Love and reincarnation

• 21 September, 2023
• consciousness
• culture
• society

This is what I want to write about today, and that is life as an experience between the duality and polarity of love and death. You see live, love and death are the three inseparable aspects of human existence.

If there is such a thing as human purity then that purity would lie within the realms of divinity and consciousness. As an example let's take music, purity in music is music which connects and reaches the soul. As another example the artist is the vehicle for the statement made through art. The purest form of love lies within the individual who is pure love.

Here there's an interesting paradox in that you can say to someone "I love you. I love you more than I have ever loved any other person. But if I never see you again it would not bother me." This is something which cannot be rationalized, and something which many people, looking at this statement from a perspective influenced by social conditioning, might not get. You see all too often we associate love with attachment. We use personal pronouns, e.g. my wife, my husband, my partner, my girlfriend, my boyfriend, to signify ownership but see this is a statement of Ego and misses the point that there is a nuanced difference between attachment and connection. Attachment is physical in nature, connection isn't. It's conscious.

You see when someone you love dies, there is no longer any attachment simply because there is no longer any physical reality in your relationship. But the connection remains. Human beings die every day, every hour in fact, but you do not grieve their loss or mourn over them. But you mourn and experience grief from the loss of a loved one and it doesn't matter whether they die or not so much, because the process of grief is the same. With the ending of the loving relationship and its death, there is a part of you that remains connected but you have no way of expressing in physical terms that connection to the other person.

Let me throw another song quote into the mix here, specifically the Tamla Motown hit by R. Dean Taylor released in 1967 (it's linked to a Youtube video if you don't know the song). The song lyrics specifically describe the duality and polarity between mind and heart experienced in grief and the loss of a loving relationship. The heart retains the connection through love yet the mind cannot cope with the fact that there is no longer any physical reality to the relationship and connection and this is what gives a sense of something dying deep inside with the ending of the relationship.

But as you can see consciousness and energy, karma and reincarnation are equal but are no longer one and the same thing.

So what you get is death - whether or not the person who has gone is still alive or dead is of little significance in the grand scheme of things because from your perspective the love that is you can no longer find expression through karma and physical experience. They're not there and this leaves you with a connection to other in your memory but no visible unity to the other person. You're left with a ghost, trauma and a deep and profound sense of loss.

It's important here to understand that death can occur on any of the three physical dimensions of the five dimensions of life:

• death of physical matter
• death of sensation (emotions, feelings)
• death of a relationship

So what you've got is a duality or polarity between love and death, which is based on the duality or polarity between consciousness and space, between existence and reality, and ultimately between drama and trauma.

Now if we look at the Creative Law meme we may be inclined to believe that drama and trauma are polar opposites. Trauma is force, the solitary force which exists in the universe, and force creates space and reality through division, separation, chaos, disorder. Trauma is always the starting point of a karmic process or cycle. You see energy, which is the basis of physicality, and karma (memory and action, as in action, reaction and interaction) is constant, it cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change and transform relative to space and consciousness.

Drama is the negation or absence of force. It's connection and unity through consciousness. But see just like trauma, drama is also the starting point of a new karmic process. Let's look at another song quote to see if we can find a way to work this into our understanding.

Okay so we got a lengthy song quote from Alanis Morrisette and her 1990 hit 'You Oughtta Know' which is of course about a woman who's discovered that her partner or lover left her for another woman. It's an example of a situation that we all know about and some of you might have experienced, which is being cheated or rejected by someone while being committed to a long term loving relationship.

You can see that the death here is on the relationship plane and has been brought about by the man's choice (karma) to end the relationship and pursue another loving or romantic relationship with someone new. The man has not died, but the connection and bond through love has been reversed by the karma of his choice and this has resulted in trauma for the woman. If you listen to the song you will pick up on the angry vibe worked into the music to illustrate the anger expressed by the woman which is part of her grieving process.

But see this brings us to the illusion of separateness and the false notion that if you cheat on someone else that you can somehow get away with it and connect to two or more people without creating additional karma or coming up against the consequences of your cheating somewhere further down the line. That is your assumption and your illusion. The fact of the matter is you cannot cheat on someone else without also cheating on yourself. Whatever deception you create in the relationship between you and someone else carries forward to the other relationship, and so you are also cheating on the other person in that relationship. This means that the new relationship is not based on love, or a connection through consciousness. It's only based on the illusion of love.

What you will have created is a physical imitation of love. Sure it's a relationship of sorts, but it's a relationship which is based on attachment, and not a connection through consciousness. So what you've created in reality is a kind of symbiotic relationship which imitates love, but isn't love. You see love is consciousness and is equal to energy and karma. But love cannot ever be energy or karma. So sure you can convince yourself that it is love, and you can say the words "I love you" to your new partner or love interest, but it doesn't change the fact that it's an illusion of love, it's a lie, and so the whole cheating process continues. Not only have you cheated on the other person, you've also cheated on yourself, and you're also cheating the new love interest. No matter how you slice and dice this, your connection to your new love interest will only ever be physical and illusory.

You might be okay with this. Okay. Whatever helps you make it through the night. Chances are you chose to cheat for purely physical reasons, based on desire, for example a desire for sex, the desire for someone who is physically attractive, or for social status or kudos.

That saying it is possible that you were in a physical, illusory relationship which you called love, and you actually came across an actual loving relationship with a genuine connection with someone new. It does happen. But see even then it's still cheating. Please keep in mind that we're all functioning on the basis of Ego and separateness, and if you are dating or seeking to develop a romantic or loving relationship on the basis of Ego, as many people do. This is simply because being in a relationship and starting a family is one of those labels which earns you the status of Widespread Social Respectability. It's these social and cultural values which create the deception and self-deception that many people arte caught up in, and subjected to.

If you've never experienced real love for example been part of a loving family in childhood, then how are you going to be able to tell what real love is? When it comes to developing such intimate loving relationships karma and past memory of our parents relationship plays a huge role in determining what we want, or don't want in a loving relationship.

You see while love is being, and a plane of consciousness within you, you can only seek out and find love on the basis of the level of your conscious awareness. You're not normally consciously aware of the vast amounts of subconscious which really connects you not just to your environment and others, but also to your previous and past incarnations and experiences of life. We come back to the principle of karma and energy being equivalent to consciousness. You can only find a connection to someone else based on your level of conscious awareness and this is always relative to your past memory, experience of life and perspective.

This is why quite often people who have experienced childhood abuse and trauma tend to seek out and enter into abusive relationships later in life. All abuse is rooted in trauma and force, and so manifests as a lack of consciousness, a lack of conscious awareness, and while such people need love the same as everyone else, the love they are capable of giving is insufficient and often they form relationships based on attachment and try to sustain such relationships through force, violence, fear, coercion and control. They create illusory loving relationships which are far more based on physicality and energy.

It's a major human predicament involving not just karma, but second hand karma and additional karmic processes, generally known as old karma, and as such karma can only be cycled through consciousness which resolves karma dramatically, through increased conscious awareness. This is how abuse and such karma cycles throug generations and we end up with what is known as human pathology.

You see all the trauma and deception, whether it's self-deception or deception of others, is part of the process of reincarnation within the duality and polarity of love and death. Life and the karmic process is everything what happens between these two fundamental polarities between consciousness and space, existence and reality, and love and death.

It's like with the Ego, the process of socialization, and attachment to external authority in it's various forms, parents, teachers, and so on. You've got to start somewhere in life. Just as if you don't know you have to learn, to become wise you have to make mistakes and somehow excel at being stupid. You have to believe before you can begin to create truth, and often this involves believing the lies and illusions so you have a basis for truth. Don't ever expect someone else to make truth accessible to you. Nobody can spoon feed truth into your mind. Truth is always relative to perception and perspective, so you've got to be willing to question, and explore, experiment, learn and discover everything for yourself. A good basis for truth is rejecting all belief, and external authority with it, and only going by your own personal experience and things you have personally witnessed.

Truth is consciousness, so truth from your perspective is always relative. Expressing truth through words, language is always an approximation. It's always relative for the exact same principle - consciousness is equivalent to karma and energy, and language and words are physical phenomena.

The exact same principle applies to the equivalent experience of love. You cannot get to love without experiencing a certain amount of trauma - through loneliness, pain, rejection, hurt, fear, anxiety, doubt, deception, self-deception, and even a certain amount of abuse. It's the same principle of reincarnation over and over, to access consciousness and love you have to break down cycles of karma and bring change to the karmic process. The loss of a loving relationship, which most people experience in their teens but some in their 20's, is a particularly harsh lesson which changes most people in some way irreversibly.

It makes no difference whether you were the one being rejected, or you were the one who had to figure out a way of rejecting your first love, and all the doubts, confusion, anxiety and fear, you end up going through the grieving process and you invariably ended up with a massive chunk of karma to work through. But there was a point to this lesson and that was to teach you appreciation, which is the very first foundation of love and the ability to love others. It was also an initial harsh lesson in other basic components for love and relationships which are trust and confidence. See these are all conscious experiences connected to relationship - without appreciation, trust, confidence and integrity - you're not going to be able to connect to others and find love.

You see appreciation is necessary to be able to perceive beauty, and this is where we get to a very important part when it comes to finding and recognizing love.

Now I know that some of you reading this may be affected by loneliness and the belief that you haven't been able to find 'real love', a lasting loving relationship or that you haven't found 'the One'. But see you're only looking at this situation from your conscious perspective and experience of life from this life cycle alone. Okay so what about the other previous incarnations you've lived through? Think in terms of hundreds or even thousands of previous lives. Do you really mean to say that you have lived through entire lifetimes without ever being loved? I don't believe you. Sorry. You've died so many different times and it stands to reason that you have been loved by others so many different times.

Let's scale this down so you can see what I'm getting at here. Assuming that you're an adult, you have had multiple physical bodies. You don't have to physically die to experience reincarnation. All your biological cells reincarnate and replace themselves periodically, your body, your nerves, even your brain. If your memory was purely physical you wouldn't be able to remember back further than the last incarnation of your brain which was probably no more than a few years ago, if not months. But I'm assuming that you can remember all the way back to your early childhood, right?

That part of your childhood you remember is consciousness. Karma, which is memory and thinking in this example, is merely the process and the vehicle for your consciousness awareness and necessary to bring that conscious memory across planes of consciousness into the focus of your conscious attention.

But see the people who one loved you, and who you once loved (and lost) are just like you, in a completely different incarnation. You're not going to be able to recognize each other because your physical forms have changed and your conscious awareness only goes as far back as you can remember, which is usually early childhood back to the age of two. But as I've stated previously there is also your subconscious memory, which is vast and goes way way back.

But see herein lies the issue which many people I feel are not aware of get caught up in the illusions taught to them by culture, specifically mainstream social and cultural attitudes. In becoming 'somebody' in society they tend to look at everything from the perspective of Ego, separateness and beliefs, of personality and Ego, and so get caught up in the illusion that love is something you can do with someone else and love is something you can find in another person. This is where actual appreciation of beauty can very easily become confused with desire. But see desire and appreciation are two different things. Desire is physical and karmic in nature, but appreciation is conscious in nature. Many people confuse the two and so get caught up in separateness.

Now I wrote about desire and separateness at length in my previous (lengthy) blog post The paradox of greed and selfishness and in that post I revived an old analogy of analogue radio frequencies to illustrate the different planes of consciousness and levels of reality we all exist on. This goes back of course to the five dimensions of life. Let's look at that analogy of analogue radio frequencies again.

Planes of consciousness and levels of reality

It is possible to change your plane of consciousness and function on a different level of reality. We all exist on many different planes of consciousness and levels of reality. You can change your energies. It is possible. Years ago I used an analogy of radio frequencies to explain the different levels of reality and planes of consciousness we exist on. See living existence has five dimensions, three of which are physical, two are meta-physical. All physical existence is based on energy, energy cycles, energy vibrations, and energy frequencies. I'm assuming that you understand this and I'm not writing in language that is foreign to you.

This is going to be a difficult part for some of you, because here I'm going to get into the issues of karma and reincarnation. But some of you might get this and be comfortable with what I m writing here. So let's work with a band so you can understand how my analogy works and get the point I'm making here. Let's choose FM (Frequency Modulation) because this is a band most people seem familiar with.

You see on one level you think you are John Doe or Mary Smith living somewhere in London. You think you are a man or a woman. But you have so many different levels of identity. Why do you choose to cling to that particular reality when you have so many different other planes of consciousness or levels of reality to choose from? Probably it's because it's being fed by your senses and your thinking mind. But until you're able to actually sense and 'feel' your way through life, using your 'third eye' and your pineal gland, you're always going to get caught up in identifying yourself only with the most tangible and most basic level of your reality, and your physicality. You know? Two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, hair, body size and shape, and so on.

You see the level of physicality you identify with determines both your energies and the level of reality you experience. You're dealing with physicality, energy and space, because in terms of your conscious perception that's all there is to perceive - physical form and space. This is at say 106.8 FM, right at the left hand edge of the band.

But who I see you as is usually very different to who you think you are. This is where we get into the analogy of the radio frequencies. It's an analogy I feel we can all get and understand, because I'm sure you're familiar with tuning into a radio station by turning the knob and watching the little red plastic indicator move left or right along the band. If you're not ask your oldest relative you know how to use an analogue radio. But here you turn the knob with your mind, your conscious perception and your sensory awareness.

Okay so let's turn the knob and move right along the band, and say let's go as far as 104.3 FM. On this frequency what you see is your physical reality. It's all still physical form and space. You see buildings, trees, people - man, woman, old, young, fat, thin, blonde, dark-haired, bald, eye colour, developed, undeveloped, able-bodied, disabled, and so on. Now if you're preoccupied with this reality in yourself this is how you see everyone else. If you think of yourself as ugly, then you're going to be looking at everyone else and sorting them into two basic categories, physically attractive and beautiful, and physically unattractive and ugly.

If you think you've got a weird shaped nose, then you're going to focus on everybody else's nose. If you think your tits are too big or too small, then you're going to be looking at everyone's tits. If you're bald then you're going to focus on everyone's hair and looking for signs of balding in other people. Much of your energy will be spent clocking other people. If you feel that you don't have the right clothes, all you're going to be noticing is what other people are wearing. This is a particular issue for women who get heavily stigmatized by the media and society in general for the way they look and present themselves.

Then we can give the dial or knob an ever so slight turn and tune into say 103.5 FM and find a similar station. This is the station for people who are lonely, horny, and preoccupied with sex and sexual relationships. They're looking at everyone to determine who is available and who isn't, who is attractive and who isn't, and who turns them on and who doesn't. Shagging FM (to give this station a name) is a very popular station out there among people. You will find it not far from Kink & Fetish FM which is the alternative sister station to Shagging FM. If you've got a Daddy fetish then older men will ping before everyone else, as will anyone wearing leather for anyone with a leather fetish. Autumn is the season for leather fetishists because it's the time when women start wearing boots again, and it's as popular as summer is with foot fetishists. Everyone has their season I guess.

But then we can turn the dial again and get to Money FM at 101.4 FM. This is the station for people who are obsessed with money, wealth, status and position. It's the station for competitive people who see themselves as somewhere in the middle of a societal league table and they're focussing on those who have more than them or, conversely, those who have less than them. These are the people obsessed with status and status symbols, perceived wealth, property values, house prices, earnings, income, how to make money, being an entrepreneur, and so on.

Then we can give the dial a few turns to the other side of the dial to somewhere like Qultura FM at say 88.4 FM. Then you're looking into someone else's eyes and seeing yourself reflected back in another human being, and understand also that when someone looks at you they are actually seeing a reflection of themselves looking back. You understand that we are all reflections of each other, as are the dogs, the cats, the birds and even the trees. We are all the different many facets of existence in unique physical forms reflecting against each other. We are all spirit manifesting as physical forms of life on a living, breathing planet in a deeply mysterious, fascinating universe.

Then you can turn the dial right to the end and the radio vanishes, you vanish, I vanish, everyone else vanishes and what you are left with is vast, empty nothingness which isn't nothing at all but the infinite space of the universe itself and what is known as the Ultimate Void. This is where you go when you die, but see, having once existed in physical form you cannot later not exist, simply because you are not the totality of the universe. Non-existence always goes hand in hand with existence. Sure all those folks who are constantly tuning in to Shagging FM, Money FM and holding onto their physical reality for dear life won't perceive you, because they will be scared to go out of their minds, and so they will miss you. But you will go on and on and on and on and on..

For the sake of continuity, to bring us back to appreciation and love, let's return to that old Jackie De Shannon song, but this time covered by the British band the Searchers, and take this a couple of verses further. Feel free to listen to the whole song or get to know the lyrics.

You see finding real love is, in itself the illusion. Sure, you can find a job, or rather an opportunity for a job, you can find a wallet in the street. But see love is who you are, and it also follows that it's also who someone else is. It's Principle, or conscious perspective, it's consciousness, it's their being and part of who they really are. The same is true of you. Love is who you are, your Principle, your conscious perspective, your Core Being, it's the essence of who you really are.

This is why dating rarely if every works to the degree that you find real love. You're starting from a position of Ego, and therefore from a perspective of separateness. Think of the whole 'swipe left, swipe right' culture of a site such as Tinder. It's separateness and sorting profiles into simplistic attractive and unattractive categories. I'm not saying here that physical attraction isn't a major part of entering a romantic or loving relationship, but this is where you need to stop and think about this. You have people who love you from your family. Are you physically attracted to them in a sexual way? How about your friends - friendship is another variety of love? Do your friends do it for you sexually?

Love just simply is, just as truth just simply is, just as beauty just simply is. None of these things need any participation or action on your part.

It doesn't matter how strong your desire is, desire is nowhere near enough to find what we all understand to be real love. Love is consciousness which comes across as a very powerful sense of connection to someone or something else - in the case of a dog or a cat. It's a definite sense of a connection to someone else which you cannot explain, cannot define, and it's something which completely obliterates your Ego and disrupts your whole karmic process.

So let's navigate a step further through the various illusions of romantic or erotic love with this Gene Pitney classic from 1968. There's a couple of things you need to keep in mind, or if this is all new to you, wrap your mind around. Let's start with the hard truth about love. You cannot seek it and any attempt to do so will take you further away from it and further towards illusions and self-deception. You cannot actually love someone in the sense of doing anything. You can express love through sex and the seeking of unity through physical intimacy (which is where desire comes into this), but to believe you can love someone as an action or express love through some language or activity is buying into the illusion and is a form of self-deception. We covered this some time ago in cheating and infidelity, and it is this notion that you can love someone is the mitigating factor when it comes to cheating. This is because you're seeing love as a choice and confusing it with karma.

When you're confronted with real love and a definite sensation of connection to another person you're taken out of yourself, out of your mind, out of your Ego, out of separateness, out of everything and you're drawn into your conscious being. Love is total attention and as much as we're able to perceive it, total connection. You experienced death in a way on the sensation dimension of living existence - because in the presence of love whatever thoughts, feelings, emotions were running through your mind are gone. No perception of time either. Something very deep and fundamental about you changes when you're confronted with love in the real sense.

There is a powerful, all-encompassing sense of attraction when you're confronted with genuine love. This is what is often referred to as the law of attraction. I'm not going to go into it because the law of attraction has been contorted, twisted, and bastardized by generations of so-called inspirational and motivational 'gurus' or leaders who are confusing consciousness with energy and reincarnation with karma. This gives rise to the widespread bullshit notion of positive thinking, as if you could somehow think your way into wisdom.

Instead I prefer to offer my personal definition of selfishness which is based on Natural Law and the understanding that self IS other and everything is interconnected and interdependent. If you are functioning consciously and genuinely in your self-interest, without engaging in separateness or any kind of division, you are also functioning in the interests of other. You also understand that hurting or harming other you're also hurting and harming yourself. Likewise with deception, as I pointed out earlier, cheating someone else cannot occur without you cheating yourself as well. Looking at selfishness in this way is the basis of integrity which brings us right back to truth and love.

Let's throw in an old Motown hit to help you understand this. The key thing to understand here is that to find love, genuine real love, you just have to live your life in a way you overcome separateness however which way you can. Do you see my notion of selfishness embedded in the lyrics 'it's a game of give and take'? What you don't do, ever ever, is 'chase' love, seek love, look for love, because what you're doing is basing your whole karmic process trying to find a principle or consciousness. You're only going to end up chasing illusion, after illusion, after illusion because you're going by memory and experience, creating and building up new karma but never finding yourself in a set of circumstances where karma ever gets resolved.

It really distorts your perspective on life. You end up in a situation which looks something like this....

Pay close attention to the point I'm making here. Separateness in any form really distorts your perspective relative to your environment and other. I've symbolized this by showing you an inverted image of the Hanged Man, the 12th card from the Major Arcana of the Tarot, plus I've thrown in another song quote from a well known popular Motown hit from 1966.

There's a lot of people out there with this distorted perspective based on separateness. These are people who are attached and clinging to a specific level of reality and plane of consciousness, usually their most immediate and basic level of reality, i.e. the most tangible, and their Ego. They bounce back and forth between the past and the future clinging to various beliefs and assumptions about life, so their perspective on actual reality always escapes them. The common and central assumption is "I am right, everything else is wrong." and so they do not really connect to anyone or anything in any profound or deeper sense, but remain in the superficial and the shallow, applying simplistic solutions to complex problems in a reality they cannot understand or grasp.

With this perspective it's going to be very difficult for someone to connect to someone else through genuine love because they're clinging only to the most immediate, basic levels of reality within Ego and separateness, so all their 'loving' relationships are going to be heavily physical in nature and centred around desire rather than the powerful attraction involved in connecting to someone else through genuine love. This is the other side of the coin where karma or energy is always equal to consciousness. If you're looking to others to fulfill primarily physical needs, wants and desires, sure you will find a partner and maybe even a husband and wife. But you're never going to find that genuine 'true' love simply because you yourself are not open to it.

There's nothing wrong with this, because there's no right and wrong when it comes to love and relationships. You can only be you and your life is what it is based on your individual karma. But see it's a lot different when you're in a genuine loving relationship with a profound connection to another person than if you just want to be in a relationship to escape the misery of loneliness and to convince yourself that you're at least desirable to another human being. I give a lot of relationship advice both online and on a one to one basis in my shamanistic work. I've lost count of the number of people who have described to me their relationship in terms of Ego, matching careers, lifestyles, experiences, sexual needs and whether or not those needs and desires get fulfilled or not, and they usually offer a qualitative judgment on whether the relationship is good, bad, or has its ups and downs.

The problem here is if you're basing any intimate or 'loving' relationship on desires, wants, needs, expectations, or even roles in the relationship you're basing your entire relationship on the karma and the energies out of that karma. You're developing a relationship dependent on time and you're buying into a lot of cultural illusions, not just separateness, but also permanence, continuity and even cause and effect. I'm not denying that there isn't love, as love is being, so somewhere there is a connection and some chemistry, but the basis of the relationship is physical, karmic and all too often conditional.

When you're basing an intimate, loving relationship on primarily physical needs, wants and desires, and karma, you end up with a relationship which requires a lot of effort, a lot of hard work, which doesn't remove much of the insecurity, and which holds you to a particular point in your life. Basing your intimate and loving relationships around Ego structure, identity, social conditioning also has the same effect, particularly when you're using your parents relationship as a pattern or model. It's interesting that we've been talking about gender equality and women's liberation for more than half a century now but I'm still coming across a lot of relationships today in 2023 which would not look out of place in 1953 or even 1923. Unlike the 1960's when many women were still encouraged to get married, settle down, and become housewives and mothers most women today are expected to work. So today you're getting a lot of heterosexual relationships and marriages where the man works, has a career, has some childcare responsibility, but the woman has to go out to work, and handle the majority of the housework and domesticity and also has to deal with the lion's share of childcare responsibilities.

So what say you? In the context of modern culture have women experienced any liberation relative to their mothers and grandmothers? How? In what way?

You see when you're basing your loving, intimate relationships on karma and physicality you're cycling karma over and over and over again. As you do, because there's no permanence or continuity, no matter what you believe, you're drawing additional karma into the relationship, second hand karma, old karma, and despite your best efforts you will never ever be able to hold onto that ideal relationship and your One will not remain the one throughout time. We all change, we all evolve, we all reincarnate, and all it will take is a fresh cycle of karma in one or the other partner to create a conflict or slip in the relationship. This is often a conflict between self and relationship, but it can just as easily be self and other.

See all too often very early in an intimate, loving relationship you hit a sweet spot when you make a decision or a choice that this is the one you want to be with and the relationship you want to be in. Somewhere deep within you you take a 'snapshot' of your partner and relationship of that moment into memory against time, and from that point you develop a set of expectations about your partner and the relationship. But see you change, your partner changes, and with it the relationship changes, and much of the effort and hard work involved in a relationship takes place in trying to constantly bring the whole relationship back to that original sweet spot.

This is where you get a sizeable bulk of all relationship issues, conflicts, disagreements, and issues. Even though you agreed with your partner or lover that 'this is it' and you agreed on the sweet spot, you both did so from a position of Ego and out of separateness, so what it comes down to is your memory of the sweet spot versus your partner's memory of the sweet spot, and which memory wins. This is not a healthy situation to be in relationship wise, because every disagreement, every conflict, all anger diminishes the relationship. See whenever someone wins an argument, the other partner has to lose and give in to maintain the relationship. It creates new karma from a position of trauma, it degrades the relationship, and as time passes all that memory of trauma and karma builds up.

Now if you feel that you're in such a situation and your relationship is falling apart or there's an additional karma build up from the arguments, disagreements, squabbling, petty differences, rowing, The Silent Treatment and so on, you can try marriage counselling or couples therapy and try to work together to create a clean slate and a new sweet spot. Going to therapy is often like getting a cleaner in when you've messed up your house on the psychological plane of consciousness and level of reality. Sure it can give your head a clear out and you can do some mental and emotional de-cluttering, but it's on you to keep things the way you agreed in therapy and to actually try to grow from that point forward.

The Eternal Moment

'Time in a bottle' is a song American singer/songwriter Jim Croce wrote to his wife when he discovered that she was pregnant. He was 29 at the time and had struggled to create five studio albums between 1966 and 1973 while holding down other jobs. His wife Ingrid was also a song writer. In the 1970's Croce former a partnership with song writer and guitarist Mary Muehleisen and his fortunes changed. Jim Croce broke through in 1972. He went touring in July 1972 even visiting London to perform on the Old Grey Whistle Test. While touring in September Croce wrote a letter to his wife telling her that he had decided to quit touring and retire from public life so he could spend more time with her.

However while touring on the night of September 20 1972 on take off the plane that Croce and his fellow band members were travelling in from Louisiana to Texas crashed into a tree on take off at Natichitotes Regional Airport in Natchitotes, Louisiana. All five band members died, including Croce who was aged 30. After she learned of his death, Ingrid Croce received the letter from her husband Jim. 'Time in a Bottle' was a song from a previous album which received airtime on radio after his death and Ingrid decided to make it available as a single in her husband's memory.

But what Jim Croce left us with as his legacy was a song which neatly expresses in words everything what love is really all about.

Love is timeless. It's also pure consciousness and so like space is infinite. Like space it works its way into all aspects of human existence and is distinct from both karma and trauma. But you have to learn how to recognize it and appreciate it. Love is, after all, the other aspect of reincarnation and the one most people don't even consider when they think about such things as reincarnation and life after death. Yes there is life after death, but see, there is also love after death as well. Most of us have those who have loved us who have passed away, are no longer alive, and these are the people we remember and miss the most. They live on in our memories.

When it comes to a connection through love to something or someone else, who you are and what's going on in your life (your karmic process) doesn't matter. The connection is always there, it's always present, and it's always the same. But see each time you connect, and the connection is the same, you and the other person are different. You've changed. They've changed. Circumstances have changed. Only the connection remains the same. This is not just romantic love, but is also the same between parents and children, between brother and sister, grandparents and kids, between friends, between employers and employees, between co workers, between neighbours, because you can find love in just about any human social relationship. This is because love is being just as much as it's connection.

Hopefully now you can see how love transcends different incarnations. There are no mistakes or errors whatsoever in the universe. It looks deep and mysterious and complex from a perspective of the uninitiated, and on some level it is, but once you understand the basic mystical principles you understand that there is a system in existence and it's only the many different manifestations and forms which are mysterious and deep. Just as you cannot live without dying, and you cannot die without living, you cannot either live or die without experiencing love.

It is for this reason we associate love with the Eternal Moment. Throughout the different karmic cycles and processes going on, love is always the same, just like truth, just like beauty, just like consciousness itself.

Being in love

This is going to sound simplistic but it needs to be said. To experience love you need to be love. What I'm giving you here is a simple mystical principle. Being and relationship are inseparable. Without being there is no relationship. Without relationship there is no being. Love is all about being at the deepest and most fundamental level of your existence.

Now I want to be very very clear here so there are no misunderstandings. I'm not referring to positive thinking or even wishful thinking, and I'm not referring to believing, be it religion, philosophy, because that will trap you in form and bind you to time, enslaving you. What I'm referring to, explicitly, is subverting your entire karmic process towards a fully conscious lifestyle as much as is humanly possible for you based on love, truth, beauty and appreciation. I'm referring to a process and this is a meta-physical, spiritual, existential process.

You see it's all consciousness at the end of the day, whether we call it love, truth or beauty. Think about it. All these terms are interchangeable and one and the same thing. If you want to go through such experiences then you need to at the very least appreciate them. I recognize the fact that I'm telling you stuff you may already know, but not because I'm assuming you don't, but purely for reasons of affirmation.

There's a slight difference between separateness and freedom, just as there is a nuanced difference between individualism and individuation. There are subtle differences between actual reality and conceptual reality. I'm writing here about our social and cultural values which are and should be familiar to all of us. But there is a big difference between just playing along on the basis of your Ego and belief systems and actually being 'real' and subversive in society, i.e. talking your talk, walking your walk, and actually living your truth.

You've been born into a life with a certain karmic process and specific factors to resolve. Your karma is made up both of the experiences you've gone through and the experiences you feel you need to go through. Your past experiences and karma are all recorded into memory and consciousness, on its very many planes and levels of reality.

But see you've also been put through a process of socialization. This is a continuous process because you're surrounded by other people constantly telling you who and what you are, what to think, what to believe, how you should behave, and so on and so forth. Parents, teachers, grandparents, other relatives, friends, cultural icons, politicians, businesses, psychologists, doctors, therapists, social media influencers, the list goes on and on and on and on. Much of what conceptual and social reality is all about is illusory, it's past truth, it's conceptual, and much of it is tradition and style over substance.

This is one such illusion which is widespread and so commonplace in our social and cultural values. What you need to understand here is that all social and cultural values are an approximation at best of the reality we all experience. All truth is relative. There is no absolute truth that a human being is capable of perceiving. Subversion is necessary for any spiritual process or journey and liberation from Ego and belief. What subversion is all about is the outward expression of love, of truth and of beauty from an individual conscious perspective. I wrote a blog post earlier this year on 'Fundamental subversion' on the basis of American broadcaster and activist Ray Hill. Here I want to finish up with two very important mystical principles to 'complete the circle' in this blog post.

The Sacred Masculine Principle

The Sacred Masculine Principle, which is all about acceptance, appreciation and the recognition of truth, beauty and love, is part of the fundamental basis of subversion and any spiritual process or journey. It's part of Six in numerology, symbolized by The Lovers in the Tarot (Major Arcana) and also the astrological sign of Virgo, which in turn is associated with the planet Mercury.

What the Sacred Masculine Principle is all about, in reality, is sacrifice and letting go. You see Self and other are one and the same, because you cannot be without being in relationship and relative to everything else. It does not matter what relationship you are in and what you're thinking about, or where your position is in that relationship, Self is always equal to other. In any relationship you cannot have more than one perspective. You cannot be more than one human being. So it follows you cannot have more than one Ego.

How this normally plays out in our social and cultural reality is that, say to enter into new romantic relationship (as an example), you have to sacrifice part of who you are in Ego terms to be a part of that relationship. You cannot enter into a romantic relationship with another person and expect both your identity and lifestyle to remain the same. Something's got to give. Likewise when you become involved in a new organization, say through employment, you have to sacrifice part of who you are and your lifestyle to become relative to that organization. Likewise in business, if you want to be your own boss, you have to make sacrifices to be relative to your clients, customers and whoever else you're dealing with.

It's important also to understand that the Sacred Masculine Principle applies to everyone and everything. Your actual sex and gender identity has got nothing to do with this. Let's not confuse karma and phyicality with consciousness and the meta-physical.

This is where we get to appreciation. See truth, love and beauty are all relative to individual perspective and individual perception. Everything and everyone is beautiful in this world, and every single human being out there - when you toss aside the artificial societal beauty standards - is beautiful in some way. But all too often many of us are masking it behind our Egos and are so caught up in our struggles for illusory social, economic and political power, that we are in basic denial of beauty both within ourselves and other people. We constantly judge ourselves and others when we lack any basis for judgment and so we abuse the powers of discrimination we are born with.

All too often the Sacred Masculine Principle gets drowned out by Ego, separateness and moral reasoning. We're so busy being caught up in the dualities and polarities of life, of "I am right and you are wrong", of making assumptions, assuming, labelling, judging, telling other people to shut up, to piss off, to fuck off, to stay away, highlighting their issues and mistakes, and playing games of praise and blame, fault finding and finger pointing, that this goes as far as abusing our sensory perception.

But the Sacred Masculine Principle is still there. It still exists, whether you believe it or not. Being and relationship are one and the same. To the degree you are judging others, you are also judging yourself. To the degree you are labelling and defining others, you are also labelling and defining yourself. Throughout this whole process of separateness and not being consciously aware of the implications of relationship and how it affects your being and perception, you are building up more and more karma and clinging to it so that, invariably it repeats itself over and over and over again reducing your perspective and ability to perceive consciousness. Your mind gets narrower and smaller and truth gets lost together with love and beauty in all the illusions you cling to.

The Sacred Feminine Principle

The Sacred Feminine Principle is essentially about creativity, empathy, connection, healing, nurturing, and the outward expression of love, truth and beauty. This is Seven, symbolized by The Chariot in the Tarot, by the astrological sign of Libra and it's associated planet Venus. It shouldn't need too much explanation from me how Venus symbolizes love and beauty, but it also symbolizes femininity and maternity, which is why its symbol features on a heart shaped tablet lying at the feet of The Empress, another card from the Major Arcana of the Tarot.

The physical world is impermanent, transient and illusory. We see this both in our environment and also within ourselves. Everything is falling apart, everything is decaying, degrading, dying, collapsing, breaking up. We are part of the same process. We grow and mature to a certain point in life, and then the growth stops and we start to experience the other downward spiral of our life cycles. We age, we grow older, and over the years various bits of us stop working properly and start falling apart. If you're still clinging to your Ego, separateness, and belief systems try to find a constant in your physical being, this is where life gets progressively harder and more of a struggle, until that point where you're forced to let go and slip into a state of decline.

But see this is how life is. This is how it's meant to be. You can fight it all you like, as many people do, clinging and holding on to stuff. But you cannot win this fight (nobody can) and all you're going to end up with is clinging to the past and getting caught up in the illusions. The past can never become reality again, and so it follows that if you're basing your perception of reality on your past, your future is never going to materialize or 'come true' either. Your only reality is death and once that happens, you will not leave a trace behind and you will eventually be forgotten. Nothing. Empty space.

Now if you can wrap your mind around that reality, embrace it, deal with it, and accept it, then you're in a position to understand the Sacred Feminine Principle and what it's all about. The starting point for the Sacred Feminine Principle is always trauma. Love and death are polar opposites and both define the edges of human existence. You have - beyond your Ego and your belief and thinking who you are - a sharp edge to your humanity and a soft edge to your humanity.

• The sharp edge of your humanity is all that what you cannot bear to contemplate let alone go through because it suggests suffering on a level you cannot deal with. This is symbolized by the concept of hell.
• The soft edge of your humanity is all that you wish for, desire, wish to experience, what defines your deepest interests, fascinations, passions, and within this your concepts of pleasure, enjoyment, fun and fulfillment. This is symbolized by the concept of heaven.

This is why The Chariot card from the Tarot depicts a Roman chariot being pulled by two sphinxes symbolizing polarity and duality, one black symbolizing trauma and suffering, and the other white symbolizing drama, connection and empathy. Your karmic process, or life experience, is going to be defined by this duality and polarity. I'm sure you've experienced trauma and suffering, you have your struggles, your difficulties, your issues and your emotional baggage. But I'm equally sure that you've experienced high points in our life, successes, happiness, bliss, joy, pleasure, love, kindness, empathy, compassion, and so on and so forth.

But why a chariot? What has motion got to do with empathy, creativity and love? There's another polarity here. What I'm referring to is the polarity between suffering and motion. One example is when you are sitting and become uncomfortable. You move and the discomfort goes away. You do the same thing in bed at night. If you're uncomfortable lying on one side, you turn over onto your other side. The same polarity and principle applies to the other dimensions of life. Someone hurts you you move away and move on. Each time you find yourself suffering due to some attachment you let go and change your perspective and environment. Consider that in making yourself a moving target you become harder to hit.

You see just like a chariot is a vehicle, then so too is your physical body and the karmic process of your life. This is why your Ego and all that separateness and belief systems and clinging to them is so inappropriate. They all amount to an image and a vehicle for the expression of your real self, your consciousness and love, to others in a physical environment so as to connect and find unity with others. But see if you're a musician, say you want to play a guitar, then you need music and songs, actual content to share with others. You don't get up on stage with a guitar and just randomly pluck at strings to make noise. If you learn to play the guitar then you start out by learning to play tunes by other people. But once you've mastered the techniques, chords and understand how to play the guitar, you start creating and playing your own music.

It's the exact same thing with your Ego and physical identity. It's not your whole Self and your whole being. It's an instrument through which you express yourself. You understand that Jimi Hendrix is not a guitar, and a guitar is not Jimi Hendrix. But see you also understand that Jimi Hendrix didn't become famous by playing other people's music and songs. What made Jimi Hendrix famous was Jimi Hendrix playing different songs as Jimi Hendrix. That's what connected him to people. Similarly your Ego is your vehicle to express yourself and the meta-physical aspects of your being - your real Self - to others. Your beliefs, intellect, intelligence, and ideologies are nowhere near enough to connect you to other people. What connects you to other people is your individual style, your experience, your story, your creativity and your empathy.

This brings me to my final point to wrap all this up. Mindfulness is a necessity for any spiritual process and journey. Yet so much of the mindfulness industry is caught up on the notion to get rid of the Ego to free up the mind. What is often overlooked is the fact that the human heart is just as capable of developing conscious awareness as the human mind. In fact the heart is better connected to your environment than anything else, because it's your connection to the universe and your heartbeat is the basis of your time perception. This means you don't need to connect to anyone or anything, because you are already connected. You don't need to look for love, because you are already love and so too is everyone else. You just need to wake up to this reality and get your headspace out of your Ego, separateness and all the other crap you allow to flow through your mind.