalytic Force of Immortality

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