Hi Boris,

Many things caught my attention in your posts,  loving vs loving the image and “perceiving things as they are”.

I, too, have thought a lot about these two topics and can tell from my experiences and observations I think unfortunately it is very rare to love “not the image”. I am not even sure if it is possible as long as we are our conditioned selves. You see, the longer we know the person, the stronger the image built about that person. You must have heard about “beginner’s mind” term. I don’t want to call it a term, it is an actuality. Basically being able to see something as if for the first time.  And how can we do it with someone who we have known our whole lives or 2 years? So we just continue living with images we built about that person. And we add and subtract from those images, thinking something changes… and here is a marriage of many decades where two people claim they “know” each other, in reality do they know each other? can you ever know someone? Did you ever look at that person leaving behind all the past memories of pleasure and pain? did you see beyond the image? And that person you think you know had an image about you too. So two people say they are in a relationship, but in reality its their images which are in a relationship. This is the main source of conflict in all relationships. Relationship is a movement, image is static, and what’s static contradicts and causes conflict with whats in a movement.

I was able to understand and see these points with the help of J Krishnamurti. He explains this point very well and i am trying to apply it to my daily life.

And back to love. What is love? Love in relation to people is when they can be on the same intensity at the same time with full understanding. it is a movement as well. It is a state. It’s an energy. Its not towards a person or an object. It’s not a product of our minds. It is not a fantasy. love is not that romantic ideas that go on in our heads either.  An idea is born out of memory, to put it simply, you think that you love, you don’t actually love…

Perceiving things as they are is the ultimate art of life. Not only perceiving physical objects as they are, such as looking at a tree or a bird without trying to identify what it is, what colour it has and etc. etc. but also perceiving ourselves, our psyche, our thoughts and feelings as they are, which is ofcourse much more difficult… I really like Haiku poems and I usually go for a walk and write 1 or 2 a day. i find it really helps me calm my mind and bring me back to reality.