A Christmas/Hanukkah Meditation on me and her

The person best defined as "Her" chatted her Christmas/Hanukkah greeting tonight just as I was sitting down to redo the graphics of my latest Kindle book. She mentioned a possible trip to India (she is currently on retreat in Myanmar). I said I would join her if the nook got good sales. She reminded me that she wants adventure, not romance. I did not reopen our continuing argument about this. It does not ever end well.

Her relationship ideal is to fall in love. We all like that feeling, but it can lead to bad relationships and codependency. I am more a believer in building a relationship with a friend, although that is more an ideal than a practice.

As a practitioner of Astrology, I instead look for compatibility in that realm (which is effective in arranged marriages and includes sexual chemistry).

The sad reality is that these approaches are exactly opposite (emotional v. logical) and both are objectification rather than love.

The key factor in building love is mutual respect. I had that with the previous "Her" and it was wonderful until we felt mutually disrespected. When respect is lost, relationship and lust go away. Been there, done that, have the divorce decree to prove it.

So, do I respect the current Her? Good question. Definitely enough to give her space. The entire width of the planet is a lot of space. There are issues we won't agree on, but respect each other enough to argue. We enjoy it and it is an essential part of a vibrant relationship (as I found out - see above)
 Still, we have basic disagreements. A big one being her extreme view of animal rights. I am a bit of a carnivore, which on the face of it is not a good match for a Buddhist.

I thought I had written an essay about animal souls last summer, but I did not find it here, so I will restate what I thought I had written. At the time, I was considering whether we could ever find common ground on this issue.

Her position is not unreasonable. Animal means animated, the definition of having a soul. Dogs raised with humans retain an adolescence because the need to kill has been bred out. Mediums describe departed dogs continuing to attend their humans like or as guardian angels. Of course, they also like meat.

When cloned protein (with cloned fat, blood and bone tissue knit together) are available, I will never eat another animal again. Until then, I have a Ribeye in the fridge.

As I was reminded once on a retreat, all things have souls, not just animals. This comes from the Platonic ideal where the reality is the ideal, not the physical manifestation of it.

I am more of a materialist on this. My atheist friends (if I understand them correctly) consider such ideals to be memes, not realities.

My personal belief is that the soul is a bio electric phenomenon from Gastrulation until decomposition when the organized energy gives way to entropy and rot.

We have no way of proving what comes next. Stories of an afterlife are faith based, not experiential. Near death experiences cannot be real memories, because memories are stored in the brain. A dead or near dead brain cannot store them.

The search for meaning has met the microcosm in the idea that, because the smallest particles seem like datum rather than matter, our very existence may be a simulation in someone else's reality. God as computer nerd. We create God in our image yet again. Recent physics has shown this mot to be the case.

Some hold to a multiverse, where every possible decision becomes a different dimension. This is actually very egocentric, because variation occurs at the quantum level. The implication is that there are multiple similar universes which are exactly the same but for one subatomic particle zigging instead of zagging. Nonsense. Chaos theory takes care of that requirement (which is a straw man).

We do not and can not have any way of actually proving such things. They are as much an abstraction as God is. The inability to experience the ultimate reality of God is impossible in the physical universe. It is why we have both free will and why evil exists. Pure good is out of reach, although there is no such thing as pure evil, as this would be non-existence if there is such a thing as good.

The Christian belief (at least the neoplatonic one) is that God is pure Being, Perfect Knowledge of Pure Being (In the beginning was the Word from the Gospel of John, which is read on Christmas Day Mass) and Love of the Being of the Word (or between them). All three must exist for any to exist, or so goes the belief. What is as real as that they are as truly the ways humans experience God or God as meme. This is a distinction without a difference.

The point is that Love is the closest thing to God and reality that we can experience if we chose to do so. It is a choice we must make for ourselves. Our bloody history as animals shows that we cannot make it for another.

Buy my book on the National Debt so that I can test the adventure. The graphics in the print version are fine and the cover will be finished tomorrow so that I can finish publishing it. The Kindle version will automatically update any change, so you need not wait until the graphics are fixed. If you buy the print book the Kindle version will be free.

Why mention this? The human animal is wired to respect material success. It is a precursor for falling in lust. Any purchase you make furthers the debate on lust v. logic.