Hi Cross.Chrono,

I appreciate your thoughtful response.

[Vineeto]: It is that from this vantage point of experiencing this moment that you can look in a dispassionate way at whatever objection is at the forefront of your mind preventing you to continue the feeling the sweetness.

CROSS.CHRONO: Perhaps that may be the issue. I keep trying to look at it from a vantage point of being in the feeling. But when I’m out of it I ‘check’ if it’s there and it can come back. But this ‘checking’ that I am doing may really be a perverse way of being these loving/hellish feelings over and over again. It really drives home the ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’ fact. Because when I’m feeling the sweetness, there are really no issues at all. It’s like I’ve been playing pretend. 

VINEETO: You probably know from experience how different it is when you look at some issue from the vantage point of feeling good, even of feeling excellent. Then you can examine the trigger and look at your previous feelings not only dispassionately but an also contemplate dianoetically rather than affectively of what was happening then.

[Richard]: “[...] reflective contemplation rapidly becomes more and more fascinating [...] When one is totally fascinated, reflective contemplation becomes pure awareness ... and then apperception happens of itself” (Richard, List D, No. 17, 11 July 2015)

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[Vineeto]: What you are describing here is love. Naming the issue is the first step to be able to successfully contemplate it.

CROSS.CHRONO: It’s funny that you call it that because I have been approaching looking at it as anything but that. Now that I think about it, perhaps there is a ‘truth’ that has been blocking the seeing of this. Basically it goes something like ‘love is not like that’ or ‘real love is not like that’ or ‘healthy love is not like that’. It’s further cemented when I read forums where everyone describes healthy ways of being in love and how it seems to be great and what not. Maybe there is, but I don’t know how anyone can describe it as so amazing to be honest. The one thing I can’t get past is how anyone can be in love without being possessive or being exclusive. So I keep thinking perhaps there is something wrong with me.

VINEETO: Ha, there is nothing is wrong with *you* – as Claudiu already explained below. It’s the human condition. Love has forever been sacrosanct and for many people love is what makes a grim and dour life worthwhile. Devika, who was by temperament a pessimist, said she lived for love, and she deliberately fell in love in such a way that it would remain unrequited so she could maintain it longer.

Hence love itself (the ideal of love) has never been questioned (until Richard). It was always considered to be the individual’s fault that it never delivered what it promised. The intrinsic promise of love is that it will dissolve the separation, which two identities automatically experience, yet by the very nature of love being within the human condition and arising of the instinctual passions, this promise can never be fulfilled.

[Richard]: “‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are in two separate camps; it is as if they are two different races. So they start from separation ... and love seems to promise to bring them together, to provide the intimacy they all long for. But my question is: why are humans separate to start off with? Is it an actual separation – apart from the physical differences – or have humans been trained into an artificial separation? Is one not conditioned to think – and feel – as a ‘man’ and as a ‘woman’? Has one not taken on a gender identity and think and feel it to be ‘me’? So is there not an artificial entity, an ‘I’, that one takes to be me as I actually am? One’s most intimate ‘being’ is a fiction anyway, so any gender identity overlaid is equally false. If ‘I’ am false, artificial, then any connection – a bridge – between two psychological entities can only be as artificial as the separation itself.

Love is this bridge. Love is artificial. Being artificial it needs constant stimulus to keep it ‘alive’. Therefore, the moment it starts to sag, the cycle automatically swings into action; frustration, niggles, fights, hurt, resentment, remorse, repentance, forgiveness, promises ... then back to love and trust again. Although everybody promises each time, in contrition, to forgive and forget, they never do. The promise to forgive and forget is never carried out. The hurt, frustration and anger is unconsciously stored away, adding to the already existing resentment that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ feel toward each other for being separative in the first place. This entire process has no chance of producing anything other than an artificial intimacy.” (Richard’s Journal, 1997, Article Three)

Richard gave the breakdown of “The Chemistry of Love” in his "Examen of the Invention of Heterosexuality", which you might find interesting –

The alternative is to “increasing naive intimacy, enjoyment and delight” as Claudiu explained it so well below. Naïve intimacy can reveal the other to you as a fellow human being rather than an extension of your own fears and desires. It is when you can see and experience the other person as a flesh-and-blood human being existing in their own right. It can be quite an astounding surprise when you experience this for the first time.

Feeling being ‘Grace’ had a gradation of five stages of intimacy –

[Richard]: “The gradations of ‘her’ scale were, basically, good, very good, great, excellent, and perfect – whereby, in regards to intimacy, ‘good’ related to togetherness (which pertains to being and acting in concert with another); ‘very good’ related to closeness (where personal boundaries expand to include the other); ‘great’ related to sweetness (delighting in the pervasive proximity, or immanence, of the other); ‘excellent’ related to richness (a near-absence of agency; with the doer abeyant, and the beer ascendant, being the experiencing is inherently cornucopian); and ‘perfect’ related to magicality (neither beer nor doer extant; pristine purity abounds and immaculate perfection prevails) – all of which correlate to the range of naïveness from being sincere to becoming naïve and all the way through being naïveté itself to an actual innocence.” (Richard, List D, Claudiu4, gradation)

Remember to have fun when you are inclined to explore it.

Cheers Vineeto