“Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word “love” is the source of our difficulty in loving” [bell's Love Ref 6.5]. bill grew up in a community (middle-class conformity) where love was not even mentioned. The hippies did much to bring the word into common usage, but instead of love being an expression of spiritual unity or a depth of romantic or relational love it is now perhaps misused dutifully, what does the mother’s “love ya” as the child goes to school express? It might have made a difference to bill if his father had said “love ya” as he was out the door to work, and equally if his mother had said the same as he left to get his bike out of the garage; so common-place expression is an advance. But whatever we think love is, to zandtao it is a word that requires an expression of genuineness. zandtao detests that love is a word used by some men to exploit women for sexual favour. Expressing love in romantic love has a duty to be genuine - Wai Zandtao explored in “Yoxa Love in Honiti and Mokeroha” a society in which love was of the highest value.
Love expressed for the purpose of exploitation would be morally-criminal in a society of siladhamma. Without siladhamma and given all the ways love is misused, it is no wonder that bell recognises there is “confusion". “If society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying” [bell's Love Ref 6.5]. A "commonly-held understanding of meaning" frightens me in a social climate that tries to conform rigidly with the level of conditioning that exists in our society. Love is the highest expression of who we are, a commonly-held understanding that love is this highest expression would not concern me; but zandtao fears the liberalism that might “regulate” this expression – as investigated with Wai Zandtao's dogmatons in “Yoxa Love". But zandtao fears more the alt-right who have fears similar to those expressed in the scifi book but lack compassion. Both the alt-right and the "Dogmatons" were more concerned with ideas and power than they were with compassion; without compassion there is no siladhamma leaving a society that has just changed the way of exploitation.
Spiritual people long learn to live with understanding that words cannot be defined. Bell starts looking at a dictionary definition (a reasonable writer’s tool) and ends with “However, deep affection does not really adequately describe love’s meaning” [bell's Love Ref 6.5]. As a spiritual person it is easy to say love cannot be defined. However, it is meaningful to say that love is more than deep affection whether that love is expressed romantically or relationally.
“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist” [bell's Love Ref 6.9]. Let's start with ahimsa that Buddhists describe as causing no harm. So we are beginning to describe love in terms of what it is not - hurtful and abusive, previously bill has described exploitation in connection with love. All of these cause harm.
zandtao is attempting to avoid bell's use of spiritual yet be faithful to her presentation because zandtao takes this word deep into Buddhism. Bell is using the word spiritual as taken from Erich Fromm’s definition of love, in this situation primarily focussing that love is connected to nurture and growth. Ahimsa in whatever form cannot be nurture and growth for bell.
“An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families” [bell's Love Ref 6.9]. Through his own inner work zandtao doesn’t feel personally threatened by any such definition of love, but he recognises he is not one of the other members of bill's family; the words “middle-class conformity” are intentionally vague and do hide much that could be included in the term ahimsa. zandtao notes here bell’s use of the words “overwhelming majority”. When bill considers that he reached 25 (with lots of paper) having had an upheaval and started on a career of teaching which was in many ways fulfilling and could be considered close to his path in life, how can he be unhappy with his upbringing? Yet for zandtao the word dysfunctional is an appropriate description of family, and would argue that in spiritual terms seekers need to question that dysfunction in their own case. Much of zandtao's reticence concerning family description arises from his mother’s dictum not to discuss family, but bill does accept that his family’s impact on his inner development is not anyone’s business. Yet for the seeker and the spiritual teacher such dysfunction is highly relevant, and drawing on personal history could be beneficial on a one-to-one basis. When we legitimately hide dysfunction behind words such as middle-class conformity, what we have to do is to be able to convey the value of the inner journey, the joy of personal development, the spiritual joys of the path, and the lack of family-shame in dysfunction. bill's upbringing has led to a fruitful life and the following of a writer’s path in retirement. Overall life's journey including bill, zandtaomed the elder, zandtao the seeker and Wai Zandtao the sci-fi writer is an expression of spiritual love, what else could be wanted from life – except perhaps a society that listens? – a totally forlorn “desire”. They say spiritually we have the parents we need, zandtao has no disagreement with that. So was there ahimsa? That is for bill and his family. Whatever your upbringing, learn.
Bell chooses to be more open about her family and describes ahimsa. “Raised in a family in which aggressive shaming and verbal humiliation coexisted with lots of affection and care, I had difficulty embracing the term “dysfunctional” [bell's Love Ref 6.10]. bill understands this but it is the embracing of dysfunctional that is necessary for our own inner development as zandtaomed encourages with his Seeker Story. But what makes embracing dysfunctionality so acceptable is that the dysfunction arises from our social system of patriarchy - it is the conditioning rather than individuals we are expected to love that is the problem. bill is very comfortable in blaming any dysfunction in his family on patriarchal conditioning, he suspects bell was the same. What we need to understand is the total umbrella of conditioning that pervades our lives, and somehow go beyond that conditioning. Love is a way of going beyond dysfunction but real love cannot be found without accepting the totality of that conditioning. When we are in love (of whatever type), whatever takes us there (our passion?) makes us forget our conditioning for that moment. Real love takes us beyond ahimsa, beyond dysfunctional relationships and beyond conditioning. “Since I felt and still feel attached to my parents and siblings, proud of all the positive dimensions of our family life, I did not want to describe us by using a term that implied our life together had been all negative or bad” [bell's Love Ref 6.10]. Love is beyond dysfunction, bell describes her relationship with her family positively; yet are we talking love? She said her family was “a setting in which affection, delight, and care are present,” and later “this experience of genuine love (a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect) nurtured my wounded spirit and enabled me to survive acts of lovelessness” [bell's Love Ref 6.12] ( – note bell’s generalised use of the word “spirit” here). She described her family experience as “genuine love” yet within there was ahimsa; so interesting in an investigation of “genuine love”.
Mentioned above is the power of conditioning, it is something we don’t pay sufficient attention to. One time in discussion bill's mother spoke of behaviour that his father had inherited from bill's grandfather, this "inheritance" issue was at the root of an important aspect of the middle-class conformity bill experienced. “I am grateful to have been raised in a family that was caring, and strongly believe that had my parents been loved well by their parents they would have given that love to their children. They gave what they had been given—care” [bell's Love Ref 6.12]. For bell the continuity of conditioning carried on between generations, this is the conditioning issue that means the type of upbringing continues through generations. Whilst real love is not conditioned, maybe how we love is? Spiritually there is talk of unconditional love, what does conditioned love mean? Two types of love – unconditional love and conditioned love; what do they mean in daily life? Based on bill's experience romantic love is conditioned love, it is an image of experiencing a relationship with a partner that comes from our upbringing, one way or another. Maybe we seek a conditioned love similar to our parents, or in bill's upheaval he rejected a significant level of conditioning but still wanted the cosmic love conditioned by romance. How much is how we want to experience love coming from our upbringing?
There are 3 choices in conditioning – accept conditioning, reject conditioning and move beyond conditioning. In other words we allow conditioned egos to be formed based on our upbringing - accept, we emotionally reject the egos formed by our upbringing and attach to the egos the emotional rejection conditions for us, or we manage an equanimous position concerning any conditioning where we stand back and mindfully grapple with conditioning so that we do not form any attached egos – any conditioned egos – based on acceptance or rejection of egos. How do we know the difference between rejected conditioning and moving beyond conditioning? The answer is that moving beyond is authentic, how do we know that it is authentic? Almost the same question how do we know that love is authentic or egoic? Conditioning? Moving beyond conditioning? Wisdom.
A summative position so far. We have unconditional and conditioned love. Unconditional is the spiritual love that arises from wisdom. It comes with the path, with the methods of the path such as MwB where wisdom arises with the 4 Dhamma Comrades. It arises from Prajna, it is just there, following the path means we love. We are born unconsciously in love and that love can be restored through mindful connection such as Sharon’s 4 Brahma-Vihara meditations.
But then we have the conditioned love that exists in society’s institutions such as marriage and family. Families can be described as dysfunctional because of the ahimsa that comes in families, similarly there is ahimsa in the way romance builds up to family which is again dysfunctional – not real loving. Our romance and family grow through generation and culture. How we “love” in family with our children follows from the way we “loved” with our parents. How we “love” in the romance that leads up to family comes from the “love” we experience in our families, and the perceptions of “love” we receive from our parents, peers and media. In terms of love our institutions are dysfunctional.
But they are not dysfunctional in terms of the paradigm of patriarchy - imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. The institution of family is the economic unit that perpetuates the patriarchy. The family as a unit earns economically, and provides the wage-slaves that create the products for this perpetuation; patriarchy also creates the demands of time to bring up family time which frees our "leaders" to create the exploitation that is our defiled world.
Young people can be outspoken, in this generation they are outspoken quite rightly about the destruction of our planet and the potential extinction conditions that the patriarchy is creating. Society dismisses the young. They claim they are going through a learning process and will grow out of it, but the reality is that young people have not been institutionalised into dysfunction, they have not yet joined the institutions of romance and family that perpetuate the patriarchy – the function of family.
Some of the family functionality is natural. It is natural to have children and it is natural for parents to want to do the best for their kids. There is a natural function to some of the jobs that we do. It is natural to trade products and skills as a way of living together. But what is not natural is the greed of accumulation, a greed in which the perpetuation of that greed is the raison d’etre of the patriarchy. It is also a greed that creates the conditioning that maintains the institutions of conditioned love that perpetuate patriarchy. As with all conditioning natural conditioning falls away as we mature and follow the path, but the conditioning of kilesa works against that mature release. The conditioning of the defiled world works to maintain the conditioning that perpetuates patriarchy. The natural conditioning (instincts) alone would not create the kilesa of our defiled world; we could still love, have families, and be free to follow our paths whilst being socially responsible to siladhamma. But that is not the way of kilesa that perpetuates the patriarchy of our defiled world.
The way that kilesa uses natural conditioning (as societal conditioning) to perpetuate its own patriarchy is powerful but not insurmountable. Individually we can follow the path and move beyond conditioning, and the more people that do that the less control kilesa has - the less the patriarchy will be perpetuated. One way of doing this is bringing genuine love into the institutions of family and romance, as bell says a return to love. On the one hand we can encourage the development of spiritual unconditional love by following the path – recognise this as a reality/Real Love. But at the same time we can examine the conditioning that gives rise to the dysfunction of conditioned love, that is the basis of the institutions that perpetuate patriarchy. Once we can recognise this conditioning and know that it is conditioning, we can learn to move beyond conditioning freeing our institutions to be more loving; in this loving way we are also working against perpetuating the patriarchy lessening the hold patriarchal conditioning has on society.
There are dysfunctional families where parents spend so much time and effort on the upbringing of their children because those children are making restrictive demands on parents with their poor behaviour. At the same time there are parents making demands on their children, demands that are not enabling those children to be authentic, to follow their paths. Who benefits whilst all this energy and frustration is turned in on the family? The patriarchy. To begin with families need to learn to live together for mutual benefit, and not be destructive to each other, that internal destructiveness of dysfunction just enables the patriarchy to exploit. Living together for mutual benefit would of course be acts of love. Recognising that the conditionality which is our way of life benefits the patriarchy is the first step to a return to love. Simply living together for mutual benefit is an act of love that is so beneficial for our families whilst also having the benefit oof helping end patriarchy.
That becomes an important aspect for this z-quest for zandtao – to help recognise that the conditioning that creates our institutions has the purpose of perpetuating patriarchy. When we recognise this, we can then learn to let go of the conditions. Not only is this an act that frees us individually enabling us to follow our paths but it is also an act that begins to end patriarchy thus benefitting the rest of society. These are acts of love – free the family.
The family theme was especially strong as Matriellez – emphasising and supporting the home. This emphasis was because as a teacher bill saw how much impact the home had on children and the way they develop. But recognising that the conditioned love of perpetuating patriarchy arises in our upbringing is another reason for emphasising the home – freeing the family is an act of love that can help end patriarchy. In political struggle family was often seen as the economic unit, and at the same time it was seen as restrictive. And political activists in struggle also struggled against their families. But the basis of struggle is love so as an act of struggle we bring love into the family. We do not accept dysfunction in family, as grassroots struggle we work to end dysfunction by bringing love into family, by recognising the conditioning that perpetuates patriarchy and by helping to end this conditioning that creates the dysfunction in family. And of course what can be more beneficial and bring more joy into the family than love, helping end patriarchy is not the objective of bringing love into family it is a significant consequence.
".... have found that, like myself, most people, whether raised in an excessively violent or abusive home or not, shy away from embracing any negative critique of our experiences” [bell's Love Ref 6.13]. This is the first step to freedom – accepting that the family institution is dysfunctional and more importantly that it is intended to be dysfunctional for love. Once that first step is taken, then families can start to be free – through people in the family giving each other the mutual respect of love.
There is an Occupy image :-
Most people examine our system, think that it is broken, and spend the time trying to fix it – this is a delusion. The system is as the patriarchy intended. We can think of the family of dysfunction in this way. When we think of love and upbringing the family is a broken institution, but when we think of it in terms of perpetuating patriarchy then the family is not broken – it is functioning well. In other words, free the family. Accept that a family is dysfunctional, accept that it is intended to be so, and start to work on the family from that point of view – making it functional – freeing the family to love.
This is a multi-generational problem because we learn our conditioning from our parents. When young parents have children their fallback upbringing strategy is from the way they were brought up. Whilst zandtao agrees with Sharon Salzberg (Real Love Ref 21.3) that relationships will only work with authentic communication, especially at the beginning there is little of that – mainly because of age and not desire. New parents will fallback on the way they were brought up. If the race and class (social class or professional class as opposed to the political classes of the 1% and 99%) of the parents are similar, then “communication” is understood. Having lived with people from a different race and class in “loving relationship” bill knows how difficult it is to go against the conditioning of the partner especially if the partner clings to conditioning when s/he is not sure.
Basically keeping relationship within the same race and class works better for living together and bringing up children although it runs a greater risk of conforming, however there is nothing better than a loving relationship with authentic communication – something that is essential if partners are from different race and class. Arranged marriages can work for these reasons (amongst others) even though for many westerners the thought of such arrangement completely goes against the cultural conditioning of individual choice.
Whilst few think of this the reality is that family is primarily guided by conditioning – from parents race and class. This conditioning comes from the systemic patriarchy, and requires a great deal of awareness and commitment to organise a family outside of this conditioning. Even if as parents we make the effort to break through the conditioning, when the children go to school they meet educational conditioning but even worse they meet the peer conditioning that conforms children. If we open our minds to consideration of conditioning, it is all-invasive. As a single adult trying to follow the path, zandtao recognises breaking through conditioning is so difficult; how can we expect children to have the strength to do this?
Be clear where conditioning comes from. There is the natural conditioning of instinct, this is the conditioning that helps us grow up as individuals with self-esteem enabling us to survive in society. But then there is the societal conditioning itself, the agreements we make in the way we live as a society, and sadly at the moment those agreements are with patriarchy - imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. How can we free families from conditioning? How can we free them from the dysfunction of patriarchal conditioning and help them function in love?
Here bell talks of the way her adult romantic-loving was shaped by her upbringing “In my case, many of the negative shaming practices I was subjected to in childhood continued in my romantic adult relationships. Initially, I did not want to accept a definition of love that would also compel me to face the possibility that I had not known love in the relationships that were most primary to me” [bell's Love Ref 6.14]. It is hard for bill to judge how much his understanding of love was determined by his upbringing, because before he started looking for romantic love there had already been the first awakening of upheaval – firstgrace – at 23. Prior to that bill never saw women as lovers or partners, when drunk he sought sex. bill can agree with bell that prior to 23 the lack of seeking love as a priority was connected with his upbringing, love was not part of the middle-class conformity that was my conditioning even though the nuclear family was. At that time love was not a conscious part of his life, he did not recognise this absence and definitely did not associate it with his upbringing. By the time he began to ask questions of his upbringing concerning love, his life was very much shaped by the path; uppermost were always questions of middle-class conformity.
Bell talks again of Erich Fromm’s love “I was in my mid-twenties when I first learned to understand love “as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”” [bell's Love Ref 6.15]; zandtao mentions it again for context. This spirit is not how zandtao understands it now but when a young adult bill thought of spirit and soul in a loose way, certainly not in a developed way that studies of Buddhism together with meditation and journey have brought. As with many spiritual concepts the more you learn of it the less it is open to definition. zandtao also doesn’t use soul any more – except maybe as soul of a writer – because of its association with transmigration; zandtao has no personal knowledge of reincarnation and tries to have no beliefs.
Later bell discusses spirit explaining that she uses M Scott Peck’s discussion from A Road less Travelled, referring to that “dimension of our core reality where mind, body, and spirit are one. An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self—a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us” [bell's Love Ref 6.22].
“The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack that we have to cover up” [bell's Love Ref 6.17]. How is this "not knowing" connected with the lovelessness in society? Lovelessness allows us to accept the materialism that underlies the imperialism and capitalism of patriarchy - imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Whatever love is, it can be valued; whereas patriarchy ultimately only values money. For the delusion of patriarchy, for the deeds of patriarchy as imperialism to be accepted, love cannot be valued and materialism has to be more important. How can foreign policies which include war and invasion allow for love? Maybe our love will be strong enough that we love the people whose country we are invading. In the first propaganda of war our side becomes heroes and the other becomes demonised.
Whatever love is, our loveless society, our families, need to start to value it; but once we do that we are breaking the conditioning of patriarchy. If we love then valuing that love puts people before profits – not acceptable to patriarchy. For zandtao love starts with the path, it doesn’t for bell and it doesn’t for most people but wherever our understanding of love starts it is not materialist. It is at least a feeling that is so strong and meaningful that that love has more value than the dominant values of our society. When teenage love acts so unreasonably, are they at fault? Should we find dismissive rationalisations of that love or should we embrace it? For zandtao the only counter to teenage love is wisdom, be wise and SEE the partner. The counters are not materialism, education and others, no matter how sensible parents are being teenage awareness knows love is being undervalued in our loveless society, and that that is an unnatural path – even though that teenage understanding cannot be verbalised. It is part of conditioned upbringing that we undervalue love and grow up in a conditioned materialistic society.
Is it necessary to cover up this not knowing of love? Or more does the pain come from our knowing we are not loving, we know our society is predominantly loveless? By accepting lovelessness we are opening the door to the kilesa of patriarchy, and whether we want to admit it that acceptance causes great suffering in the world. We might know what love is only vaguely but we do know its absence, if there is a cover up it is the acceptance of the absence of love. Because many of us are intellectually-trained we might blame the lack of definition, but the definition does not create the feeling, and it is the lovelessness that is the problem. Do we need a definition to love or do we need to learn how to love?
Families are of course the places to learn how to love. zandtao accepts that as babies we are born loving, do you? But in our families do we then stay in love? At some point doesn’t the dysfunction stop us from loving fully? But remember this, dysfunction comes from patriarchy. But as individuals we can be strong and bring love back into family – free the family from patriarchy. Even if we cannot define love we can know how to bring love back in. For children lovelessness starts in family, and then extends to the wider society. Children start with love, parents must bring in their own love otherwise those children contribute to lovelessness as adults. Don’t start with knowing a definition, start with loving, rekindle the loving we are born with. Know the feeling of love.
Sorry bell, I disagree with this - “Had I been given a clear definition of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person” [bell's Love Ref 6.18]. The priority is to experience love, experience the love that we feel at birth, the "definition we need" is to feel love for ourselves and receive it from others. It is the feeling that matters.
For zandtao this feeling of love is predicated on a spiritual understanding of love – Prajna; for all intents and purposes (except the intellectual) Prajna is a “useful definition”. For bell the purpose of “useful definition” was to enable her to make it “easier to create love” through discussion and awareness. With MwB and other teachings of Prajna, or with Sharon’s 4 Brahma-Vihara meditations, bell would have been able to work towards returning to love – prajna is zandtao's “useful definition” on how to feel love.
zandtao also notes that he does not accept that love is a “creation”. Love is fundamental to each and every one of us but through conditioning we become blocked to love. Fundamental to this blocking is the patriarchal conditioning that causes dysfunction in family instead of the family living together in love. In the case of romantic love the power of personal passions breaks down so many of those blocks and those passions provide the delusion of “love”, but unfortunately romantic love brings with it other conditioning that causes new blocks. For many people family is thought of as a refuge from daily life, but in practise that refuge does not have the love we delude ourselves about.
Bell asks “is love an action or a feeling?” She notes that we choose our actions yet we feel emotions without choice. Because she is not spiritual she does not see that love is spiritual, a state of being; we are love, and when we feel love that love has not been blocked. We choose whether we remove the blocks that prevent us from being love. This is the same for all our spiritual life, do we choose it? Accepting the “useful definition” of prajna above and acting on it is an act of love.
Bell explains “Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being” [bell's Love Ref 6.24]. Using definition is interesting to apply to imagination but it does not apply to love. We are not bringing love into being but destroying the blocks that prevent our natural love – our spiritual love. Through mindfulness we use our “imaginations” to grapple with the blocks and release them. The first step is to recognise there are blocks, it seems far easier to recognise blocks to love rather than it is to try to create love. But accepting innate love is a big step, a step that usually only makes sense when verified by meditation.
Bell ends the chapter by saying that she is charting a map to love from her definition. “We need a map to guide us on our journey to love—starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love” [bell's Love Ref 6.24]. Do we need a map when love is already inside? When we get back to feeling the love inside, there is no requirement of map or definition because there is the faith in love that comes from already knowing and experiencing it – from knowing that we were not feeling love because we allowed conditioning to block it off.
Bell’s definition comes from M Scott Peck’s discussion of “as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. This definition and map is very much an academic approach – scientific method. As an academic she has not embraced the spiritual path even though her very definition discusses spirit. zandtao has described his “useful definition” to fit in with her approach – For zandtao this feeling of love is predicated on a spiritual understanding of love – Prajna; for all intents and purposes (except the intellectual) Prajna is a “useful definition. For bell the purpose of “useful definition” was to enable her to make it “easier to create love” through discussion and awareness. With MwB and other teachings of Prajna, or with Sharon’s 4 Brahma-Vihara meditations, bell would have been able to work towards returning to love – using zandtao's “useful definition” on how to feel love. zandtao is unhappy about trying to fit spirit into academia, it has never worked in the past. In the next chapter zandtao wants to develop “freeing the family” - not discuss intellectualism.
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