Love and anger

• 6 November, 2022
• culture
• karma
• society

This is a common theme in the two books I'm writing at the moment, 'Ghostly Hunger' and 'The Loving Space'. If you have read any one of my other books, particularly 'The Invisible Prison', which is about external authority, and 'The Tears of the Clown', which is about the Ego, you will be familiar with the widespread issue of separateness which is a common issue for human beings.

We are all essentially, somewhere deep down inside hungry ghosts who yearn for, and need, to experience love in its many different forms. Here I'm not just writing about romantic or sexual love, but the whole spectrum of love which embraces sympathy, kindness, mercy, compassion, empathy, acceptance, friendship, and so on. We are all born into life with a certain amount of karma to resolve, or work out, but we cannot work it out all by ourselves.

Love is a purely conscious experience which often escapes definition. We often cannot put into words why we love someone. We just do. We understand that love is something we need, and which is essential for our emotional, psychological and spiritual well being. We need other people with the keys to unlock the locked doors in our heart which arise out of separateness and to give us a definite sense and meaning to our living existence.

Unconditional love?

But while we understand that there is such a thing as unconditional love, and we all have a potential to experience it, love generally is an experience which comes with conditions. Whenever someone tells me that they love me unconditionally I always ask them if they would still love me after I sliced off both their ears with a razor blade. Kind of makes them step back and think.

Not that I would actually slice off anything from anyone with a razor blade. I'm familiar with shaving legs with a clamshell razor. And with wiping away blood afterwards. I'm quite safe to be around.

But my point here is that while we know that there is such a thing as unconditional love, few of us are capable of it. We are all socially conditioned to believe in our separateness through social conditioning and education. And within this is an awful lot of conditioning to believe in special love, unique love, or to narrow down love to the varieties of love which involve just two people and invariably lead to sex. This creates all kinds of different issues, not least loneliness, putting another person on a pedestal and idolizing them, constantly misunderstanding friendship for love, not being able to find someone to be with, and transactional love, or love of someone's physical appearance, sexual prowess or bank balance.

Then there's the issue of compatibility, because truth be told, there are people who we simply cannot get along with, who rub us up the wrong way, people we feel we cannot love, and people we have closed our hearts to. There are people who hold dear values and beliefs which are diametrically opposed to our beliefs and values. Therefore rather than seeing unconditional love as something possible more often than not it's an ideal which we are working towards, each in our own individual way, as we journey from being convinced of our separateness to finding ourselves being able to connect to our environment and other people.

This is something I'm keen to point out to anyone. Any spiritual journey isn't so much about you, who you are, and what you believe in. In fact who you are and what you believe isn't really that important when it comes to your spiritual journey. What really matters, and what is the most important, is how you can connect to the universe, this planet, and everything that lives and breathes on this planet. This of course includes other people.

"I could be wrong, I could be right
I could be black, I could be white
I could be right, I could be wrong
I could be white, I could be black

Your time has come, your second skin
You rise so high, and gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie...."

Public Image Limited, 'Rise'

Anger is an energy

Here it's important to understand that hate is not a polar opposite of love, but falls within the spectrum of love, so is actually a form of love. This is where you get the difference between hate and bullying on the one hand, and social stigma on the other. You can only hate someone if you know them or know something about them. Stigma on the other hand is based on a label or a social marker, or a type of person. You don't necessarily need to know anything about that person or have any relationship with them. Both hate and bullying implies a relationship, stigma doesn't. This is why the concept of a hate crime is incredibly poor legislation which presents issues to the police and courts, simply because the motivation which led to the crime - and motivation is important when it comes to crime - cannot always be worked out or successfully prosecuted.

Then we come to anger, which is essentially the outward expression of energy in a relationship. Anger is in itself a legitimate emotion and feeling. It exists within the human spectrum of emotions and feelings and it takes on many different forms. This is all part of that journey which starts out from Ego, separateness and 'me me me' and ends up when you've resolved your issues with the world and life, you no longer give a monkey's chuff, and you treat everyone the same simply because you accept them for who they are. You accept everyone else for who they are because you accept yourself as well. It's at this point you've learned what humanity means and understand that Ego - and most anger arises out of a perceived threat to Ego - is just role play with a lot of self-deception thrown into the mix.

This is something that many people, among them politicians and political activists, would do well to learn and keep in mind. Anger as I've stated previously is a legitimate emotion and feeling, and defines 'asura', one of the six realms of existence of samsara and the Buddhist Wheel of Life, because anger is based on trauma, and trauma on force. This is the energy of the demon and the demi-god, expressed in nature through storms, hurricanes and tornados. But behind that anger and energy and emotion there has to be consciousness and conscious will, and not mindlessness, otherwise you can end up with mindless violence and a pointless protest or one which divides people far more than it connects and results in change.

The black civil rights movement in the US illustrates this principle with numerous examples. You don't just have the popular figures of Dr Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Coretta Scott King, Fred Hampton, and Ella Baker. You also have people such as William Henry Furman, the house breaker and plaintiff in Furman v. Georgia 438 (US) 238 (1972) which caused a four year nationwide moratorium on capital punishment in the US and made the death penalty constitutional. This was a case which saved hundreds of lives, among them Charles Manson, when capital punishment was held to be unconstitutional and states were forced to clear out their Death Rows and commute death sentences to life. What sparked the case was the fact that Furman, who was robbing someone's house, was escaping from the homeowner, he tripped and fell, his gun went off, and the bullet caught the homeowner and killed him. Despite not having any intention to murder someone, Furman was sentenced to the electric chair. He fought his sentence, won in the US Supreme Court, and it was another case, Gregg v. Georgia, which brought capital punishment back.

"Memories, good days, bad days
They'll be with me always
They'll be with me always
In these old familiar rooms
Children would play
Now there's only emptiness
Nothing to say
Knowing me, knowing you, aha
There is nothing we can do
Knowing me, knowing you, aha
We just have to face it this time
We're through
Breaking up is never easy, I know
But I have to go
Knowing me, knowing you
It's the best I can do...."

ABBA, 'Knowing me, knowing you'

When anger is a manifestation of abuse

Anger is only healthy when there's some degree of mindfulness behind it. When there isn't anger and trauma in a relationship can quickly develop into cycles of abuse defined by anger, frustration, and redemption. This is where issues of control, denial, deception and blame enter into the relationship, bringing with them fresh or new experiences of trauma which through abuse become recorded into memory. Abuse is a very serious and complex social issue which plagues human relationships right across the spectrum - parent-child, between partners, within families, employers and employees, relationships between neighbours, and even relationships between governments and people.

But within the complexity of human abuse and trauma the mystical principles are pretty much simple and the same. All trauma is environmental in nature and arises out of emptiness, space, ignorance, and lack of awareness. Trauma will always escalate energy cycles and frequencies, and thus cycles of abuse cannot be fought, or resisted, simply because all abusive behaviour and relationships are essentially defined by compulsion and compulsive behaviour. This means that abuse is a behaviour rather than a person. There's plenty of people who are abusive parents and abusive partners who are not abusive in every environment and every relationship. Similarly there's a significant number of people who become abusive when they enter politics, and more than a few abusive employers out there who are perfectly fine with their partners and children.

What we need to do, generally as a society, is to stop labelling people as abusive, but stick to defining relationships as abusive or not. I know this is a difficult thing for people who have been the objects of abuse from others, particularly child abuse and domestic abuse, but abuse is environmental and definitive of a relationship, not a person. The relationship is how cycles of abuse transfer from one person to another. I know this is hard if all you've ever experienced from a parent or partner is abuse, because it's hard to see them as anything other than abusive. But quite often those who are the objects of abuse don't always see their parents or partners as abusive and fail to recognize that the relationships they're in are abusive until later in life when it's too late and the abuse has cycled into memory.

"Something's going on, a change is taking place
Children smiling in the street have gone without a trace
This street used to be full, it used to make me smile
And now it seems that everyone is walking single file

And many hang their heads in shame that used to hold them high
And those that used to say hello simply pass you by..."

The Housemartins 'Think for a minute'

The deficit of consciousness

It's very important to take a step back here and take a look at the bigger picture. This journey from separateness towards unconditional love isn't just an individual journey. It's also a collective movement or motion which defines society and the trajectory of human evolution. The high and mighty Western society isn't defined by its humanity, or its empathy or even its community, but far more by its brutality, its various traditions based on ideology and belief systems, and by its brutality. Referring back to my other blog post titled 'Moral nonsense' for centuries much of Western society has been about for centuries is forcing Western beliefs on other societies and communities, particularly notions of democracy and freedom, under the threat of military invasion, economic manipulation, and the threat of weapons, missiles and bombs.

This is what I personally refer to as a deficit of consciousness.

Neglect is a form of abuse and the levels of what I can only describe as pathology, arising out of disgustingly high levels of unnecessary trauma and suffering created out of political incompetence, failure, societal indifference and mindlessness, for example across society in the UK and United States, is nothing short of shameful. Most of the social and cultural values aspired to are outdated, archaic and dead. In far too many homes throughout these societies children, teenagers and adults are denied many basic needs and opportunities, and this is something that is difficult to conceptualize for many people who have not gone through pathological circumstances and experiences in life.

"I always said it could, they never thought it would
The people look so pitiful, I'm thinking that it should
And now it's on its way, now it's on its way
I can't help saying told you so, and have a nice final day

'Cos nothing I could say could ever make them see the light
Now apathy is happy that it won without a fight...."

The Housemartins 'Think for a minute'

Social and cultural values which are dead, lifeless and outdated

There are many professionals, among them doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, social workers, and others working in such fields as mental health, healthcare, and welfare support, are simply not trained or prepared adequately to deal with this reality which comes out of this pathology. There is a massive gap, and sometimes a chasm, of awareness, a lack of insight and empathy, which further impacts on the lives of those affected, and thus impacts on communities and society as a whole.

There is a lack of training and awareness among such professionals, and this ignorance which results condemns many lives which have the potential for rehabilitation and which could take a different course, but for the ignorance and the lack of opportunity. This of course is not done with any premeditation, which I also wish to emphasize, but it happens and it happens because of the lack of insight and awareness.

This is not, by any means, hyperbole on my part.

A pandemic subculture

The effects of our inadequate and broken system creates a kind of pandemic subculture which is never really spoken about or discussed with any fairness or open-mindedness, though we are all aware that such a subculture exists and that some people are affected by it.

Not only does this subculture create experiences of homelessness, abuse, addiction, long term unemployment, poverty, destitution, and a lack of opportunity creating experiences and cycles which are extremely difficult to escape from, but it sucks in other people who have other circumstances and experiences beyond their control, such as disability, chronic illnesses, and mental health issues, who also become alienated, isolated, marginalized and 'written off'.

These are experiences which affect not just individual people, they also affect entire families because such experiences cycle through generations of families and there's common experiences between parents and children, who grow up in this subculture and who have no other opportunity but to perpetuate this subculture further.

"And many hang their heads in shame that used to hold them high
And those that used to say hello simply pass you by
Think for a minute
Stop for a minute....."

The Housemartins 'Think for a minute'

The political vacuum

There is also what I can describe as a political vacuum which is related to this subculture and a general strategy of avoidance when it comes to political parties which also ensures that this subculture perpetuates and cycles with each passing generation. I have tried in my work to raise awareness of such issues within political parties and so far it has come to nothing. This has left me with a distinct impression that there are serious limitations when it comes to democracy.

This means that there is, throughout our society, a barrier which is pretty much impenetrable, which divides those who have gone through pathological experiences in life from those who haven't. Society is not a level playing field by any means, of this I am certain. But there is a certain stigma attached to people affected by this pathology and it affects them in so many different ways when it comes to opportunities in housing, in employment, in education, so that their ability to become part of 'the mainstream' and break the cycles of their past is severely limited.

"Do you know where you're going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you? Where are you going to? Do you know?
Do you get what you're hoping for?
When you look behind you there's no open doors
What are you hoping for?
Do you know....."

Diana Ross, 'Theme from Mahogany'

Trauma isn't something that simply fades away

Trauma is force and is what creates karma, which is physical action and physical activity. This is essentially the difference between trauma and karma. Trauma is the start of the process and karma is the process. The journey is still the same journey, irrespective of the environment and perspective, it's still motion away from separateness towards unconditional love and unity. Trauma doesn't go anywhere but remains in memory and will remain in memory for as long as there is no karma to move away from the trauma. Apathy, the opposite of empathy, is what holds you back and creates the suffering. Suffering is created out of clinging, so trying to cling to the past to avoid suffering will only result in the creation of more suffering.

All existence is changing. All existence is relationship. What I'm point out there is that you cannot go back, nor can you stay in the same place. You can only move forward. How and when you do this is essentially down to you.

This is the subject of my new book titled 'Ghostly Hunger' which should appear on this website and the Qultura websites as a free e-book for download sometime later this month. You can reserve a copy by messaging me and telling me whether you prefer EPUB or PDF and I will email you back a download link. Outside of that if you are willing to move forward and seek change you'd be very welcome in the Qultura community and also you can turn up to any dreamweaving workshop or meeting. The opportunity is there, but it's down to you to take it.