Reality can be understood like this: a point-counterpoint dynamic. Thank Jakob von Uexkull for this pithy concept
If we now proceed farther, we enter environments in which very effective phenomena appear, visible, however, only to the subject. These phenomena
are not bound to experience, or, at most, to a singular experience. We call such environments magical...Such experiences are frequently encountered by
traveling researchers in the case of primitive peoples. It is said of primitives that they live in a magical world in which fantastic phenomena blend
with the sensually given things of their world. Whoever looks closer, however, will find the same magical formations in the environment of cultivated
Europeans. – Jakob von Uexkull, A Foray into the Worlds of Man and Animal
But lets add the concept of "tensional integrity", or 'tensegrity', to describe how two points relate:
Lets call point, a 'transcendental sign', and a counterpoint, a "dynamical object". The sign is love; the objects are the objects of the material
world around us - subparticles to atoms to rocks to suns, planets, animals etc. Let's get a diagram for this:
Ok? The Big bang followed upon a cosmic inflation process - virtually the same as the kabbalistic "tzimtzum', or contraction. Paradoxically, a space
is created, and the space itself induces an asymmetry. It creates the order of Time - a temporality which, from the perspective of the forces which
make up the cosmos, have this temporal ordering:
Gravity comes first when the subatomic plasma states of the early universe create some areas with more than others; then the strong force emerges when
matter is crunched together, causing protons and neutrons to merge; then the weak force comes - some neutrinos decided to split apart from their
mirror - as Frank Close notes, the neutrino is the material instantiation of "lucifer". But as noted above, space is the more primary physical cause
of asymmetry. Nevertheless, neutrinos squeeze out of the sun-forming process and spread far and wide throughout the cosmos. Next, electromagnetism
comes, and its basically here that chemistry begins and the universe (along with gravity) takes on a specific sort of form.
Fast forward some 13.77 billion years and we arrive at Earth, in the milky way galaxy (a spiral one), revolving around a sun about half way between
the radioactive inner and cold and barren outer arms. It is here that social organisms evolve, and love emerges. Love is the quintessence, the fifth
force of nature, built upon and out of the previous forces in the universes temporal architecture. Love is paradoxically like gravity: it is
attractive; and yet, like gravity, love - or rebuffed love - can have a profoundly repulsive effect: it is theorized that dark energy is the repulsive
effect of gravity. Weird eh?
So quite simply, love is the experience of experiencing yourself being positively known by another. There are two sides here: the active side looks
like this:
and the passive side like this:
Your experience is
literally the expression of physical laws which enforce the phenomenological state in question. When someone loves you, we
can conceptualize the interaction as having this form:
Someone acts in a way - in body language, facial expression, eye gaze or vocal tone, which conveys the feeling and intent their having as they act.
Love is
enactively expressed and known in action. There is no such thing as 'abstract love' - it is either expressed in behavior, or its not.
When the behavior is perceived, the body resonates with it. The body forms a 'point', the imminent point from the first diagram. And then in
reflection, the self, implicitly referring to a really nice affective state, will propose something. Conversely, if love isn't present, a whole slew
of complicated transformations take place; the body speaks first - the reflective mind usually just relies upon the existing cultural scaffold to make
sense of whats being felt.
A whole culture emerges from this dyadic interchange:
Since we're living in probably the 6th 7th millennium since civilization arose, we have a very screwed up culture indeed. Indeed, we're suffering
from spiritual pollution which denuminizes our relationship to the objects around us - to our own feelings, to our bodies, to other people, and to the
world. All of this is actually emergent from the process of development:
Intersubjectivity (non-verbal cues) come first; they set the template for interpretation of feelings - second; and feelings form the ground of our
metaphysical reasoning so that, in the end, our metaphysical constructions are really outgrowths of the metaphorical structure of intersubjectvity.
Consciousness, intellectual interpretation - better referred to as a culturally afforded reflexive reflectivity - and embodied feeling, all are
intimated in the book of books - the Holy Hebrew Bible:
Here, the metaphors of God, Adam, Eve, and the snake correspond to something in you and in the world: in you God is consciousness; in the world its
the world; Adam is your intellectual interpretation - which in the world is your brain; Eve is your feeling body, which in the world is your actual
body. And the snake - the deceiver, is the experience of fear, and in the world, its the logical interplay of organisms as it is exists in our own
phylogenetic history. We fear because evolution began from just that starting point - it doesn't end there, however.
The snake - fear - speaks to Eve (ChaWaH in Hebrew, the body); she experiences the influence of fear, and hence, once under fears control, Eve - the
feeling body - communicates its message to Adam, the intellect. Notice how logical the narrative is: first is fear - lower level brainstem; then
feeling - a midbrain structure; then, intellect, a higher level cortical structure. Together, Adam - intellect - and Eve - feeling body - are
dissociated from the transcendental knowings of consciousness: we are here being taught about the primal significance of dissociation. Dissociation is
the splintering of consciousness from intellect and bodily feeling; it splits the world into two unrelated parts. The ontological unity of self and
other is lost.
We can look at this process from the perspective of causation: in a certain sense the highest cause is the transcendental sign - love - symbolized
physically as the process of symmetry. The mind cannot "run away" from what it is built from. Dissociation is a process that only hurts yuo in the
end:
Long before civilization arose, the human being, Homo Sapiens, the wise one, experienced itself subjectivity as synonymous with the universe itself.
The awe which permeated its experience had made into, quite understandably, the 'caretaker of creation'.
But in falling from such a state of grace, we are confused: look at how much dissonance exists in communication itself:
We have to sort the logic of this:
or this:
All because of this: