Based on Love

"I wonder if people see that I'm changed. Maybe from outside, it just looks like I'm walking slowly, and I'm in a strange state. But I'm carried away by this affect. I'm walking without aim in this small parking lot. I'm quite close to that sensation in my dreams when I'm lifted by a strange and very familiar force and start to float. I see differently. There is beauty around, except for the big bushes here, they are very dark, I feel their darkness. It acts on my skin. I'm turning around to let my body catch more. Darkness is everywhere now. Beautiful darkness. The shadows of things are more present than usual. The trees around this parking lot are shaped mainly by their shadows. My shadows send shivers on my spine and the entire body. My body moves slowly to capture these dark affects. I see why Don Juan said to Castaneda that shadows are much more than what they seem. I'm connected with my shadow for the first time in my life. Sometimes, depending on my distance from the lighting poles, it disappears and I pick another one."(note from inside Love practice) 

Some spiritual traditions talk about a fear & control vs love dynamic, we always have the choice between the two sides and everything is decided by that. It might be a simplistic view, but it is surprisingly actual now, when our lives and politics are so much fear & control based. Although "fear" is somehow twisted to mean "love". The twist is possible because "love" is exhausted and perverted, it can mean anything, from sex to empty corporate "care" slogans. What is disappearing from "love" is the actual body experience of it. From everyday actions, to contemporary dance and performance, the default perspective is of a body as instrument, as tool. We control and put our bodies to work, to do things, to create images, to express ideas, we discipline and choreograph them. Love reverses these deep cultural tendencies and goes the other way, from body to mind. From body as matter, image and representation to body as affect, as "love body".

There is a correspondence and influence between the body's politics and society's problems. The apocalyptic exploitation and control of the planet starts with the control of the body, out of fear and of a "safety first" mentality. Any radical, meaningful change, political or not, has to start at its roots, at the levels of embodiment of the cultural and political. The habits of interacting with the world are the ones developed in relation with our own bodies. Do we listen to them, or do we just impose our will on them? We can replace "body" with "nature", and we get our ecological mindset. Ecology is an expansion of the internal ecology. Nature, reality start there. Ecological is to listen, anti ecological is to control. Fear makes you want to control, love to embrace. The "eco solutions" become increasingly irrational, more domination and control over the environment, more unloving into the world. At the base of the climate crisis and of the new normal, is instrumental, use-oriented thinking based on an attack upon the environment, on the assumption that our life should be at the expense of others. 

The same anti-ecological paradigm shapes medicine. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, vaccines, antivirals, other drugs and the lack of human contact destroys our body ecology, our immunity. The resulting allergies, autoimmune disorders and chronic diseases can be much worse than the infectious disease that we're fighting. When we are at war with bacteria and viruses, we are at war with our own bodies. From too much eagerness to fight microbial life, we end up fighting ourselves. 

Instead of an antibiotic approach, we can go for coexistence. Even now, we can choose to trust each other and the power of our community, that we each have a role in building immunity together. This would be an ecological mentality, that we're together in an ecosystem and germs are very much part of it, are very much part of our bodies for that matter. In general, microbial lifeforms are not our enemies. We cannot survive without them. We are viruses and bacteria, more than human cells. We coexisted and survived with respiratory viruses for millions of years, and now we suddenly behave like human immunity does not exist. We should trust the power and intelligence of these ecosystems to regulate themselves, because, as studies are showing it, if we trust them more, they work better. If we listen and feel our bodies, ourselves in complex relationships with everything around, then we can start to trust this complex ecology and start to trust our bodies too, including their symptoms and diseases. Through an ecological perspective, you feel that things are meaningful, connected, happening for a reason, not just random events.   

"I stopped with the broom in my hand while swiping the floor. I started to move the broom differently, more like caressing the floor. It spreads the dirt. It doesn't matter. What matters is my new connection with the floor. My chest is warming up. My body got extra sensitized, and I feel the broom like a safety grounding. It's quite helpful now, I feel that I melt down. Now I try to be more reasonable, to clean the floor more efficiently, at least to not spread the dirt. I'm down on the floor. I'm fascinated by the pile of dirt, there is a lot of cat hair in it. The broom is lying down next to the pile, it seems like all three, the pile, the broom and myself we're at peace now, close to each other. A quiet moment. We stayed like that for a while. My eyes started to swipe the floor. It's like different parts of the floor catch my gaze. My palm touches the floor, and my eyes are stopping the swipe to be able to write this. The same affective connection with the floor is now also through my soles of the feet. I'm affectively connected to the ground through my hand, eyes and feet. The rest of the body is slowly moving to adjust to this affect. A slight guilt passes my mind now, because Eliza is continuing the cleaning. My body is slowly moving towards utility again. But something stays, I feel my activity now, the perception is different."(note from inside Love practice)

In our globalized culture it's more and more difficult and ridiculous to communicate with plants, fungi, animals and other beings. Beings become more and more on the side of objects than subjects. We started to see ourselves as complex matter and chemistry organized according to the (Newtonian) physical laws, as objects. Physicalism requires our most direct and the only undeniable experience, our consciousness, to be seen as an illusion. The presence of consciousness, of subjective experience, is a "hard problem". The solution, if you want to keep with that kind of science, is to eliminate it. Materialism may be the main reason why we stopped feeling plants, animals, nature, and we stopped feeling ourselves too. Through this perspective everything is objectivized, to be analyzed, exploited and consumed. In many indigenous cultures the body is "dreamed" or made of affects and capacities, immaterial. This perspective is very difficult to entertain in our globalized physicalist worldview. The radically different perspectives from other cultures show us that other types of bodies and worlds are possible.

We can protect nature because "we have to", because of fear of sabotaging ourselves, or because when we become sensitive, we connect with it and love it. If you don't have this affective base that carves you an individualized, singularized path, your next best step is to automatically follow the trend in your bubble, to act mimetic, to do what "you have to". But this produces alienation from one's own affects and capacities, from our bodies. When the inner love connection is not there, the perspective and behaviors come from the implicit authorities in our environments. The orientation becomes external, mimetic. Belonging to a certain group, identity becomes central. Congregating mimetic people around identities is very convenient for the power. They just need to be oversensitized to their supposed identities and oriented against each other. Divide et impera - identity politics. Identity politics creates social polarization. The human and through extension, the natural environment became divisions and conflicts, artificially created or enhanced. 

The identity vs love opposition is central in the Samaritan story. Following a feeling in his body, he helped a beaten-up Jew, someone who should have been an enemy or at least invisible. He's acting against the strong codes and certainties of his culture. This was an inconceivable behavior at that time. Giving this example, Jesus wanted to end the old rule based on norms and identities and to set love as fundamental – to open a new possibility, for a post-identity society, where our relationships shouldn't be based on identities and norms but on this embodied sensibility, called love. A possibility later completely perverted by the church and the rest of society.

Identity is affirmed in relation to the "current thing" that you are supposed to support, care and worry about, and in relation to the people that you're supposed to hate and cancel – the people who deviate from the "despotic empathy" (Irmgard Emmelhainz). In this environment, thinking and feeling become dangerous and are met with canceling. These identity based dynamics are strong enough now to make families, friends not want to see each other again because of opinions on a medical product. What once was in the domain of personal freedom, if and how you chose to medicate, now is constructed as a source of responsibility and identity. We're not allowed to listen to our own bodies, our own perspectives on body and health are not allowed. We have to surrender to the experts and behavioral specialists that govern, to "follow the science" identity, which means the Pharma experts, not the thousands that are very critical of them. Often, as in the above example, identity tends to become a core of irrational dark forces, impenetrable to reason or love. The identity enthusiasts can be like cult members, forming a mad society. The solution is not a fluid identity, this is just to play identity games harder. It's better to leave the identity games behind. There is something universally human in all of us, and the differences are superficial, we're all alike. In many indigenous cultures, "human" is extended to plants, animals and other parts of reality. 

Identity etymologically comes from a "state of being the same". To be identified is to be pinpointed, to be stabilized in non becoming. An identity is difficult to escape because every thought, every decision is part of that identity, they come from what you are. Identity is a trap. The way out is to follow, listen to some sort of outside, like some special dreams or feelings. Guided by love, listening to your heart, following your intuition, means exactly this, to have the courage to open yourself to extra-ordinary influences. To exit the prison of yourself, of your identity, of what you know. It's the courage of letting the unknown move you. It's what love always does, to get you out of yourself. Love ignores the identity games. Faith is trust in love – to allow yourself to be guided by love.

The current reality is all about eliminating dissent. The possibilities of thinking and experiencing are greatly reduced. The official narratives are protected with walls of rationalizations, increasing the separation from experience, and canceling presence. Social neurosis. Love means having the courage to experience, to feel the other, the difference, the alien. It's radically open and in contact with bodies, experiences and environments. In a way, love is a meta-perspective. And we need this, to be able to transcend the "divide et impera", the divisions of identity politics. Different experiences, perspectives won't feel threatening anymore.

"I'm in the street. I'm overwhelmed by this love. I have to stop. I have to make space for a passing car. I'm on the sidewalk now, moving very slowly. I may look like a zombie, but I feel the opposite of being dead, I feel very present and alive, like I suddenly see what’s around, and I'm connected, especially with the trees. I move on the streets guided by this feeling. Although the intention of getting home acts on my directions too. There is a general, universal love that I feel towards nothing in particular. My chest is warm, and I'm slowly turning around myself, and it feels like this warmth is traveling in all directions around. I'm turning the other way now and it feels like my body receives some subtle affective energy. It circulates through my body and waves of movement are passing through it. Somehow, my body affects the world. I don't know if it matters, or if it can change anything, but it's a nice feeling. Maybe I need to be able to believe more in this. And I feel the world in me, it's a feeling that travels through my skin like a charged shiver. I capture affects from all around. It's like my body is touched by everything around me. It goes under my skin as well. It amplifies, it feels like I'm possessed by love. That my body is affect, I'm moved by affect. And my affective form is in relation with other forms out there. I especially feel connected with the shapes of trees. It's like I start to finally see them, actually it's a kind of see-feeling, the eyes are involved, but it's rather affective what's going on, is not the ordinary seeing. I'm thinking that this can be my lockdown way of doing art."(note from inside Love practice)

The suppression of love is the main schooling activity. The main lesson is that knowledge comes from experts, not from your own experience. You learn to trust and listen to authority, not to your body's feelings and intuitions. Illich pointed out how the same type of disembodying powers medicine. You unlearn and distrust your healing capacities and put your body in the hands of experts, to treat it as a machine. Medicine expropriates healing, and death too. You cannot die your own death anymore. In your last hours or days, your body becomes a battlefield on which experts and machines fight for your 'life'. A desperate battle is performed like a grotesque ritual. This attitude towards the body, grasped from the outside through the experts' mediation, is similar to the exploitive way of relating with nature and reality, through norms and calculated ecology – you measure your carbon footprints, and plan ways to instrumentalize and engineer nature more, in order to save it. This is anti-love.

According to Illich, God's Incarnation brought a new possibility of a love based being, outside of norms and identities – “not under the law, but under grace.”(Paul). The “expanded horizon” for love introduces a new type of freedom as possibility into the world, and a new type of evil – to neglect or pervert this love. Against Christ's project of eliminating the rule based life, the church started a process of institutionalisation and perversion of love, its transformation into rules. The good, the love, the faith were transformed into norms, services and commodities. By becoming imposed, love, charity, hospitality become radically perverted, destroyed. This process was continued and amplified by institutions like school, medicine… They dispossess humans of their capacities and practises of learning, healing, creating. The power of love, of the body to affect and to be affected was constantly captured and diminished. Institutionalisation "deaden the heart and shackle the imagination", it transforms everything into anti-love. Medicine leads this process. it became a totalitarian religion, with its life-god at the core, and it made people acquire medical, machine-like, bodies. People got disembodied, the sense of themselves lost and the connection between people’s feelings and nature dismantled – "the poetic, performative quality of existence was erased and forgotten in field after field." Institutionalisation "deaden the heart and shackle the imagination", creating a world "immune to grace". "The felt body was replaced by the external observation and manipulation of the anatomized body." Love, the possibility of love, people's "own sensual nature" was gradually replaced by disembodied despotic feelings that were coming from experts, dogmas and mainly from the show. The core of our being, the capacity to affect and to be affected, to love, was replaced by a despotic emotionality. Our world became the negative actualization of the Christ, the culmination of a new evil that appeared as a corruption of love – the Antichrist.  

"I'm on this grass between the sidewalk and the street. There are some tree stumps and weird mushrooms on the ground. It's not the place where you will normally walk, but in this affected state it makes sense. Now I'm walking between the cars parked on the street, it also makes sense, because I'm not really deciding. It's this affect that guides my body. It's a big difference in walking on grass and on this cubicles now. They're quite hypnotic. The patterns correspond with my affect and somehow determine my walking direction. I'm lucky that there are not many cars passing. Love is not necessarily the best guide in this car oriented city. A car had to slow down to wait for me to free the road. It's a strange continuity between the cubicle patterns and the tree shapes. I'm just spinning slowly around, and I feel open to affect and be affected. I just had to let another car pass. I hope nobody calls the police. I didn't know why this affect took me out of the sidewalk to the grass and then here on the street, but it all makes sense, in the end is love against machinic, computational. My body feels to affect all this artificial intelligence around, the algorithmic bodies on the sidewalk, in cars, offices and homes."(note from inside Love practice)

There is a perverse mechanism of annihilating radical experiences. Instead of doing the experience, you unconsciously do a mental simulation of it. On a larger scale, this is what happens in religions. Religions are born out of ecstatic, radical love experiences, but in time these experiences invariably become prescribed norms and dead dogmas. Jung said that exactly that is the function of religion, to substitute the wild, dangerous experiences with some tamed ritualistic surrogates. And somehow at a personal level we tend to do the same with every important experience. Currently, "love" can mean just some positive, well-meaning attitude that we force on ourselves. Love as embodied experience and practice is completely something else. 

Experience pushes thinking. With the current obsession for safety and risk management, any mental "discomfort", and therefore risk of engaging with something different from the imposed ideas, is avoided, self(censored). Thinking disappears. We learn that thinking should be objective, disembodied, unrelated with our experience. Without embodying, what is called thinking is just a rearranging of external, experts' clichés. And this expert "thinking" is everywhere now, especially in academia. Expert thinking is always inside the fences set by governments, mass media and corporations. Without the primacy of embodied experience, thinking becomes computation. Body sensitivity opens the possibility of thinking. Thinking is not possible without love.

"I'm with the small shopping cart in one hand and the phone in the other, my body suddenly stopped my shopping activity at the fruit stands. My chest started to open and to warm up. I'm vulnerable, because I feel the place as extremely noisy and agitated, and the products too strident. Not the fruits though, I feel safer here next to them. I'm too affectively charged. Probably I seem lost, weird. I partially exited my state to pick some apples. Now I feel that I give myself to the world. I embrace everything. I feel sensitized to some sort of higher force. I understand why the saints in the icons are blessing like that with their hands, it really feels that there is some sort of energy spreading out of my hands. Some shoppers seem puzzled to see me like this. It becomes intense, I feel so much love. I feel that I disintegrate, that a sort of transcendence is imminent. That reality is just one possibility, the walls of reality are very thin. I'm ecstatic but also scared because I clearly feel that reality is a dream and that there is a way to open it like in lucid dreaming. That I could start to float, change the setting, the space, the time."(FF) 

Fear paralyzes the autonomy of individuals and societies. Fear is the main way of governing. Armies of behavioral experts and psychologists are working every day to inject more fear into our world, blocking the possibility of politics. In this situation, like in many dystopia and myths, love seems to be the only solution. Love is a radical outside of calculated possibilities, the supreme political and spiritual instrument. Ecologically too, only love seems to be able to break the present vicious circle of trying to repair the damage of manipulation and instrumentalization of nature with more of the same. Love can guide us out of the contemporary certainties, into a fertile unknown, creating openings where nothing seems possible anymore. "Love is as strong as death."(Song of Solomon) It's not something that you can simply learn, change is not enough, you need to be converted to love. As we saw in the case of religions, the paradox is that to follow the spiritual or religious ideas, norms and practices can be anti-love. Yet, we can follow the example of some saints and shamans to have the courage to create and follow our own love practices. 

Disembodiment and desensitization requires increasingly powerful stimuli – drugs, "exciting" things on screens… and this reduces sensitivity even more, and other capacities as well. There are all those studies that show that videos and TVs are bad for your mind, while reading, because it activates embodiment and imagination, is good. Screens are more and more dreaming for us. New tech like VR disembodies even more, because it dreams for us more. On the same line, drugs are manipulating the mechanism of rewards, are feeling for us. Of course, you can try to intervene biochemically, to force your way somehow in a place where you're not. The problem is that these shortcuts are not working. It's like you're not allowed to cheat, these stimuli have a boomerang effect, and they ruin your sensibility, your capacity to love. The states, the well-being, the interesting experience, the health are preferable to be consequences of thoughts, attitudes, behaviors, effects of what you are and do, of your process, of your particular embodied experience.

In our disenchanted technologized world, the mind is activated and encouraged over the body. Maybe that's why we all seem to need some tricks to slow down the tools that are constructed every day in relation to this world, our minds, and to give a bit of space to the body. Religions and spiritual methods were always aware that we, our minds, are in the way of body sensitivity. That's why practices like meditation and prayer were developed for quieting the mind and opening the body. 

Prayer and meditation seed in ourselves awareness, inspiration, heart, faith – the habits of listening and following our bodies, souls, intuitions, of relating with something beyond ourselves, beyond control. When we quiet our minds, we can start to feel, to be present. To be affectively connected with the environment. They're practices of love. Meditation instills in us the habits of living in the present, of listening and being a spectator to our own processes, meta-awareness. Prayer tells us that we should put our faith in something that is beyond ourselves, something greater. They're huge challenges nowadays. We're constantly trained to control stuff and to believe in reason only. Or maybe we cannot believe in anything and reason is all that's left. 

"I was reading this book and my attention shifted to the way my hand is touching it, with affection I would say. It's a nice book, but in my current state it's difficult to read. It's very pleasant the way it is attached to my hand. My eyes are seeing the pages in their entirety, the text as abstract images. This situation extends to the other hand. The keyboard and the phone are becoming blurry too, the writing difficult. This might extend to you as well, affecting your relationship with this text. For a while it was impossible to write. Now I'm partially back. Some words in the book just catch my attention randomly, I read them individually, as stand alone meaningful. For, to, unknowing, shadow, by, overlooked, shape, incorporates, wave, else, and. I started to slowly walk with my two objects, trying to focus on writing this. Now that I said this, I feel that I present them, and some feeling extends from them to the world. They feel charged, my chest too, and this feeling is going into the world, like in some icons in which the holy book is presented. I looked in the book again and this line jumped out to me, "the soul is actualized as a body in another world".(note from inside Love practice)

Love can feel as an affect between sensibilized bodies (human or not), a subtle sensing of the other in your body. We can welcome it or deny it, enhance it or suppress it, but love is impersonal, transpersonal, it doesn't belong to us. It's like air. It's not our air, it's out there, around us, and we can breathe it. Like an atmosphere between us. It is something objective that exists, a special affect that we can feel in our bodies when we're sensitive and open. Like an immaterial substance that permeates us sometimes, and changes our bodies. And you can be a little high, floating on this diffuse feeling. Although it's all around us, it's also rare, it needs a special sensitization of the body to be experienced. 

Love and art are both very sensitive to faith. You just have to believe in them. And the trust is contagious, helps the others feel that there is something there. Love-confidence, art-confidence, not self-confidence. Maybe the aim of all is to increase love and the belief in love. Maybe that's why so many times, love has something to overcome, mostly some other values and beliefs. Art is often about finding ways of overcoming control, the fall in ourselves, in what we know. About allowing the beyond of ourselves to inspire us, the beyond ourselves to shape our moments. It is about a certain flow, about letting us be carried away by art / love intentions. They're not jobs, not matters of discipline and determination, but matters of soul.

A love attention can be activated by adding an affective perspective to everyday activities. It develops as a layer added to the current actions and behaviors, a second attention that turns everything into abstract love. It cannot be provoked, it's not in our control. It's like an exploration, you're more of a spectator, the attitude is of curiosity about what the love intention will bring up this time. More interesting and often amazing stuff emerges than what you can bring up by yourself. In time, this love attention can create a love body. Love body is not so much about the affect that comes from the body, but it is more about the body that comes from affect. The affect is producing and moving the body. The body is love – the affective layer is primordial. 

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you have to satisfy basic needs before finally taking care of the immaterial, spiritual ones like self actualization. Love practice proposes that you go directly for the spirit, for following your heart, your "idealism". In many religions it's said that in this way somehow even the basic needs and problems have a better chance of being taken care of. In Christianity, it's a sin to worry, or a trap. It means that you don't believe that God will take care of you. It's a sin also to try too hard to control, plan, to worry about the future, God will take care of tomorrow, you should deal with the present. It's a huge problem in the world today that almost everything is done for security and profit, and out of some sort of calculation. In our world, it sounds crazy or naive to just do things out of love. 

There is really nothing more important than love. We all seem to know this. Love is all, we all seem to want it. We may like it in songs, in movies, but not in our lives. Because we feel that it will radically change them. Love is dangerous, it ruins calculations, expectations, plans, what we were supposed to do, our preferences, our stability, our order, it is the end of the world as we know it. Love pushes us towards the affective bases of reality, to follow our hearts and to leave ourselves behind. Love brings chaos. We don't want it, not at all. Better without it. Life will go on… Or maybe not, maybe when you block love the soul dries. Maybe the difference between life and non life is the difference between love and non love. 

"I'm in this dark hallway and I feel like kneeling, because of this spiritual affect that passes through my body. I'm here next to these colorful shoes. And I'm thinking that everything can become a sort of altar, and any space can be a temple. I feel like leaning on the wall. The skin of my hand is touching and being touched by the cold wall, and my face too. My phone is also touching the wall, it's the only way I can keep writing. But this is not just a wall now, it feels that my skin is in direct contact with the world. I transmit my warmth and receive its coolness. The wall is my limit, the edge of the outside. I needed this materialisation of the outside, I can relate better with it like this. I'm in contact with everything. I stayed like that until I fell asleep on the floor in front of the shoe altar. I dreamt that I went backwards and I was floating in a dense darkness, maybe falling as well, you couldn't tell. At some point my body was permeated by darkness and a somehow material fear. I was trembling because of this dark affect, and I went into a strange supradreaming state. At some point I found what seemed the right thing to do, to accept and even accentuate my state, my trembling, my powerful fear. It felt right, like I was floating on top of darkness."(note from inside Love practice)