Hi Alessa

There are ways to not accept bad behavior without having to rely on asking for accountability and responsibility from another person.

I was wondering if you could give an example and what ‘accepting bad behavior’ in this context.

To clarify I view accountability and responsibility as important values in the creating of healthy boundaries and healthy boundaries as a kindness and act of compassion to myself and those I interact with.

When I talk of accountability and responsibility I’m not associating it with punishment, or any other such measurement of “justice”. Nor do I assume to apply such values only outwards but inwards as well… I’m using the words in context of the serenity prayer. To address the things I’m responsible to address… and wisdom to know the difference.

I agree that often when we take responsibility and create boundaries others can take them in unintended ways, feel hurt by them, even experience such things as being punished. I would argue that that is their responsibility to work through.

I wonder If I’m sounding cold and robotic?

The scenario of betrayal and theft was also a metaphor. Based on my own experience the wrongs done to me were also a betrayal and theft of something of ‘my spirit’ taken. Asking for the “key” back involved learning and in learning better creating healthy boundaries.

That’s why I’m starting to feel like asking for accountability and responsibility from others is unnecessary

I see I’ve put things badly when I used the words to hold someone accountable and asking for the “key back” may seem aggressive with a focus on the outer vice inner response. When the “key” is reclaimed I’m primarily being accountable and responsible to myself. True as that is happening within relationship with another it is at the same time holding them accountable and responsible…

I can’t think of a story where healing or change doesn’t happen until some form of accountability has taken place….

I find that simply maintaining my own boundaries, treating people with compassion and understanding is helpful.

I like that. My experience has been that compassion and kindness arise naturally from healthy boundaries and that accountability and responsibility as properties of such boundaries. (When I use the words accountability and responsibility I do not hold them rigidity or righteously but lightly. As you noted those words can be troublesome.)

The sun is perceived to rise and set, but reality is that it simply exists. Similarly, love exists as a constant presence independent of our perceptions and experiences
What do the crucible, and the fire represent in this metaphor?

The crucible and fire are metaphors/tools within the temporal, dualistic, linear sphere of experience. This is the “playground” of measurement and judgments. Here the “sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening”.

When we wrestle with such notions of accountability, responsible, relationship, boundaries… we are placing such measurements within the crucible and the crucible over the fire with the aim of deeper truth and authentic self (gold). Perhaps the gold involving a realization of the relationship between the temporal and Eternal, that the “sun neither rises or sets”, a change in perception where Love exists as a constant presence from which All things arise and return (unconditional). That such a realization is “the sense of life“.

Sorry; I tend to lean towards the metaphorical which can be confusing. Language as a property of the temporal measuring experience tends to get in the way.

Thoughts to ponder

Stillness is what creates love. Movement is what creates life. To be still and still moving – this is everything. Do Hyun Choe

“Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity.” – “To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” – Lao Tzu

“Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.” Eckhart Tolle

The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, stillness is eternity, realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal, not moment, but forever – is the sense of life.
Realizing how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience — this is the ‘knowing’ experience.- J Campbell

The beauty of that light, like love, is not to be touched, not to be put into a word…
But there it was – in the shade, in the open, in the house, on the window across the way, and in the laughter of those children.
Without that light what you see is of so little importance, for the light is everything; and the light of meditation was on the water. It would be there in the evening again, during the night, and when the sun rose over the trees, making the river golden.
Meditation is that light in the mind which lights the way for action; and without that light there is no love. – Krishnamurti

Hi Anita and Alessa
Sorry for the mix up I need to pay closer attention.

I am feeling a little better Anita but still finding it difficult to concentrate. You summed up my thoughts quite well and put in a way that may be less confusing to anyone following along. 🙂

“The sun is perceived to rise and set, but reality is that it simply exists. Similarly, love exists as a constant presence independent of our perceptions and experiences

I did want to add that there is a time for everything and that I’m coming from these topics well into the second half of life. Someone in the first half of life focus may be more on the filling of the ‘crucible’ then placing it over the fire.

Hope everyone has a good weekend and happy Valentines day.

The heart is the place of union where the luminous consciousness is made. . . . Human existence must reach out to transcend the world of forms that conceal the ultimate reality. This reality lives in the heart and must be set free at whatever cost. . . . Thus to reach one’s heart, to possess oneself of it, means to penetrate into spiritual life. The operation is extremely painful, and that is why the heart is always represented as wounded, and why the drops of blood issuing from it are so significant that they alone are a sufficient symbol for it. The religious imagination reveals the broken heart as the very best means to wisdom and growth, – Laurette Séjourné

Hi Anita

“What do you think holding someone accountable means”?

If someone broke my trust and stole from me: accountability might mean I ask for the key to my house back and end the relationship. I believe this can be done as an act of love that does not need to be fueled by of anger or the rest of the drama we tend to create. Unless it’s what we need in the moment… but are a least a little conscious we’re doing so.

My my experience of karma isn’t about justice or any such measurement but a natural consequence of action. Karma may not feel like love but as the temporal experience of an Eternal realty I think it is.

“To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings—all in the same relationship.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I found that a lot of people mistake unconditional love as having to include unconditional allowing. I view accountability and responsibly an intimately connected to the experience of love. We want what we do and who we are to matter and for something to matter we get to be accountable and responsible. If one loves one will also suffer. Which feels wrong yet Love without suffering would have no ‘wight’, no meaning or purpose.

Jung talked about relationships being the crucible where we discover ourselves as part of the individuation process. Everything we experience is relational whether it is with ourselves, others, nature, or even language. The crucible used in alchemy is where all the stuff and things are added, mixed and boiled. A process to remove the impurities until what is left has been purified (gold). As a psychological process such turning into gold is suffering yet one might argue than that only a wounded heart can be transformed into a pure heart.

It was my thought that because we tend to mistake the ‘map for the territory’, which may explain the tendency towards conditional love, that a healthy relationship to the word Love is needed. It’s also why I suspect Love is of the Eternal non-duality experience. It is in Loves non-duality that it can be unconditional.

Hi Anita

Feeling under the weather today so will be slow in my response

I’d be interested in your relationship to the word Love.

Hi Anita

I was thinking that we were straying into ‘fix it’ mode, both for our own reasons. I suspect its inevitable when opening up old stories. I recall someone in another thread saying they were going to burn their old journals and thinking that maybe they had the right idea.

But then, and thanks for re-sharing the stuff from 2016, paging through the old pages can be helpful. I remember that in 2016 I was working through some things and its helpful to see what stuck what didn’t. It was in hindsight still pretty much head space trying to get to the heart, and it seems I tend to repeat cycles of such self reflection.

I have noted that you have a method you use to process the information people post and how you move from the head to the heart. Like recognizes like, so I also noted when the head stuff was being thrown up to protect the heart. In essence, we have been mirroring and suspect sometimes triggering protective habits. Its a possessive that were noticing. Maybe we have grown some?

Fallowing is part of my method of processing – a kind of free association of thoughts

A theme within your past few posts was the reminder to treat our selves with kindness, patience, understanding, self-acceptance… I noticed a tendency withing to push the words away. Then I found myself posting that I could not say that ‘I love my life’ and it’s been niggling at me.

If I didn’t ‘love my life’, (or is it that I don’t wish to say it) what did it mean for my connections to others. Here the image of how I see Frodo at the end of the story pops into my mind… Did Frodo love his life? (I see heroes of the book looking back at me annoyed…)

What does Loving ones Life look like? That Life be all rainbows and sunshine? As noted in 2016 the positive thinking thing isn’t helpful for me…

The words of Joseph Campbell come to mind – ‘Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.” (do no harm) And then Tolkien – “For if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomable at the foundations of the Earth.” To label such joy as Love feels absurd yet to not to equally so.

The problem is that the word love is so problematic. Like the word God it triggers so many different things the word become unhelpful.
I feel myself wanting to force a meaning on the word Love that removes the sorrows, no not to just remove sorrow but to forget it and not participate.

Closing eyes… what do I feel when asked to repeat – I love my life? Not anger, not shame, a kind of detachment… or is it interference… and here it comes – Conflict of should’s, if only’s… propelled into the playground of time, measurement and duality.

Seems I’m seeing the request to repeating the words as a question. What if I just said them with out the question and measurements, and maybe remove the my. I Love Life?

Thanks for the kind words and poem Anita

I’ve been doing yoga classes where at the end the group is asked to repeat the club’s mantra ‘I love my Life’ – which I can’t do as I don’t love Life even though I’ve realized that life arises from and returns to Love.

I agree that the paradox of the desire to change will also confront and trigger the fear of change. I also agree with the advice about change – the importance of goals and process, detachment from results and finding joy in the journey … I feel this is important for the first half of life but not so great as you enter the last quarter.

I’m leaning towards Krishnamurti were all such doings are actions that happen within the temporal playground of duality and measurement and so will also always involve conflict and ‘grasping of water’. As most playground games they have proven fun and a distraction until they don’t, and a new game needed to be found. That has been my experience.

As I was writing I thought I would google to see if their was philosophy behind the notion of the sun neither rising or setting. Always a little disappointing to discover that what you discovered wasn’t new but also not comforting in a way.

Anyway, I didn’t find much though the results showed that the Rig Veda has this:
“The sun, it neither rises, nor does it set
he who knows this, he attains moksha……..”

My intuition returns me to the beginning of our dialog – that we work for that which no work is required –
“To trust yourself to the water” will not be an act of doing or fixing but a leap… only not a leap you ‘work up to’.

I asked the question how and, in the asking, defeated myself.

“He who knows…” but this knowing isn’t ‘knowledge’ and this is where I stumble. I so like to pretend at knowing.

Language is going to fail as language is a toy for the playground…. That said you may be on to something with poems and art.

Hi Helcat

Early you mentioned how Sam was based on a soldier that selflessly came to Tolkien aid suggesting that Frodo in some ways was Tolkien. The image that came to mind was how ‘tired’ Frodo remained after the quest, not defeated but his youth replaced by profound knowing that aged and weighed on him. I wonder if Tolkien felt similar. Again, the word bittersweet comes to mind.

I admired Sam, though not called to carry the weight of the evil he was able to carry his friend. Sam saw what his friend saw and suffered yet at the end of his quest, he maintained a wiser innocence that allowed him to continue to engage with life. Where at the end of Frodo’s quest Frodo couldn’t fully re-engage with Life.

I recall now that Frodo parents drowned. so at a young age Frodo had a glimpse of life as it is. Perhaps this is why Frodo doesn’t have the same youthful inherent innocents that Sam had. There is always something sad in Frodo. I suspect it was this difference of experience that made Frodo the one able to carry the ring… But not destroy it.

Purist of heart…. Frodo I think had a heart that had been broken and perhaps healed by the kindness of Bilbo taking him in. A healed heart stronger because of its scares… than perhaps only such a heart that has been broken is Pure?

It took everything Frodo had in him to get the ring to the place where it could be destroyed but not the step further. Here Tolkien shows his wisdom as such an evil is not for us to destroy, we are only called to carry our part. Its a theme throughout the story as the hero’s never assume to try to change what was not theirs to change.

I think I saw Sam as the Hero because I wanted to be him. To emerge from the quest with the kind wise innocence needed to continue to engage in life after all the hardships.

In hindsight it makes sense to me that I saw Frodo as failing and Sam as the hero. I wanted to be Sam and knew I wasn’t.