Truetalk has been writing since he was a teen, and only in the last five or so years has he taken himself seriously as a writer. He lives in the Vancouver area of BC, Canada, where he has lived for most of his life. He finished his degree in psychology at Simon Fraser University in ’95 when he started his counseling practice for individuals and couples. He recently completed his PhD in psychology and philosophy at University of Life in Black Rock City. His counseling practice though broad in a practical sense, is specialized in alternative relationships, including the various forms of polyamoury, polyfidelity, or what ever other poly-like relationship you may be working on. He has studied the human psyche for almost his entire life, and has a thorough understanding of consciousness, human psychology, and our current social structure and how we as individuals or groups function and dysfunction within our culture and general social milieu. He would love to hear any feedback from the readers of this community, answer questions or even take requests or topics to write about.

Previous editions of this column can be found in the Monthly Columns Archives.

A new thought stream

The topic will be similar, in that I will still be talking about love, connections, relationships, intimacy, and time. This time I will start with the presentation of love’s various manifestations, and how we as beings experience love on multiple dimensions. This is not a new thought either, I have written extensively on the subject in the past, and though I am not sure, I suspect that other people have discussed and played with this break down of love into dimensions of experience. I don’t even really know why I am writing about this again, except that maybe its because I am presenting it to a new audience. I was thinking about what to write this month, and I thought that maybe I had never before presented this idea that love is expressed on three levels through people. There is the spiritual, the mental or psychic, and the physical. Each is important in the full experience of love, and there may indeed be a bit of imbalance in our expression and experience of love. I can not tell for sure though, and in the end I think I would like to present a question to the readers: do you feel/think that these experiences and expressions of love are balanced or not in humanity today? I will describe each in some detail then, and leave it at that, you can then look at your own expressions and experiences of love, try to identify whether it is physical, emotional or spiritual love that you have, and see which ones you have the most or if there is some balance between them in your life.

Love expressed spiritually is best understood as love for the community. The community being a tangible manifestation of the whole, the entire and complete existence, metaphorically. Spiritual love is akin to compassion, it is soft, unconditional, kindness to another, and an expression of caring love. It is the love that is expressed by giving yourself to the growth and benefit of your society, or community. Great people of humanity’s past to demonstrate amazing spiritual love are Jesus, Buddha, and others, its hard to name drop on this level, but the idea here being that people have given their lives to stay and teach the rest of humanity some deeper truths. Compassion is about giving to more than the self or even others, but to all. This level of love is hard to relate to or with the personal and intimate relationships I feel I mostly explore here in my meanderings. I want to include it though in these thoughts, because all love needs to be considered to make it a integral and whole expression of love. I think this means that the two of us come from the same community. The thing is that I use the word community, because community is formed through the collection of different people, theoretically, and practically too, this will exclude no one, and include all. Race, sex, age, these kinds of things are all equal in/at spiritual love, only location, and timing seem to control this love. The point is to find someone in a community that you love, so that you can share in that love too. Which is what this is all about anyways, so I will now move on to that.

The next love is of the mind, it involves our emotions, thoughts, memories, desires, fears and hopes (and so much more). I do not want to make any judgments here, I simply want to express what I understand in describing the emotional and mental expression of love. Thus, love here is our thoughts about loved ones, feelings for loved ones, and the expression of these things to loved ones, and the receiving of this love. It is the thrill you feel when you think about someone you met or know. The memories you have of people you love, the knowledge that they are there still for you, and the belief that you share a life. The psychic level of love is the most unstable of the loves. It can change, period; the mind is one of the most dynamic, flux, unstable object I know, well as it is now. It does not need to be like this, and that is a bit off topic, be it as mind is now very flexible, love can be hard here. Again, I am not wanting to start explaining why or how now, I only want to describe. Maybe, the point is that love on the mental/psychic level is both very pleasurable and painful, love is beautiful and destructive here in mind, and love is both stable and unpredictable in the psyche of humanity. Love here on this level is known as love, while on the next expression of love it is called intimacy.

Thus, we move to the physical expression of love. Here there is touch, and caress, kissing and stroking. In ways hard to explain, this is both the most simple expression of love and the most difficult. This is where I would get into the cultural influences, and away from a pure description and towards a questioning of the expression of physical love. I do not want to do that though, that kind of writing is clouded with judgment and opinion, but what I do want to say about the physical expression of love, through sexual union is that it does have a very spiritual quality, as a potential. What I am trying to say is that the experience of orgasm, done through good sex, can resemble the blissful state of non-duel existence. This is a very deep or high experience, depending on how you view spirit, equated with the attainment of transcendental awareness. The awesome realization of our complete unity is gifted upon the individual, and the ego dies, the self is melted into some grander, whole and entire being, transforming the self into a no-self, or the true Self. This can be experienced through good sex, conscious and fully aware and present sexual union to the fullness of orgasm with another. It is the moment when two become one, it is the spiritual movement of the body and mind, and it is beautiful and unique, and achieved only through the fullest expression of physical love.

There they are, now I ask again for your opinion, do you think that these are evenly, and harmoniously being expressed or experienced in this reality? That is, in the relationships you have, know, see and are aware of, would you say that each of these areas of love is being equally used, touched or understood as an integral part of the love relationship in question. This can be answered very personally, in that you would look at your own connections, and intimacies, and then decide how you are doing. In those cases most people will believe that indeed they are okay. This is common enough. Then this can also be answered in a more general and philosophical, or social vein, and then you will tend to say that yes, there does seem to be some imbalance in the way love is expressed in the world today. My only intent here is to bring more awareness to our understanding of love and the relationships we call love.

Truetalk is a contributing writer as well as a member of this online Community. He can be contacted here or through our message board Forums.

Truetalk ; March 16, 2007

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