The Passionate Mind Revisited by Joel Kramer

Author:Joel Kramer [Kramer, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-814-9
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

COMMENTARY: Love and Care

Unlike earlier chapters with a more inward focus, this discussion about love moves into the social arena, where relationships play out the drama of what it is to be a human social animal. Humans share with other social mammals an ancient and sophisticated limbic brain with extraordinary capacities for emotional sensitivity and attunement—many yet undeveloped and unrecognized. Our exceptionality lies in being a thinking mammal whose sociability is greatly influenced by ideas and values. This chapter on love and intimacy contains revealing examples of how beliefs and values on core issues within different worldviews have implications and consequences that partly determine personal and social relations.

Traditional spiritual worldviews, both monotheistic and Eastern ones, create a destructive polarity between the spiritual and the mundane—which is tellingly often called the “profane”—and then trivialize any concern that they define as “non-spiritual.” Unity worldviews, though professing to be non-dual, have a hidden duality between the spiritual and mundane, in which the “spiritual” is considered “more real” and of course superior, with no acknowledged interface between the two supposedly separate spheres.

In contrast, in The Passionate Mind Revisited the One and the Many, merging and individuation, unity and multiplicity (separation), are viewed as dialectically embedded in each other, with neither being more “real” nor valuable than the other, as they are not totally separate at all. Neither side of the apparent duality has ontological priority. (Ontology is the study of “being,” or more simply “What, if anything, is really real?”) From these disparities in worldviews, many differences flow—including the nature of love and loving, and what distinguishes loving from caring. As this chapter makes clear, our perspective acknowledges the reality and value of self, ego, time, expectations, attachment, desire, fear, demands, control, boundaries, measuring, self-protection, and other issues that come up between two or more selves living and loving together through time.

To say that unity worldviews do not effectively address the plurality of diverse, individuated selves or relationships between and among them—given that many consider the self and ego illusory—is an understatement. Because love is relational, involving more than one person, even though unity worldviews champion ideals of unity and love that sound good, in actuality they do not encompass the reality of the self or selves, nor the complex issues involved in separate selves connecting. Instead the unrealistic, dysfunctional guidelines put forth by a unity worldview mislead people, causing unnecessary havoc in an arena that in the modern world has become complex and potentially problematic in and of itself.

Worldviews are the source of values. Worldviews that negate the reality of the self, boundaries, separation, individuation, the importance of time, and thus change and evolution, cannot construct viable ideals or guidelines for relationships between two or more people, let alone for evolving, passionate ones. Unity worldviews that negate the value of attachment and desire claim to offer better values and a loftier concept of love—and therein lies the problem. They are too “lofty,” supposedly on a higher, spiritual plane, above the crass, ego-involved, self-centered dramas that occupy so much of this imperfect world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.