Bob Johnston's Post

Hi John ~
Thank you for your interesting response to my post. I have divided up your response into sections of quotations which makes it easier for me to respond in turn. I hope that's okay with you.

You wrote: When considering love, peace, happiness or other states, the prevailing image is that these somehow exclude anger, hatred, conflict and we divide things into what we define as positive and negative. This makes peace and love some kind of bland state separate from other states that we know exist that we do not classify as positive. Is love all inclusive?

My response: I have had those thoughts, too. However, I've also experienced a more dynamic kind of love. When envisioning love, peace, happiness or other related states I see a continuum running all the way from the bland state you mentioned through a more dynamic, invigorating and exciting state, for example, the kind of mutual dynamic erotic love that is felt during sexual intercourse, also a kind of love exhibited in a friendly competitive game of any kind, such as tennis, baseball, and yes even football (a kind of martial art?) if played within the rules and concern for the health and welfare of the opposing players.

You wrote: Can there really be love if it is not all inclusive?

My response: Hmmmm . . . great question. If you mean by "all inclusive" all opposites, all dualities, everything healthful and unhealthful, everything temporal and transtemporal I have to answer 'I don't know' because my conscious awareness is limited to what I am able to experience here on planet Earth. I am not yet able to experience what may be infinite except in a relatively limited way . . .

You wrote: Being hurt is mentioned in the comment. That is very interesting. I have practiced martial arts for long and hard enough to have experiences such as described by Dr. Pai, the founder of Pai Lum Kung Fu. There comes a point where the "opponents" punches, kicks or other "attacks" are no longer attacks but only motions in the air. There is no threat. The experience is peace in the midst of what appears to be conflict.

My response: My wife Millis and I have practiced Tai Chi, a form of the martial arts, for about eight years. While probably not on the sophisticated level of Pai Lum Kung Fu, we have had glimpses here and there similar in some ways to what you describe. I'm also reminded, getting back to football, former star quarterback for the San Francisco Forty-Niners John Brody has described experiences in games when for him time stood still, like time seemed to have evaporated into the eternal NOW . . . when he stepped up into the pocket to pass, even with huge fast defensive linemen barreling in on him he felt an ineffable calm, clarity and peace . . . like he had all 'the time he needed' to get his pass off to a receiver . . . he seemed to experience what you described as "peace in the midst of conflict."

You wrote: What would it be like for our planet to be visited by a very loving alien race. A race so advanced that they could not be harmed by us in any way. Could we grow to accept that and be secure?

My response: Interesting hypothetical question. Reminds me of the experiences of people (approximately 7,000 as last reported) who have been hypnotically regressed by Dr. Michael Newton into their life between biological lives, respectively. They report a transtemporal (my word) life similar to your loving alien race . . . so advanced that no one could not be harmed in any way. So if their memories are valid and reliable loving experiences analogous to your alien group are possible in at least that timeless realm of life between mortal lives. Whether it is realistically possible in our temporal realm, I suggest all we can do is hypothesize about its possibility and experiment with trying to make it happen.

You wrote: The title "True Love" is also very interesting. It implies there is the opposite "Untrue Love". Is "Untrue Love" love at all?

My response: Untrue love to me is an inauthentic intention and behavior masquerading as love. Put another way, untrue love is an overture which may verbalize itself as loving on the surface but which lacks congruence with an individual's behavior. It's reminiscent of the old saying (paraphrased), "What you are doing speaks so loud I can't hear emotionally or physiologically what you're saying." To illustrate, my wife and I know a man who closes all his extremely psychologically abusive emails with "I love you." Actually, in his way he is naively trying to manipulate us into forgiving a very large debt toward which he hasn't repaid one red cent for over a decade. If that's love, I suppose one could say it's love for his pocketbook at the expense of ours.

John, I hope I've responded in a way useful to you. I'm amenable to carrying this conversation further into greater depth if you want.

Best wishes,

Bob

Bob,

Thanks for your well thought out responses. This is evolving into a great dialogue. One I hope we continue and others may be drawn into participating as well. My key word is dialogue, listening, considering and building on our life views, multiple lives and other life views and tapping into other consciousness. I understand what you mean by continuum. Perhaps, we can tune in to other dimensions that could take the concepts to areas unexplored. How about love in the 5th or 6th dimension. There is a good site on dimensions at http://www.tenthdimension.com I like questioning and exploring. Words like love are so often used without consciousness. I wrote a blog last week on love as Angela had suggested we have a look at love this month. It is on the next page in Declare entitled Being in Love or Love Being in Me. If we see what we know and we want to see love, then we need to know love.

John

John, I have meditated extensively on all both of us have written to date on this subject plus www.tenthdimension.com and I would like to know if you are interested in reading (if you haven't already done so) my blogs titled "An Integral Noetic Allegory About Our Source and Mission" on page 4 and "An Integral Noetic Ode to Our Source (an alternative to Psalm 139:1-18) on page 3. Those two pieces comprise my overall frame-of-reference, prerequisite as I see it for further dialogue on this subject. What say? Bob

Hi Bob,

I went and read your blogs. Thanks for being generous and open about your life. If I read them correctly, you had a pretty intense Christian family life growing up. My mother was from Prague. My grandmother's family were prominent jewish people in Prague and most all died in concentration camps. My mother's father was not Jewish and my grandmother and grandfather knowing well the systematic nature of the third reich, made sure my mother and uncle were baptized Catholic. It would at least delay their arrest. It worked and they lived as did my grandparents. My father is from Florida. He was a soldier in WWII and became an attorney. My mother's family fled Prague in 1948. My mother was only 17 when she and my father married. I was born a year later. My father was Southern Christian and later became a fundalmentalist Baptist. My parents divorced when I was 9. I grew up with my Mother. I do not consider myself religous, I do live and practice my spirituality at every momemt. I love the mysticism of life, before the spirituality becomes religion.

On our love dialogue. My feeling is we do not have enough words and concepts for the state we refer to as love. Eskimos have 12 words for snow. Some African tribesman have more than 50 terms for what we would say is a brown cow. We often describe things as a spectrum which is far more descriptive than a point. A spectrum is 2 dimensional, a point 1 dimensional. This is relatively easy for a mind thinking in 3 dimensions to handle. This is why I brought the topic of expanding to more dimensions and seeing if that would help us gain some insight in what we refer to as Love. Even Baskin Robbins has at least 32 flavors of ice cream. We do explore Love in many aspects, however for something so very important in human exsistence, more words for more flavors would be helpful.

John

Thank you, John, for the brief on your religious/spiritual background. We do indeed have some similarities in that regard. And I too enjoy the "mystical spiritual" in contrast to organized religion.

How would you feel about first exploring the various meanings of love in the three (although you may have noted I use 4-D) dimensions before launching into the farther dimensions? By that I mean there may be something to be gained by first exploring the definitions of love as used in the various world cultures, religions, philosophies, sciences, etc. I note that Wikipedia offers some succinct (I hope reliable) information about how love is perceived/experienced in those and other contexts. All I did was type "love" in the Search box and up came all kinds of interesting data. What say?

Best,

Bob

Research on what is currently documented is definitely in the plan. I was thinking last night about the similarities of human understanding and use of the concepts, principles and mysteries of love, consciousness and gravity. These are constantly with us. Even as I write this morning, I find the words don't flow. Normally, thoughts come as fast as I can type them, ideas flow, not here. I have a belief that solving some of the mysteries of these 3 areas will be a large evolutionary jump for humans. Everyone experiences love, consciousness and gravity. We have touched on some effects these have, but I don't think we (in the large human context) know what they are or even how to approach them.

I was thinking about something we use today that would be a mystery to someone living a thousand years or more ago. A simple thing is electricity. We measure it in volts, amperage whether it is alternating current or direct current. We use it everyehwere we look in our current civilization. I am 55 and have always lived with electricity, yet my gradparents and great grandparents did not and that was not that long ago. Our civilization would look very different without our gaining some understanding of electricity.

In looking at love, consciousness and gravity what I see is the extension of how things are viewed and seeing if we can apply that to these concepts. As an example, most people are familiar with the word energy. In my own mind, I feel the struggle to fit my experiences into what would be to me familiar patterns. I consciously (there, I used the word), coax my mind to play with and be comfortable with unfamiliar patterns, to see things in an unfamiliar way. This is part of stretching or leaping to another dimension. To make the dimension vision more tolerable maybe just leap from a 2 dimensional view to a 3 dimensional view. Thinking in 3 dimensions is difficult enough.

Maybe, finding the way to see love would open up consciousness to a new way of thinking that would give us some grasp of gravity. We do not, to my knowledge, have any technology to measure love, nor terminolgy to describe the measurement. Do we use electricity as a starting point and see if love has voltage, amperaqe or other characterisitcs? Do we not use a scientific paradigm at all? Do we need some new as yet unknown paradigm of thought to give us the revelation and open the channels of knowledge that will bring in a world as different from our current world as ours is technologically from the world a thousand years ago?

I don't know what question to ask. I do know that to get an unfamilar answer will take asking an unfamiliar question. I do believe that discovering a new consciousness of love will open the doors to a new world, perhaps one where love, consciousness and gravity are as usable to future people as electricity is to us.

As you can see I am grappling with ideas to push my consciousness out of the familiar.

Best, with gratitude
John

Hi John ~

Thank you for your response dated February 23rd. At the risk of being redundant in an effort to respond to each of your paragraphs in context I have repeated what you wrote and tried to rejoin in an intelligible but brief manner (not easy for me to do). Each of the issues you raised deserve much greater and indepth treatment than I have given.

You wrote: Research on what is currently documented is definitely in the plan. I was thinking last night about the similarities of human understanding and use of the concepts, principles and mysteries of love, consciousness and gravity. These are constantly with us. Even as I write this morning, I find the words don't flow. Normally, thoughts come as fast as I can type them, ideas flow, not here. I have a belief that solving some of the mysteries of these 3 areas will be a large evolutionary jump for humans. Everyone experiences love, consciousness and gravity. We have touched on some effects these have, but I don't think we (in the large human context) know what they are or even how to approach them.

My response: Right, wrong or indifferent, my approach to the 'indefinables' has been to start with what we know from the integral human sciences, such as the positron emission tomography scan (PET-scan) studies in psychoneuroimmunology (cited in my original blog) and what they show about the relationship between thoughts, feelings of love and the biochemical emittance of healing endorphins and dopamine in our bodies. I add to that the studies cited by biochemist Barry Sears which show a high positive correlation between low levels of serotonin and felonious behavior in criminals and, conversely, higher levels of serotonin and more peaceful caring behavior. Those studies provide a high degree of probable (disconcerting as it may be, as you know science usually speaks in 'probabilities' rather than 'absolutes') valid and reliable truth applicable to individual attitudes and social relationships. Once we move beyond those highly probable verities, however, things become far less clear. My approach in this less clear area is to consciously formulate 'working hypotheses or assumptions' which seem consistent with what we know to be probably true evidenced by valid and reliable evidence derived from studies in the integral natural sciences. I use my working assumptions as experimental hypotheses to test in the laboratory of my everyday living. When new evidence supporting a change in my assumptions becomes available I try to make the necessary adjustments and move on.

You wrote: I was thinking about something we use today that would be a mystery to someone living a thousand years or more ago. A simple thing is electricity. We measure it in volts, amperage whether it is alternating current or direct current. We use it everywhere we look in our current civilization. I am 55 and have always lived with electricity, yet my grandparents and great grandparents did not and that was not that long ago. Our civilization would look very different without our gaining some understanding of electricity.

My response: What you wrote checks generally with my experience.

You wrote: In looking at love, consciousness and gravity what I see is the extension of how things are viewed and seeing if we can apply that to these concepts. As an example, most people are familiar with the word energy. In my own mind, I feel the struggle to fit my experiences into what would be to me familiar patterns. I consciously (there, I used the word), coax my mind to play with and be comfortable with unfamiliar patterns, to see things in an unfamiliar way. This is part of stretching or leaping to another dimension. To make the dimension vision more tolerable maybe just leap from a 2 dimensional view to a 3 dimensional view. Thinking in 3 dimensions is difficult enough.

My response: Yeh, I've also experienced this struggle you describe. My way through it is to add electromagnetic energy to your triad of love, consciousness and gravity. As you may recall from Physics 101 four basic laws have been identified: gravitation, strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetics. The astrophysicists with whom I have associated over the years told me that electromagnetic energy pervades the entire known universe (as far as the Hubble telescope can currently see), and speculatively speaking beyond that, omniverse (multiverse). While I agree with you and research psychologists Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek at the University of Arizona that gravitation is wonderful evidence of the love of our Source for us. . . and there are numerous additional examples one could give e.g. existence of an omnipresent electromagnetic energy field pervading the known omniverse which provides a physical frame-of-reference for what some call the 'interconnecting web of all existence.' It appears our respective brainwaves -- beta, alpha, theta and delta -- provide both the sensory and parasensory equipment to connect and communicate with each other for health or for ill. That seems to be another possible manifestation of our Source's love for all of its constituents . . . yet, I wonder how the violence and killing that goes on up and down the food chain can be congruent with any concept and experience of universal love.

You wrote; Maybe, finding the way to see love would open up consciousness to a new way of thinking that would give us some grasp of gravity. We do not, to my knowledge, have any technology to measure love, nor terminolgy to describe the measurement. Do we use electricity as a starting point and see if love has voltage, amperaqe or other characterisitcs? Do we not use a scientific paradigm at all? Do we need some new as yet unknown paradigm of thought to give us the revelation and open the channels of knowledge that will bring in a world as different from our current world as ours is technologically from the world a thousand years ago?

My response: See my brief discussions above relative to the PET-scan studies, an all-permeating electromagnetic field and brainwaves.

You wrote: I don't know what question to ask. I do know that to get an unfamilar answer will take asking an unfamiliar question. I do believe that discovering a new consciousness of love will open the doors to a new world, perhaps one where love, consciousness and gravity are as usable to future people as electricity is to us.

My response: Perhaps there isn't just one question to ask, but many to 'play' with (as you mentioned earlier). I like the idea of playing with ideas, concepts and memories of experiences because in play I relax and just let my muse wander creatively hither and yon to provide a variety of new options.

You wrote: As you can see I am grappling with ideas to push my consciousness out of the familiar.

My response: Me too.

Thank you, John, for your stimulating questions . . .

Warmly,

Bob Johnston