I don't know. What is the difference between 'love' and 'pure love'? When people fall in love, they tend to be, for a while, enslaved by that feeling because ego becomes subdued. When one loves, though, there is a flow from subject to the perceived object, but I am not clear on what 'purity' means here. I do not see how loving can enslave anything. Obsession can enslave its object. But loving enslaves the subject that perceives the object. Can one love something completely abstract, like pure consciousness? There does not seem to be anything there for flow to occur.
God so loved the world he killed his kid. Now on a human level that is just murder. People are always killing the object of their love, if that focus on the object is not returned by the object. One could take this metaphorically and say something like the universe itself is so in love with itself that it has provided a trap door into which an individual falls and dies becoming in their own awareness the universe itself. That trap door is whatever spiritual path one has chosen, provided it accomplishes that end. Can pure being, which has no definition be considered love? For love to occur some emptiness must exist to be filled, so it seems to me love is not a thing or a state but a process of becoming and is not therefore 'pure' in any sense. But as I do not know the answer to this I can take suggestions. I have never been into bhakti , it is totally unnatural for me, so love of guru or some supposed sacred something would never appeal and never has appealed to me. However one always experiences a flow in the direction of what one likes, so devotion is really a part of anything that appeals to one, in greater or lesser degree, so devotion is not really a path, it is what allows one to stay on whatever path is their path. To my mind, teachers that hawk devotion as a path are trying to package obedience to their wishes thwarting the natural process of flow. Students do admire and sometimes love their teachers, and as long as the teacher does not artificially try to foster that and just gives the students what they need to succeed, I think that is fine. The goal is not to venerate the teacher but to live, understand, and even improve upon what the teacher knows. This tends not to happen in religion, where the situation devolves into focusing on the character of the teacher rather than on what teacher wanted them to know. Does god love? If god is defined as wholeness, then god is complete and has no need of anything, being everything, and why would that be love? There is YHWH in the Torah, who in human terms could hardly be called loving. We throw people in prison today, for doing what YHWH does in the Bible. YHWH in the Bible is not an abstract being, but rather just a magnification of very human characteristics, rather unsavoury ones at that. But as mankind evolves there seems to be a tendency to more abstract conceptions of what people use the word 'god' for, though it does not seem to have progressed all that much. You find very abstract conceptions of Zeus in some of the pre-Socratic philosophers, based on what survives of their work, and those that followed them in later centuries. While you have that almost daemon-like entity in the Torah, you also have more abstract versions of god in Cabbalah, Jewish esoteric interpretations of scripture, which are much more in line with what people who seek enlightenment are engaged in. You said, "Like that, God, or we can call it Life, wants to give us all of itself", but in the end, we are all of it, and have always been, so is that love? Maybe it just depends on how you parse the situation. If you love yourself, there being no other, is that love or vanity? ================== ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: Xeno, is it even possible to enslave out of pure Love? I believe that it is and that it is one of the great paradoxes of life. Like the way a parent will set strong boundaries to protect their child. Like that, God, or we can call it Life, wants to give us all of itself. It will put us through hell in order to do this. But that is an expression of its great love for us. When we see this and stop fighting the river, then the journey of non ending coupling of us and Life is smoother if not ecstatic. On Sunday, October 20, 2013 11:37 AM, "anartaxius@..." <anartaxius@...> wrote: Share wrote: 'OTOH maybe God does want to enslave us, but only out of pure Love.' Were I this god, I would love this; you have succumbed to the propaganda of a tyrant. Thomas Jefferson, an admirer of Jesus but not of much else in the Christian Bible wrote of this god of the Torah (as the Christians inherited the scriptures of the Jews) in rather disparaging terms: 'There are, I acknowledge, passages not free from objection, which we may, with probability, ascribe to Jesus himself; but claiming indulgence from the circumstances under which he acted. His object was the reformation of some articles in the religion of the Jews, as taught by Moses. That sect had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific* character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust. Jesus, taking for his type the best qualities of the human head and heart, wisdom, justice, goodness, and adding to them power, ascribed all of these, but in infinite perfection, to the Supreme Being, and formed him really worthy of their adoration. Moses had either not believed in a future state of existence, or had not thought it essential to be explicitly taught to his people. Jesus inculcated that doctrine with emphasis and precision. Moses had bound the Jews to many idle ceremonies, mummeries and observances, of no effect towards producing the social utilities which constitute the essence of virtue; Jesus exposed their futility and insignificance.' *meaning terror-ific - 'terrifying' in more modern language This passage (from which the part I bolded is often quoted out of context or modified) is from a letter Jefferson wrote to one William Short in 1820. ( http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_jesus.html http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_jesus.html ) One might accuse Jefferson of racism on the basis of the content of this letter. Jefferson was referring to the character of god in the 'Old Testament', the Torah etc. which are a part of the Christian scriptures. Jefferson himself made a version of the Bible where he cut out all the tyrannical passages and mythology including the entire Old Testament, and most of the New. He admired Jesus to the extent the character of Jesus can be extracted from these writings, but he admired not much else in the Bible. http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/62/The_Jefferson_Bible_The_Life__Morals_of_Jesus_of_Nazareth_1.html http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/62/The_Jefferson_Bible_The_Life__Morals_of_Jesus_of_Nazareth_1.html Can you imagine an American President speaking like this today?
