The Other

Love happens through the other. You come to 'find love' via the "highway" of knowing and being with ANOTHER person. This is an existential reality.

The other is mysterious. Something so obvious and present at every moment of our existing: OUR thoughts; OUR feelings; OUR body; OUR house. OUR children. People who experience the same "otherness" of the world outside their "I" are all around us. We share the same common subjective reality.

But then body's separate us; things are separate. Fictions of body and soul melt into one, and the paradigm hardens and thickens, as callous forms from the stampeding of arrogant desires into the world of the other.

It's THE PARADOX of life. How do we overcome suffering? How do we overcome the pain of disease - the pain of our social lives, the pain of jealousy, which arouses hatred, and suspiciousness, and a chaotic stew of non-linear positive effects launched into motion by an unstable and self-opaque mind.

Everything we do in every moment creates effects. They're like little trains that are pushed this way and that way by a drifting mind - going along the tracks of current experience - current thoughts, generating specific emotions, which amplify the probability of those same thoughts, which deepens the groove within the mind, beckoning attention - whilst attention maintains ignorance from the ride that its on, down those tracks, toward a specific behaviorial tendency.

Morality IS what being human is about. Think about it. In order to understand self, you have to know how to be with others. The issue of how to be with others is forced into awareness by a discovery that I - like everyone else - am acutely sensitive to how others look at me, speak with me, attend to me. It's a mixed bag of emotional states and conceptual categories. If I'm feeling good and someone talks to me about something I know a lot about, but he knows very little about, but he speaks about it as if he, and not I, were the knowledgeable one, the conceptual category of "knowledge" of me being knowing and he being ignorant would "shift" my emotional state into a negative one; I can externalize it by making a look on my face; or I can internalize it by anxiously maintaining a "nice" look so that I don't come off as annoyed to him. Either way. That's what being human does. What we do has predictable effects on others. The only difference is degree of sensitivity; and degree of self-awareness to self-regulate the mind to act in personally defined ways

The OTHER is such a basic concept. Our thoughts are 'others' inside our mental mindscape. They come in and out as we roam about our days, in the most basic OTHER - the world about us - mother nature, big mommas house, were always in it and subject to it's living conditions. The spin of the planet as it orbits a sun, which orbits a galactic center, which sails through space to the infinite OTHER - the unknown.

Being a body and having a body are both true. I know my body is me and yet I still feel, phenomenologically, as if there is a "point" of some sort which stands 'beyond' anything I interact with. I know it only after-the-fact of experiencing it. And then I reflect; and then I also know prereflectively, in that I am always existing in a flow, in a process that unfolds in a flow.

The mind flows with the same flows of everything else. The galaxies flow and have a flow-like shape. The solar systems flows, following patterns of gravity's motion. And then our planet, and the most effusive flows of all, the winds. It's the light of the sun and the shape of the land and the temperature of the sea that propels the climate system. Hot airs rises in certain areas to the stratosphere while cold old moves in larger quantities at lower levels. And the various streams interact to push the world and it's locales into specific weather systems.

And there's the ceaseless movement of natures biosphere. Trees, insects, fungi, spreading through forests, growing onto of one another; some sedentary; but moving upwards, it expresses a wish to be closer to the light. But then bugs come about, and they move in directions, entering dimensions unavailable to the plants, and feast upon them.

Life grows, and develops everywhere. The birds of the skies have evolved with all things in the serendipitous flow of existence. This is the track that all things are pulled upon: our made equal in, the macroscopic shapes of the flow, the "someone just turned on the lights" sort of feeling, that all of us exist in this mysterious and sacred pull.

All of existence shuttles with the other, existing in fundamental unity, but expressed in a binary of opposites: self and other, physiological differences yet a strange and elusive pull towards unity, towards common identity.