seeking_brilliance

@Jack River It's been a long journey to understand self. I don't know what the confusion is either but hey, I love myself regardless. (oops maybe I don't) And I'm sorry, I don't mean to argue, I'm just trying to understand. Thank you for all your responses.

@TheAvatarState thank you so much for actually explaining this in your own words and it didn't sound like a tape recorder. What you say does make sense. I will contemplate it today while at work.

Ok, so you feel love as a warmth in all your chakras. The first to actually answer my question lol. Thank you

Thank you. Maybe I don't have all the context needed. I have felt this as you've described, usually in dreams, where love is such a strong connection - like a super magnet- and requires no words to describe it. In this thread I'm exploring where we feel love in our body. What sensations do we get, if any, when we notice we are feeling love? I'm curious to know if people around the world feel it in a similar way, or how much it varies. What is good and evil? I can't be sure such things even exist, so why would I put limitations on them? In your own words, could you explain to me good vs evil? Sure, I knew that when I typed it, but it's also a belief that they can't. You claim that it is just how it is, but how do you know that? I don't deny that self denies the wholeness of love, but that doesn't explain why a self can't love at all. Even if it's only a mediocre interpretation of it. Does that make it less real? @pluto so in your explanation, I can love and be loving while being myself, right? Sure I could probably explode in love if I shed the self, but if love is in everything, then it's in the illusion too, right?

@Jack River I kind of get what you are saying but your entire point is based on the belief that fear and love can't be in the same room. How sure are you about that? Does that mean that fear can't be loved? Do selfs deserve to be loved? Your description of them makes them seem completely antagonistic, but then again, they didn't ask to exist. And before you tell me they don't exist... Come on. They do. You know it. They exist, if only to themselves. But that's really all that matters to them- all these selfs running around, some of them posting on this very forum searching (perhaps in vain) for meaning. You say love cannot occupy self, but who needs love the most? Self or no-self?

@Jack River is it though? That's sounds nice and all but I want to know how you feel love. And I'm sure you'll reiterate that there's no "you" to feel anything but I want to know how Jack River feels love. In the body? What are the sensations, if any? Or do you stand with your statement that you (don't) feel love with no self.

Yep. Just amazing huh? And we readily accept this kind of information passed down in dna but shoo off the idea of memories being passed along because it sounds too woo-woo. But memories are just stored information. And we don't really understand how information is stored, and how dna is fully encoded. We just don't know.

@Equanimitize so, for example, does this perhaps explain some irrational fears, like the fear of heights, fear of deep water, etc.? (I know that's unanswerable but just for contemplation)

@d0ornokey Ive been having dreams of living in larger communities kind of like this and I told my friends at work that I would totally do it if not married but they think I'm crazy of course. Your example of 5-6 people is also a good idea, because with fewer people like a roommate type thing is more feasible to happen without moving to the middle of nowhere. I think it would be great because living with those who even find meditation to be weird is hard enough. So to live in a group that could potentially meditate together as a fun tradition or something along those lines would be awesome. There just has to be one rule : that noone tries to tell others how to do their journey. Help can be given of course, but there can be no spiritual - bullies in this community/home It would also help with life choices like being vegetarian or going green, because most likely everyone in your living space will agree or at least not make you feel weird about it.

I've come to the conclusion that love is at least two things : an idea and a feeling (or at least the body interpreting love as a feeling.) For now I want to focus on the feeling of love. So what is love? It makes me feel something, right? Like a piece of my own heart is divided amongst the things and people I love, and even the thought of them makes the pieces feel more whole. There's a swelling of warm, tingling pleasure in the area that is known as the heart chakra. But is there? Or do I only believe that? If I believed it also made my right big toe ache in agony, would I hobble around every time I hug my mom? It sure would make hiking (which I love) quite difficult. But suppose I had been taught since an infant that the feeling of Love brought great pain in my big toe. I would either feel it every time I feel love, or I'd be depressed, thinking that I can't feel love because I feel the pleasure in my chest but no agony in the toe. And if I did feel it, it makes it true because in my direct experience, those would be the two main factors of the feeling of love. Even if the person who taught me this was just an evil asshole who thought it would be funny. Also, I wonder if agony were a major contributor to feeling love, if I'd even want to ever feel it. But love isn't all sunshine and rainbows. There is a pain in love. Just ask a love sick 16 year old who's been freshly dumped. Or a father who just bailed his son out of jail. This love has several emotions factoring into the overall feeling, but the unique concoction is still love, and a painful kind of that. So it's actually kind of hard to pin down an exact feeling of love, but it does seem to be heart centered and can be a swelling or contracting feeling, depending on circumstances. This I have direct experience of. Although I can't know if I was misled into believing these to be the feelings. Perhaps a feeling of love could be in the stomach, or the left arm. Or the head. Perhaps it pervades the entire body. Perhaps its completely outside the body in some kind of auric field. Perhaps there's no feeling at all. Or perhaps it feels like everything and we mistake it to feel as nothing. Or as something. And something can't be everything, after all. Everything is everything (and something, of course). So what creates this feeling of love? If the feeling even exists? A concoction of chemicals in the brain? Something in between the atoms? Purely imagination? Gosh it would help if I knew what the hell feelings are! But suffice it to say, I do feel love, and my body can also get very tingly like a cool electricity is firing through my skin. Like today when talking to a client about the new season of Doctor Who, and how exciting it was for a new doctor, (who's female!) , and the future of the series. My skin started pulsating like a million tiny fireflies were buzzing around even in my head. It felt good... weird, but good. And maybe it's a combination of excitement and love, because I don't often feel this tingling, but I consider it the feeling of love. Expressing my love for this television series changed something in my body. I couldn't help but smile. I wonder if she felt it too. But I still don't really know what love is. It's got to be more than a feeling right? (not considering the option that it's an idea, which I haven't fully explored yet) But what else could it be? I could easily say it's a learned response, or even gene-inherited response, fueled by lifetime of risk and reward opportunities, releasing an elixir of chemicals into the bloodstream like a special cocktail. How could I possibly know if it is more than that? For all I know it's the shining pinnacle of evolution. A gift from our ancestors to learn to cope with reality. And nothing more. What if? So my question is how do you feel love? Where do you feel it? I'm interested in how much is cultural influence, and how much is a common feeling.

@Nahm yeah I don't either. Thanks though 😂

@Nahm would you say reality is a self-feeding (perpetuating) loop of ideas? Or are the ideas the "false" reality that me mistake reality for.

@Hellspeed are you into alchemy? It seems to me you have studied it

@Serotoninluv that's interesting. Would you be willing to right something about this and maybe how it affects or interacts with consciousness? And doesn't gene expression change every so many weeks depending on environmental changes and state of mind? If I had a child five years ago and one today, I wonder how different their inherited genes would be considering they have the same mother.

@Equanimitize yes thank you. I think you're right