I would like to say something about this idea of love being communicated.

When a relationship ends its common to hear someone say. “I don’t love you anymore”, – “you never did”…

Is it possible to end a relationship as a experience of Love?

Joseph Campbell* liked to tell this story of a samurai warrior, a Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. After some time, the samurai found and cornered the man who had murdered his overlord. He was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, when this man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in his face. And the samurai sheathed the sword and walked away.

Whether the samurai kill the man as a act of honoring his code (his center of “being”), or anger the murder would be just as dead. However, this is not a story about the murderer nor is it a story about justice, mortality or even the code of the samurai. It is about acting from a place of ones “being”, ones truth, responding to life needs from ones authentic center.

If I say Love is the code from which I serve and respond to life, and someone has “murdered” – crossed a boundary that duty requires a response. It is possible to pursue that responsibility of accountability as an act of Love?

(I argue here that personal, social wellbeing… meaning, purpose, joy.. arise from a experience of being loved which cannot exist without the experience of getting to be accountable. That nothing we do or are could be experienced as mattering and or experienced as “being” loved without the experience of <i>accountability for the “good” and the “bad”</i>).

Love, accountability, responsibility, fear, hate, forgiveness, vengeance, justice, freedom… all have something in common. They all involve the setting boundaries. The question, from which do we draw on to build the boundary?

With regards to relationship, it might feel necessary to use the energy of anger to create the boundary to end a unhealthy relationship. Perhaps better to say ending contact, as that is also a kind of relationship?

The problem with creating a boundary using the energy of anger is that it burns and does not care what or who it burns. I would suggest that the boundary that ends a person relationship can be maintained from the energy of Love.  Ether way a boundary is created. It is possible to create the boundary without damaging the ‘code’ in order to fulfill the ‘duty required of the code’

It may seem to be a impossible paradox, as a seeming paradox words fail… here is a riddle to ponder

“Stillness is what creates love,
Movement is what creates life,
To be still, Yet still moving
– That is everything!” 
Do Hyun Choe

There is a time for everything even the creation of boundaries from a place of hurt that may not feel like love, yet it still may be.

From what I’ve observed Anita response to those seeking dialog always comes from a place of love even when healthy boundaries require a dialog relationship to end.

* Google Ep. 2: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth – interview with Bill Moyers

Here i am, no feelings, no desires, no goals, only consuming, like an animal, at least an animal doesn’t have awareness, the drugs has made me even more apathetic, more numb, i kinda like it, this is why i laugh at everything that happens to me, because its all just a big joke, all of this

Beautiful… agony, bitter sweet. I used to wonder how it was that I felt so much, that I felt nothing at all? Why is it that the Buddha is most often pictured laughing?   “Dad I’m big but we’re smaller than small, In the scheme of things, well we’re nothing at all, Still every mother’s child sings a lonely song, So play with me, come play with me”

It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for… it’s all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing? ― Alan Moore: Batman: The Killing Joke

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” ― Alan Wilson Watts  – “The universe is the game of the self which plays hide and seek for ever and ever.” Come Play with me

Most Conflict, inner and outer, has nothing to do with the present. It is always about the past or the future. We can’t agree on the details of what has happened or is going to happen. We desire certainties… but memory is a trickster, a work in progress, ever changing and we never know what is going to happen.  What is really in dispute is how we will deal with not knowing… For my part I prefer the gift of doubt

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Peter.

This close to the experience it may be difficult to detach the emotions from the analysis of the experience and learn from it.  Detachment here does not mean not feeling the emotions you have only that you avoid attaching your sense of self to them. We have emotions we are not our emotions. We have experience’s we are not our experiences. (That can be a hard one to grasp, as its all to easy to define ourselves and or be defined by a single experience. )

You are not a ‘bad’ person because you feel bad or have done hurtful things to others. We all struggle and we all hurt the ones we care about most sometimes. Relationships are a crucible which will revel our best and worst qualities.  Shadow work (often projected onto the other) and mindfulness can help us separate the things that belong to us and the things that belong to our partner. Forgiveness, accountability, responsibility… are all tools that help us develop the ability to learn better, and learning better do better.

Sadly its a reality that it is often the pain of a relationship ending the pushes us to do the work that might have saved the relationship.

My experience and observations is that their is a tipping point when the past of a relationship becomes so heavy that only those where both those involved have truly learned to know themselves AND a have developed the art of Forgiveness AND have above, above average ability to communicate can over come. (Depending on those factors (and others) every relationship has a different tipping point that love, as understood in that experience, cannot over come. )  Love pushes towards life and growth, when the tipping point has been reached, LOVE may require a relationship to end if only to push us.

Their is a lot to unpack in your post, a lot that you might learn from. Keep writing. Keep a look out for your victim and villain story’s. These types of stories can shine a light on our own projections and fears, areas that might require work.

Other questions you might ask. Where in the relationship did you feel safe? Did you react or respond to you partner when you felt unsafe?  How so? How did your partner respond or react to you when they felt unsafe? Where your boundaries healthy ones?  How many of your boundaries were defined by fear and how many maintained by love? (Using the energy of fear and anger to maintain boundaries may be easier then using the energy of love. At least that has been my experience. )

I wish you well on your journey. Its sounds so odd… but LOVE opens the door to being able to be grateful for the very things you wished never happened.

From a interview of Stephen Colbert

“…he is the youngest of eleven kids and … his father and two of his brothers, Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, were killed in a plane crash when he was 10.”

“I learned to love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of G_d are not gifts?’ ”

Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of G_d are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I’m grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.  I felt so guilty to be grateful’. But I knew it was true.

“It’s not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can’t change everything about the world. You certainly can’t change things that have already happened.”

Consider that this is coming from a man who millions of people will soon watch on their televisions every night—if only there were a way to measure the virality of this, which he’ll never say on TV, I imagine, but which, as far as I can tell, he practices every waking minute of his life.

The next thing he said I wrote on a slip of paper in his office and have carried it around with me since. It’s our choice, whether to hate something in our lives or to love every moment of them, even the parts that bring us pain. “At every moment, we are volunteers.”

I’d like to add on to what TeaK Mentioned – I very much agree that a good Therapist would be helpful in the healing of past. They can help you give to yourself what others should have given you.  

“Sometimes you have to find a way to to give yourself what someone else should have given you”.

In Jung’s path to Individuation the first task is coming to terms with the mother and father complex. Your parents may have influenced how you relate to the mother and father architype however this is not about one parents. This is coming to terms with your own ability to nurture and protect (healthy boundaries) and provide for yourself. Individuation requires that at some point one takes ownership of becoming their own ‘mother‘ and ‘father‘. Our life experience with our parents and other family  may have given a good or bad examples, and influenced our own ability to care for ourselves but it does not define it. Even so we must take ownership.

It’s not easy, by the age of 5 most of use have determined how we are we will respond to life. How we will nurture and protect ourselves.  That is what TeaK is getting at. If we want to move past that 5 year old response to life you need to ‘talk to him.

Last thought. Some mistake the call to ‘love others as oneself ‘ as a command. I view it as the reality in how we love and that if we can’t love ourselves we are going to find it difficult to love others. How you love yourself will be reflected in how you love others and what they intern reflect back to you. (Why relationships are crucibles of self discovery (becoming). The good the bad and the ugly will show themselves).

You can’t ‘fix’ what others failed to give you but you can start learning to love yourself in more skillful ways.  A part of that will be accepting the things you cannot change about yourself and focusing on what you can.

You asked for advice, so here it is: first thing for you to do is to stop trying to find a solution to suffering, stop looking for a way out- for the rest of 2021. For the rest of this year, give zero thought to ending your suffering, completely remove your attention from this topic. Do this today,  let me know how it feels for you, and we’ll take it from there (one step at a time).

For what its worth I think that’s good advice from Anita.

There was a time in my life when I felt similar to what you talk about.  Like you I got discouraged when people  suggested I be more positive. The ‘think positive’ advice, as a defensive pessimist I wasn’t built that way and that wasn’t going to change. I was not going to be able to change my thinking by replacing it with ‘positive thinking’. Then it occurred to me. What if I just left the space blank. That to my surprise I was able to do. I changed the stories I was constantly repeating to myself with no story. A kind of mindfulness I guess thought didn’t know it at the time. When the negative stories came, I didn’t try to change them but more important in time I found I didn’t have to dwell on them. Its difficult to describe.

I shared some of T.S Eliot’s pomes before. I repeat this to myself when I find myself filling the space of my self talk unskillfully

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing”  – I discovered as you mentioned that like toxic positivity, hope is a double edged sword, to easily done unskillfully.  Better not to hope then hope unskillfully.  It is important to say that this is not hopelessness.

“wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;” I was very naïve and didn’t have a great relationship with the ‘idea of Love’. Not having to fill a time of waiting with unskillful stories of ‘Love’ turned out to be very freeing.

“there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting“. That the  waiting becomes the faith and love??? I love that.  Challenged me to re-evaluate my relationship with faith and love. *

“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:” How very true for me at the time. Wait without filling the space with stories, negative or positive.  I live in my head so was very surprised to discover it was possible. Those moments when I let thoughts go…

“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” The problem of opposites. A change in perspective, the possibility that one can be detached and engaged, still while dancing! Find that the way out of our suffering isn’t the light but first the darkness, isn’t up but going down. A experience discovered in the waiting..

* Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us—that is, trust and loyalty. – Jung

Waiting becomes trust becomes a experience one can lean into.

“If you think you imagine yourself taking the position of esthetic stasis, you’ll understand about withdrawing fear and desire for what happens, and about samsara being nirvana, the still point in the mist of the turning world. That’s all there is to it. Then the world becomes a display of things from which you are disengaged, and yet, voluntarily, you can become engaged “joyous participation in the sorrows of the world.” It is very different from being compulsively linked.”

Still

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
― W H Auden

But then what our our illusions? Choice? Skillful or unskillful choice?

I’m taking a social media break.

Just wanted to say thank you for challenging me Murtaza. I hope it didn’t feel like we were gaining up on you.

I wonder why you addressed the following question to.. the normies in this site who are way less qualified to judge and advise you

i didn’t address it to normies, i address it in the hope of finding a none normie person that can agree with me, agree on my logic

So anyone who challenges your thinking must disagrees with it, (all or nothing), and disagreeing is a normie to be dismissed?  If you are certain in your reasonings why reach out? Why the need to find someone exactly like minded?

i believe in the here and now, the past is already gone, and whatever has been produce from such past, can’t live here

That’s why you say you’re “created in a way that guarantees misery”  i say this because of the combination of my past and current needs and desire and beliefs and values and goals

If the past can’t exist in the now, why should it influence the present, why not choose your present as you will?  Viktor Frankl  argued (and Science backs up) that “Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” He talks only of the possibility. His observation in the concentration camps shows that most will not choose but instead summit to fate. Either way end was the same for those that choose to respond with ‘grace’ or those that gave didn’t. Only the inner experience of the moment was different.

It is true that the ability to choose and what is chosen in a moment may be determined by the cards a person one has been dealt. The choice a illusion of fate.  Still the process between stimulus and response exists and so the fate of the possibility of picking new cards.  The past is gone, the end determined, yet their is space between that fate allows us to play with. Why not play? The past is gone, their is no requirement that we hold on to all the cards we were given, especially the ones that only exist as memory. A duality and paradox, Fate and choice existing in the same moment?

In the space between stimulus and response we filter the present moment though the filters of our fears, hopes, expectations desire… almost all of which are based on memory of the past and memory is a trickster.

Hi Murtaza

I thank you for clarifying your response, however I still don’t feel dialog between us is going to be helpful.  You appear to be very literal with your definitions where as I see words as symbols, that point past themselves expanding ones experience.

To be clear your language didn’t bother me it just left me little space to engage with.   Take your reaction to the words wonder and joy that gave you permission to assume you understood my experience and so labeled me a ‘norime’.  Perhaps if you knew of my time in the military, time of cancer, time of losing love ones you might reconsider the definition of ‘normal’. Where you responding to me you, or responding you your associations with the words joy and wonder? Presuming my use of the words meant you knew me, and knowing me, free to label me and set me aside.  The very thing you dislike others doing to you.

I brought up the Buddhist noble truth of suffering because you your original question in this thread reminded me of it. (and that this is a Buddhist site if a little one)  You assume that because I brought it up I understand it and or must agree with it. Which I do and I don’t. It seems to depends on the perspective I take. From where I look at it, in general or personal, objective or subjective…  Life is complex and simple.

I should have been clear, It was Schopenhauer who said ‘Life is something that should not be’ In context He struggled with the reality that Life feeds off life, and that he found no meaning to it, and little joy. (I wonder if he did not enjoy being sad, I wonder if that might also apply to me?) 

Our life is dependent of consuming life until it is our turn to be consumed. Every breath we take fuels and brakes down our body.  The only advice I gave is that how we respond to that reality is important as it will very much color our experiences. Some will turn to religion, some to drink, some to meditation, some to despair, some to indifference, some to engagement, some to art, some to anger, some to love, some to hate, some to compassion, some to joy… Their may be a time for each, who am I to say which is the better for someone other then myself.

I wondered if the “Salmon” after completing it journey enjoyed the struggle or resented it.  It is a wonder to me that I can imagine that that Salmon did. That does not mean I have been able to do the same with regards my own sufferings… I wonder…. when I found myself on a mountain, in a storm, injured, cold, miserable, frightened, that in that moment I found wonder at the power of the storm, the mountain, myself. A experience I would never choose to experience, yet cannot deny how alive I felt in the moment. I wonder if it was Joy? How is it that perspective can change a memory of a experience, and that change the present moment? Why is it the word wonder is related to the word wounded? Greater minds then mine have pondered such things.

This is only dialog not advice.