Liquid Love

July 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The various states of consciousness alluded to using the metaphor of a liquid are comprehensive and consistent, from the ’stream’ of individual consciousness at one end to the ‘oceanic’ experience of non-individuated ego loss at the other. In between these states a range of states and conditions are similarly articulated using this metaphor, including flow, immersion, absorbtion, etc. These states are not only rational and logical however, but are also heavily informed by, or rather constructed with, emotional content and responses. The ‘oceanic’ feeling identified by William James is a notable example. Initially associated with the overpowering divine adoration of religious experience, this concept was reframed by Freud in terms of that other great first love, a baby’s ecstasy of embrionic and amniotic immersion within the body and the ego of the mother prior to partition, birth, and the individuating rigours of childhood. In both readings, one religious and the other ontogenic, the metaphor of a vast ocean stands in not only for undividedness, but for undivided love. Immersion and dissolution in this ocean is a kind of death, not of the body but of the ego, and we see miniature versions of this death, this dissolution, in the small death of sexual orgasm (in French le petit mort), and in the sacrificial ego loss when we are drowned in romantic love.

Posted in Feeling, Freud, Sigmund, James, William, Liquid, Love, Metaphor | No Comments »

Love and Proximity

August 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

There are many forms of love; of one’s country, one’s God, ones’s partner, child, team, and love of oneself. The behaviour and structure of these loves is obviously different but some features of all these loves are inevitably the same (otherwise they would not all be referred to by the same name). One of these underlying similarities is the use of the metaphor of proximity to describe the strength of the emotional bond. We associate the emotion of love with a sense of ‘closeness’ to the object of that love, and of the loss of love with an increasing distance. When we cease to love someone we say that we have ‘grown apart’, or we may act ‘distant’. An ultimate extent of proximity may be that the loved one is so close that the psychological and ego-based boundaries which usually separate us, the subject, from the object of our affection cease to exist. It is a cliche that lovers ‘become one’, but a cliche which refers to a metaphorical fact. This proximal fusion is also writ large in the logic of religious devotion; the ‘divine union’ of Christianity, the ‘advaita’ of the Upanishads, etc.

Posted in Love, Religion, Space, Unity | No Comments »

The Union of Love

November 16th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It is a cliche that love can take many forms; the love of a parent for a child, the love for a spouse, a mother or father, the love of country, land, and God, love of art and of ideas. Each of these different forms of love is accented with behaviours or ancillary feelings which make it distinct; lust, greed, patriotism, sacrifice, aesthetic appreciation etc. but all of them also have something in common; a shared property which allows us to recognise them as similar in some way, no matter how varied their manifestations may be.

Emotions are the felt components of complex drives, cognitive processes, and biological needs. Emotions, such as love, provide the motivation and personal validation for actions which we might otherwise not consider, from the instinctual retracting of hand from hotplate at the urgings of pain, to the magnetic attraction of life-affirming lust. The emotion of love, operating in different registers and forming the motivating part of different complex structures of behaviour, is always about union; in all cases, the emotion of love signifies the drive for closeness, contact, and ultimately fusion of self and other, whether this other be one’s country, one’s wife, or one’s God.

Posted in Binding, Emotion, Love | No Comments »

Make Room (Exercise)

November 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Stand or sit in a place where you can watch something approach; a person, a vehicle, on object. See this thing in the distance and be conscious of the space it is taking up in your visual field. As it approaches observe the changes that you are making and that you are experiencing. As it grows larger feel yourself making room for it in your awareness. Feel yourself giving the object space, almost as if you are moving part of yourself aside to allow the object to exist more fully. Feel the space of your mind open to accommodate the object as it approaches. Let the object fill the open space of your mind.

Alternatively, instead of having the object approach your self, try the same cognitive process as you yourself approach an object. As you move toward the object of your attention feel your mind making more and more room for that object. Feel the contents of your mind moving aside; feel yourself moving aside, to open up a greater and greater space for the object. As you get close to the object let it fill the open space of your mind. Try it with a person. Try it with someone you love. Try it with someone you don’t love.

Posted in Attention, Exercises, Love, Space | No Comments »

Can we really taste love?

June 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Most of what we think about both consciously and unconsciously, and most of what we talk, write, draw, paint, and make movies about is human stuff, the products of human society and culture. We live in a materialist, secular society, with an appreciation of the down-to-earth, rational, nuts-and-bolts attitude that built the modern world, and yet our discourse is dominated not by the hard facts of trees and moons and sailing ships but by concepts like truth, justice, love, anger, our careers, the economy, the school system, taxation, inflation, rising (or falling) house prices etc etc etc. These are not hard facts, they have no resilience at all, not do they have texture, odour, colour, taste,or visible shape. Given that these and similar concepts have such a significant foothold in our mental lives it is worthwhile considering where these intangible ideas are located on the great globe of knowledge. When we look around from our privileged place at the centre of the universe, past the trees and moons and sailing ships, where do we find these ideas? Is the truth really out there? Is it within reach? Can we walk up to justice and run our hands over it? Can we taste love and can we really smell fear?

Posted in Abstract, Love, Sense | No Comments »

Soul of an Atheist - Grasping the Big Picture

November 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie

If I was to sum up the aim of this writing in one sentence, I would say that it was about grasping the big picture. The picture we want, or I would say need, to grasp is very large indeed, and can only be seen from some elevated position high above the plane of usual human grasping, and we should recognise the ambition of our aim at the outset. Imagine a picture of everything. Got that? If you have then you can close the book now and join your friends on Mount Olympus, or Heaven, or wherever it is you Gods hang out. For the rest of us who are still mortal any attempt to grasp the big picture seems like a hopelessly hubristic endeavor. We are the barely conscious products of chemical reactions taking place in a film of moisture on a ball of rock. How in God’s names could we hope to understand things we can’t even see, or touch, or even think about properly? How could we hope to grasp the big picture if can’t even put a sentence together accurately, for goodness sake? Grasp the big picture? Surely we don’t ‘grasp’ a picture, we ’see’ it. When we ’see’ something we look at it from a safe distance and let the light of our objective knowledge bounce off it into our brains. ‘Grasping’, on the other hand, suggests taking hold of something, pulling it close to us, maybe pressing is against our bodies and feeling its contours merging with our own. There is something of love in this grasp, and of understanding, and compassion, and the intimate sharing of a single sense of being. Grasping the Big Picture? Surely this is nonsense? But this is exactly how it should be. No one sense is what we must use to contemplate the immensity and the complexity of Everything. The big picture is too big to hold with our eyes alone, and if we are to take it in then we must become synaesthetes and allow the familiar segregated play of our senses to spill over into each other, to cross the lines on the playground that usually keep them apart, allowing us to feel with our eyes and see with our hands.

We may say that this is impossible, and only those with some bizarre quirk of neurology are capable of such grasping. But if only we could remember back, and maybe we can, we would remember when this was first nature to us, before the second nature of common sense turned us into an I, and a You, and a He or She, or into an It.

Posted in Cosmology, Grasp, Knowledge, Love, Sense, Synaesthesia, Up | No Comments »