Love and its uses

I've been privileged with many wonderful teachers in my life. One of them, Nicky McCartney, here contributes to this blog on the theme of Love and Its Uses.

By Nicky McCartney

Love is instrumental, but it is not an instrument. We often confuse the two: we try to use love to make us happier, to guilt trip and put pressure on others, to wheedle and bargain.  And we are often confused about what love is. It gets mixed up with commitment, responsibility, duty, romance, feeling good, feeling safe, being generous, cooperative, receptive, flexible. Love can lead us towards these things in its instrumental capacity, but when we try to use love to force any of these, we get victimhood and perpetration.

As soon as we try to capture and control love, the corruption starts. Love knows no boundary, and capture and control are all about boundary and the use of individual will for private ends.  Love has no private ends: it interpenetrates and infuses all of life. Love knows only oneness, the group. 

Our receptivity to love and our ability to be a conduit for it depends on our capacity for inclusiveness and oneness with a greater whole. When we are able to focus on the whole, and not just the parts that make up the whole, we enter the territory of Love. It does not matter how small that whole is. It may be the whole that is produced by 1+1, me + you, or the whole that is the manifested universe.

Love asks nothing of us except receptivity to it. As it infuses our lives, we are more and more bound by its law, which is the law of Oneness. This causes a slow but inevitable revolution in the way we think, feel and act. 

Material existence has its own necessities as well: those of categorisation, boundary, separateness, personal survival, time, priorities, different physical, emotional and mental gifts and limitations, physical and psychological developmental processes.

These exigencies define much of our lives, until love creeps in to change everything. The illusion of separateness and the divisions which serve it become more apparent. The eyes of love allow us to appreciate the multi-coloured, heterogeneous reality of the material world, while seeing and experiencing the source of oneness that binds it all.

Paradoxically, in the concrete world, love without power becomes weak and open to victimisation. Will or power provide energy, boundary, direction, focus, purpose and decisiveness: the very antithesis of love.  

Wrongly used, love and power are repellant to one another or bound by an abuse system. We take advantage of love's receptivity when we try to achieve selfish ends by directing our power towards the loving, receptive part of others or ourselves. This attempt to coerce, manipulate or ignore the right place of love in our decisions and actions makes us into perpetrators. Yet if these polarities can be resolved, the marriage of love and power produces empowered love and loving power.

There is power in a factory, power in the land, Power in the hand of the worker.

But it all counts for nothing if together we don’t stand. There is power in a Union.

There is Power in a Union song, version by Billy Bragg.

How then can we bring power to love, without violence? The only way is to direct our individual will towards our best understanding of a higher order good: a good that is inclusive and which seeks to do no harm.

The boy who decides to stay away from the gang robbery on the pretext of having food poisoning, because he feels that this is a step too far, may not be yet expressing empowered love or loving power, but he is pointing himself in the right direction. His fear and distaste for the gang action and his decision to stay away are early signs of a capacity to think beyond himself and to take action in accordance with a higher order good. He may not yet be able to articulate what the good is that his decision is directing him towards, but if nurtured by multiple such choices he may one day be an embodiment of empowered love or loving power.

His embryonic capacity for love influences his discernment and his choices. His embryonic capacity for power enables him to take purposeful action. When he brings the two together towards a higher order goal, that of removing himself from possible harm to himself and others, he begins the journey which ends with enlightenment.

Step by step the longest march can be won, can be won

Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none

And by union what we will can be accomplished still

Drops of water turn a mill, singly none.

Traditional song. Anon.

In the concrete world, love orients itself to and expresses itself through group relations. Our participation in groups, whether physical or virtual, on the inner planes or the outer, is the only way we have of entering love’s embrace. Here we realize something of a great truth: that all is relationship; that nothing exists outside of relationship with something else; and that Love is the binding ingredient.

At the edge

The following (somewhat rough) poem was written today. It’s one particular reflection on the journey of consciousness. I’m very privileged because many of the people in my life have chosen this journey, for which ultimately there is no map. It’s what Joseph Campbell described as “the hero’s adventure”, and it has been mythologised in myriad ways in many cultures.

At the edge

There’s no rest for those at the edge

no smooth path

no clear terrain

no planned schedule that meets approval

not even harsh words – blank looks

for those at the edge.

At every turning

wheels scrape ruts in the road

At every moment the new must be made

out of nothing

The body is an experiment in mutability

it absorbs all, suffers all.

Ahead the land

falls away to air

and so I take a step

over

kindly gravity catches me in song.

The cult of change

Move fast and break things

Motto of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

While, with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony ...

William Wordsworth

There’s a spot on a bow-shaped wooden bridge above the Merri Creek in the northern suburbs of Melbourne to which I find myself lured on my walks.

There I gaze, for a minute or two, into the water below. After rain in winter the creek is a surging torrent of turgid brown. In summer it is clear and shallow, allowing you to see to the bottom. Depending on the day, the sun’s rays can dazzle as they gleam and glint off the water. Depending on the creek’s depth and strength of current, the water ripples and glides in a multitude of ways leaving behind endless more delightful ripples and swirls.

For a brief time once every few days I am mesmerised on that bridge. And I notice others stopping there too, gazing below as if looking for something intangible; like the way people involuntarily stand and stare at the ocean. It’s the simple beauty and the sight of ceaseless movement, nature endlessly rising and falling. The inner eye is gently opened to the deeper realms of being. Paradoxically, all the shifting and movement brings stillness and calm, an experience of the eternal that lies beyond transient form.

I contrast this with the human world in which I am enveloped for most of the day. Our culture places a high value on change, but doesn’t have the vision to see the changeless. We are caught up in the hurly burly of material existence, without experiencing the eternal which underpins it. Karen Armstrong, in her book A History of God, notes how past civilisations were essentially conservative and resistant to change – they were anchored by laws that were regarded as immutable and divine. But, she says, “The modern technical society introduced by the West was based on the expectation of constant development and progress. Change was institutionalised and taken for granted.”

Without religion to point to the eternal reality, I think the West has developed a kind of cult of change in recent times. Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” sums it up. Innovation is everything, to be stationary for any length of time tantamount to failure. Boundaries or limits are suspect and will inevitably be broken by the human drive for improvement. The ideal person participates in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of experience generated by their interaction with technology and consumer products. What Zuckerberg and others like him describe is a capitalist managerial ethic overlayed with insights from the world of marketing geared towards consumerism. Once the preserve of corporate executives, the managerial change fixation has now penetrated deeply into the psyche of society as a whole.

The great failure of the cult of change is its inability to answer “To what end?” or to speak to deep human needs. I think it generates anxiety and feelings of inadequacy in many people. Change is a constant of all created reality, but human-generated change needs to be directed and purposeful to the broader needs of humanity and the planet. The idea of constant improvement has merit, but there are times when we don’t need to strive, when simply “good enough” is fine. Indeed most of the time “good enough” is appropriate: it would be silly to attach some notion of excellence to washing dishes, or to walking the dog, or sleeping. Even at work, we should be secure in knowing we are good enough while being open to improve where we can.

There is a steady-state ethic that is starting to emerge as a counterpoint to the mainstream attachment to change and growth. Informed by the environmental movement and the wisdom of indigenous cultures, it values simplicity. It tries to place the individual in context within a web of human and non-human relationships that makes up the totality of life. It reinforces the importance of ecological and other limits. And its measure is quality, as opposed to the generation of movement and money for its own sake.       

About 700 metres south of the wooden bridge of my walks there is another bridge across the Merri Creek. It is a road that for large parts of the day is clogged with traffic, noise and car fumes. I instinctively find it hostile to any sense of peace or lasting value. Yet, on a larger level, this scene is no different to the ceaseless tumult of flowing water – behind both lies the face of eternity. A well-developed eye is required to see this, and feeling to understand that change and the changeless are essentially one.

Dreams and the unconscious

“The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.”

C.G Jung, Man and His Symbols

I’m amazed, but mostly baffled, about the way the unconscious operates. Carl Jung emphasised how little we know about it and how important it is to learn more and to engage constructively with it.

Only a few days ago I had a powerful experience that caused me to reflect about dreams and the unconscious. My partner and I were on holiday in far-north Australia and wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef, so we joined a half-day boat tour for snorkelling and whale watching. I’d never been snorkelling and I’m not a confident swimmer – I learnt the very basics in a few days on my own in a hotel swimming pool when I was nine and still need to feel the bottom with my feet or hold on to something after a few strokes. Our guide said that would not be a problem because he had devices to keep me afloat.   

After we made it to the reef and the other tourists jumped into the water with their snorkelling gear, I plunged in – and panicked. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the deep water and the idea of somehow floating while breathing through a strange plastic mask suddenly brought on fear. I gulped sea water and managed to grab the steps of the boat. My partner and the guide were good. They coaxed me into holding on to a life ring, which the guide then pulled through the water as I learnt how to breathe through the snorkel. And within a few minutes I was actually seeing the reef, gradually relaxing in the water.    

My partner and I found it difficult to talk about the experience afterwards. I was embarrassed and needed time to digest and integrate. That night we had broken sleep with disturbing dreams: mine were a mishmash of images, a collage of strange visions and fragmented energies. Though none of them were clear to me, I connected them to my hapless time in the water. A small trauma, a little wound had been created, and the psyche was responding. As Jung pointed out, the unconscious, through dreams, acts as a kind of balancing pole to keep the total mind in equilibrium. Our ego, the personality we present to the world, is in fact quite fragile; beyond it is the vast and largely mysterious unconscious. The ego is subject to myriad stimulations and phenomena every day, all of them registering in some way in the personal unconscious. If we are generally stable in ourselves and in our lives the ego can be solid and firm, but it is always subject to upset or imbalance. New experience is one of the main ways to tip us over.

Unless the ego is mature and flexible, open enough to embrace or relate playfully with new experience, it can be knocked off balance. In that case the unconscious arrives to fill the breach, with its assorted bag of fears, irrationalities and dreams. It is the instinctive and primal counterforce to the developed rationality of the ego. Some experiences of course are just too strong to be absorbed gracefully by the individual ego – on the extreme end I think of wars and natural disasters, which can fracture the psyche and lead to long-lasting imbalances where the unconscious has too much power over a personality. 

Developing a constructive relationship with the unconscious is an important function of psychology. Often we consign the most truthful and telling parts of ourselves to the far reaches of our mind, yet the unconscious continues to speak to us in dreams and other ways, providing balance to the total psyche. Its language is that of images and symbols, which is difficult for the ego, particularly one conditioned in a rationalist, scientific culture. I try to write down my dreams and make a stab of interpreting them, my method a simple one of image association. It’s not easy, the insights coming slowly over many years, but fascinating and rewarding nonetheless. An attitude of holding and accepting mystery is, I think, crucial. Jung was often at pains to point out that the unconscious needed to be taken seriously – we can’t afford to write off dreams, visions or the non-rational as unreal and unimportant – because it reveals so much about our inner selves. At the very least it demands to be noticed and given credence in our lives.  

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The importance of place

There’s nothing like a sense of place. I’ve never had a stable place of residence for more than a few years in my life, but for almost two decades my surrogate emotional home has been the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne.

I’ve been going to the Vic Market most Saturdays since 1994, sitting with friends at one of the metal tables in the lane beside the delicatessen section. Fruit and vegetable shopping is the stated aim of a visit to the market but the real interest is in meeting old friends, conversation, coffee and immersion in the vibe.

There are lots of families with children, tourists passing through, couples sitting quietly together, buskers with guitars and solo singers, dogs of every size and kind, and fat overweened pigeons. I love the way you can watch people change over the years – children who grow into fine adults, stallholders taking their breaks sitting on milk crates and smoking in the lane; the friendships that come and go, and those that last. The market’s not just a backdrop to life – I imagine it having a transformative effect, a catalyst for the best in all of us. At the very least, it’s an affirmation and celebration that we are, after all, social beings.

And then there are the Vic Market legends: the time a certain reviled politician and his wife out for a casual stroll were sent fleeing after word of their presence got out in the lane; The Band Who Knew Too Much, whose joyful swinging sound attracted impossibly large crowds; and Jim, the craggy-faced seller of the Big Issue and his familiar cry, “Getcher copy of the Big Issue ‘ere, only five dollars.”

I think place is very important to human happiness. These days there’s an emphasis and tendency towards mobility – rootlessness is seen as OK because technology allows us to hook into communication networks from anywhere. But being a “person of the world” can be harmful if there are no places that are meaningful to us and with which we have a deep relationship. Places hold memory and so are part of our development, make us who we are. They are part of the weave of our lives, resonating psychologically and spiritually. Places evoke particular responses and moods that can be positive or negative – some are uplifting, others make us uneasy, dull or stupefied. At the Vic Market, I’m always reflective and deeply appreciative. For me, it’s a place to just be. I’m thankful for its presence in my life.

For thousands of years people have gone on pilgrimage to holy places. The ancient Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi, Muslims are asked to go to Mecca at least once in their life, Jews and Christians have Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Catholics the shrines and cathedrals of various saints, and Buddhists and Hindus significant geographical places and temples. Salvation is in the journey to the holy place and in the prayer or ritual conducted there; the journey is a pilgrim’s preparation for meeting with the divine, arrival the point of connection with God. Ritual renews and strengthens the bond a pilgrim has with their particular deity or expression of the divine, as well as providing a sense of union, meaning and depth in life. Power is created when the ritual happens in a group, the individual merging both with the religious community and the divine mystery/presence.

Mircea Eliade says in his brilliant book, The Sacred and the Profane, that sacred places channel a human need for connection, transcendence and meaning. They act as spiritual centre points from which meaning emanates and to which people need to return to reinvigorate their lives. Eliade points out that there are still echoes of symbol and ritual in the contemporary secular West, and people have a continuing need for transcendence. My experience at the Vic Market has something of this quality for me. It is a psychological centre point to which I return, a place of reflection and comfort. And I don’t believe that it’s solely a projection of my needs and desires onto a particular place, though an element of that is certainly there. There is a relationship between me and the Vic Market, which is re-established and remade every time I visit. This fine, unseen level of reality exits despite our materialist age and is not diminished; whether we acknowledge it is another matter.

Maybe somebody someday will set up a little shrine at the Market as an expression of thanks. It would be a concrete spiritual gesture and something perhaps for which we are not yet ready. The truth is that people show gratitude in myriad ways there anyway – buying food, chatting with the stallholders, appreciating the colour and variety of the wares, eating with friends, enjoying the ambience. Our actions have deep and lasting reverberations.

Discernment

It’s a small scene that captures the absurdity of life in the modern world: Chinese tourists pile out of a bus near Melbourne’s Parliament House and take photos of each other, faces beaming, in front of a statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon.

I see this on many mornings walking to work. It’s safe to say the tourists have no idea who Gordon was, because most Melburnians don’t know. He was a kind of tragic hero of 19^th century colonial Australia – a famed horse rider and poet who, having suffered a bad fall in a race and burdened by self-doubt and financial problems, shot himself at the age of 37.

Gordon was one of the early writers of Australian bush ballads, most notably The Sick Stockrider, a melancholy but folksy tribute to the European pioneering spirit. The Chinese tourists with their happy holiday snaps in front of his statue may not care, even if they knew. 

It’s a bizarre scene, but one that’s repeated countless times in different ways around the world and quite instructive. Disconnection is fundamental to the modern condition. Ironically at a time when people are more connected than ever across the world thanks to technology, when information is readily available on anything, deep levels of ignorance abound. 

I think in future our time will be seen as the high water mark of material consumption. Unparalleled wealth is being created with a seemingly endless variety of material goods and choices. If you have the money you can get virtually anything you want, do anything you want, be anything you want. Money has few barriers across the globe.  

Yet as passionately as we have sailed in recent times into the adventure of the material world, the inner world of Spirit has been left far behind. We lack connection with ourselves and our environment, living as tourists in our own lives. Though contemporary technology, including IT and the internet, is helpful in many ways, ingenious and creative, it has negative personal and social effects. Distraction and hyperactivity are two of the most notable. In the absence of a spiritually infused culture with healthy values, addiction to gadgets and the products of the internet is widespread as people fill the inner void. 

Despite this, I can see change. At some point perhaps not so far in the future, as a result of immense human population, scarce resources and climate change, our society will become radically different. There will no longer be endless material abundance and sheer survival will become more important as we are forced to live within environmental limits. By then as a society we may also have moved towards the inner world of meaning, connection and community.

The move towards the Spirit starts with discernment. It’s about engaging quality. Discernment lifts an individual out of the common denominator of the mass and presents him/her with deeper choices about life. What is life about? What really makes me happy? Endless and addictive “conversation” on Facebook, Twitter or other social media does not address these questions; neither does endless consumption of goods, ideas, travel or anything else. When we engage with quality in our lives, we are on the road to creating meaningful connections. Then we can begin to relate to technology or any other aspect of our world with open interest but not with the slavery of the mass. 

The constant barrage of new technology affects social interaction and creates problems that take years to understand, let alone address. There is, for instance, the anxiety and social exclusion of people who don’t participate in or can’t keep up with technology – because of poverty, age, disability or other reasons. There are also the effects that new technology has on the body, either directly through stimulation of the nervous system – contributing to lack of sleep, distraction and anxiety – or indirectly through lack of exercise and obesity. 

Discernment needs to be a central pillar of our culture. Many individuals are already walking its path in various ways, connecting with their deeper selves and their community, but discernment has to become a template for society as a whole. For the tourists who congregate in central Melbourne by the likeness of Adam Lindsay Gordon, it might be something as simple as taking a minute to read the words on the statue; or a moment in the early morning sunshine to imagine who this person might have been, before taking a photo.  

The death of print

We live in a time of endings, but also in a time of beginnings. Recently a friend told me she felt a great loss at the “death of print”, the decline and likely disappearance of many newspapers. It felt to her momentous and the times were uncertain.

I agree. There is enormous transition going on. To me it seems like the entire Western project, the civilisation whose political, economic and social ways have come to dominate the planet, is undergoing fundamental change. Institutions that emerged during the Age of Reason like the press and parliamentary democracy seem particularly moribund at the present time.  

But with endings, there are always beginnings. This is something we often fail to see. When a person dies, for instance, the family and friends grieve for a time and then go on with their lives. The death is felt as a loss, which it is. But it also opens the door to new relationships. Those who are left behind have a new experience of life, a difference in the makeup of things, a re-ordering of reality. Often that which has been neglected or unseen comes to the surface and opportunities for growth and enlightenment inevitably arise.

Every death heralds a birth. This is not something easily grasped by the rational mind. Most of the time we see material existence as a moving jumble of discrete and isolated phenomena. But the connections are everywhere, on all levels, and interdependence is the overriding reality. A deep and fundamental understanding of relationship is, I think, something that humans are evolving towards, but it requires a shift in the psychic dominance of rationality and a greater opening to mystical experience.

The ecology movement is one of the primary catalysts in turning our minds towards relationship. Scientists are increasingly aware of the biological interdependence of life on Earth, and how life-supporting ecosystems exist in delicate balance. Take one part out of an ecosystem and the whole, dynamic web is changed. When we revere nature, when we are awestruck by a mountain or moved by the lushness of a forest or the grandeur of the sea, we turn inwards to a profound place of oneness, which is mystical experience. 

What birth arrives with the death of print? I don’t find this easy to answer, and it’s probably still too early to tell. The breakdown of the traditional press as mass opinion-forming agents creates an opening for multiplicity and diversity of views – we have seen this in the internet – but those views are not necessarily mature or enlightened. The shift towards the internet is also a means by which culture is fragmented as people seek out their own niche interests and news, abandoning the broad-based and generalist news services. The fragmentation, in my opinion, furthers the decline of the political-economic-social system we live under. It makes society more unpredictable and volatile.

Before new forms are created there is a period of gestation, usually involving conflict and crisis. We don’t know how long the present period of transition will last, but it’s safe to say that the seeds of the new order are already in existence. The seeds of love and unity are daily watered by the actions of millions of people across the world.