in defense of love, a bit overly sentimental but felt when spoken

we can move beyond dichotomy with andrea hiott, loving is knowing

in defense of love

[00:00:00] Hello everyone, it is February 7th, 2025. This is Holding Paradox, a diary, whereby I turn on the microphone and talk about the, the day or the week, tonight I just feel sad that everyone is hurting each other in so many ways without really meaning to. And I guess we can mistake that for motivation, or we can mistake that for some kind of a meaning in our life, but this is nothing compared to what is possible in terms of meaning and connection and love. And I don't mean love in a sentimental sense. I really don't. I want to defend love here because I feel we've somehow assumed that to be loving to one another is a sign of weakness, and that is a dangerous and frankly just wrong interpretation of what love is and of what kinds of power and meaning come with experiencing love and expressing it and being part of life through that [00:01:00] flow and that energy. It can be ecstatic, and I mean just walking around and seeing the world in a way that you thought you couldn't see it before. And this does not come from treating one another as if we aren't as if we aren't part of each other. The golden rule of uh, treat others as you would have them treat you. I think it's actually a very good, basic place to start. If we just look at the news right now, Who's treating the other person the way they would want to be treated? And, if we do want to be treated in this way, then what has happened to us?

Do we want to be treated negatively? We want to be treated as if as if we have no feeling? We all know that we have feeling, and we all know that life is scary, and Difficult and challenging, but also there's so much to life. We have absolutely not yet experienced that we could experience and we're numbing ourselves and we're treating ourselves in a terrible way when we move away [00:02:00] from love.

And when we think that saying such things are expressing humanity as a sign of weakness, that's the best part of America. My grandparents were were farmers and Very religious, and I don't think they would even understand what is happening right now. It doesn't even make any sense in terms of the way that I grew up in these very basic simple rules such as God is love, love one another, treat others the way you want to be treated.

 And as my grandmother and grandfather always said, your actions speak louder than your words. So let's just look at the actions right now. And how can we move towards love from all sides, by the way.

I've decided to try to just do these posts about things that strike me as paradoxical that we have to try to somehow hold in a different way.

These kinds of moments can actually be moments where we change and how the small Actions of our [00:03:00] day and the way that we interact are going to have big ripples and perhaps We've all been talking about wanting to change the systems Maybe this this is a way it can happen if we all work together to try to orient it or dance it in the right Way

it's an emotional time A lot of people are worried, a lot of people are excited, I think it's hard to understand that there's a good side and a bad side to being able to hold the paradox, to being able to see that Each situation can be read in multiple ways at once.

 That's a lot of what George Orwell and this whole idea of double speak and so on and many other people have talked about it of how we can sculpt our words or our actions so that they can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. From any position you the more aware you become of the landscapes around you and the more you're able to hold what seemed like contradictory [00:04:00] positions in mind at once, the more clarity you begin to have, and the more you can see what other people might not see, and that's only because most people haven't slowed down to try to see the whole landscape. So, I mean, this is just true in just about any situation but it can definitely be used in really bad ways, because, for example, that's something that's taught in a lot of rhetoric schools, right, where you, you learn how to use your words so that they can be interpreted in many different ways, and you also learn, or one can learn, how to give people the feeling that they want when they're with you, and then If you are ruthless, you can do whatever you want and just play, play the power of that.

And that's this kind of swinging back and forth that happens in many different areas of society today. Where we don't hold the paradox, we don't embrace it. We don't allow for the landscape to [00:05:00] hold all these different perspectives, because if we did, we would all know that that was happening, and we wouldn't be able to fall prey to all of these things, these ways where we sort of regress to calling each other names, or getting just so angry at one another.

It's hard not to and, not that anger is bad. I remember a friend of mine said to me once, there's a difference between anger and anger. and indigen indigence, is that how you say the word? Indigence? So you can have positive anger, that's something you can channel when you understand that it's coming because someone's been hurt or because you really feel something deeply and you want to stand up for it stand, I don't think any of us should be passive.

If anything, we need to be more proactive or more confident, more active however, it really, really is hard to watch us take sides in such a [00:06:00] dramatic way that we are really becoming, it feels almost as if it's okay to be a bad person. And it feels almost as if people have forgotten how There is a whole other way to be alive We almost need drugs now just to be able to refill that again But actually the drugs are so that's such a lesser quality of it remember, there is something amazing about being alive when you are being a so called good person.

Not just because you want to be a good person, but the best moments of our lives are when we're in that moment of connection with another person. When we're feeling love with them. I don't mean romance movie kind of love, I mean this kind of love that you feel maybe sometimes when you're out in nature or you've gone on a long walk.

I mean I felt it today when I was on a long walk and it was this kind of misty air and it was at night and the colors were all sort of glowing and I was near the water and there's this kind of van Gogh [00:07:00] or van Gogh reflections on the water because I'm here in the Netherlands. And, there's just this, something floods you, and you feel it in moments when you help another person, sometimes just by accident, or something on the street where you just have a little interaction, and there's some goodness in there.

I mean, goodness is Not the right word, but you know what I mean. This is on the side of connection and not on the side of Believing that the world is so easy to understand that we can just do what we have to do, be ruthless, hate one another, gosh language really is hard on this because being a bad person is is not really it's too It's also too binary in the exact way that I'm trying not to be but we we've gotten confused And that includes the people that are confusing us.

They are also confused. Nobody is really evil It's just [00:08:00] we're becoming more and more Likely to be because we've forgotten what real power is what true connection and love Actually that that's so powerful and it's such a wonderful way to be in the world. It's a completely different state of living It's for any of you have done drugs and had a Psychedelic experience real life can be like this and even better We can really go to different places together. I don't even do drugs, by the way, but I just know it from my own experience, and it doesn't mean I'm walking around in this state all the time. I get frustrated, I have the same sorts of rollercoaster emotions about everything going on. But I understand that there's a different reality to it. And it really does feel like we're so caught up and focused on things that aren't even real. They're not even real. And it, maybe it's because we're, or these people, or all of us are afraid to die. [00:09:00] Maybe we're afraid that we're so attached to the story we've created of ourselves and We need to somehow find a way to make that as visible as possible. maybe it's connected to the fact that we're all going to die.

And that's a really hard thing to. But I, I think we're missing something because I really think there's a whole other opportunity that we have in life. And there's so many amazing, smart people right now, all around us. Just imagine if this brain power and this intelligence, because it really is intelligence, and this, Charisma and this Strength that is on so many different sides and people who've gone through so much and are still strong and still fighting the good fight And actually still being really good people most of the time helping one another loving one another I wonder if all of these people and all of their skills and all the power and all this wisdom Cool stuff [00:10:00] we've created with technology and Gosh, there's just so many wonderful things.

What if we actually use that to Experience the world in a different way What if we focused on some kind of technology, social technology, if you want to call it that, that actually isn't technology at all, but is taking our embodied possibilities somewhere else. I think a lot of people are excited about psychedelics precisely because of this reason.

Something is beckoning to us. There is another vision out there. That's calling to us that's possible now because of how intelligent we are because of all this technology because we're beginning to understand that we're part of a larger life and we're Here for that life part of that life and that includes one another That includes a lot that we maybe don't even notice right now [00:11:00] or I do think there's some kind of shift happening.

We can live in a new way. And life can be you know, when it's dripping with color, you're so glad to be in that moment, and you're, you just feel you're in the flow, and you're sort of so present, though, and moving as part of life. And I think that's, you know, That's a portal that's taking us somewhere.

It's already late tonight, but I think I'll talk about Threshold Vision and Blake William Blake and post that. But tonight I just, I just wanted to ramble on about this to see if anyone else has these feelings of just wishing someone out there would be able to hold this space publicly. I don't even think when they go low, we go high.

I think that's still a wonderful statement. But even that, we need a complex system idea of that. You know, [00:12:00] not only high and low, but opening all the dimensions. We need fracticality I just would love to see someone strong enough in public. To be able to hold that space, to be able to, even in the face of all this craziness, hold that space and yet still be vocal, still be fearless, still be confident.

What does that mean? What does that really mean? I mean, I should try to live it myself, but what would I do, how would I be in the world if I could be that person, if I could hold that space? That's the question I'm asking myself tonight, and That's what I hope to find some sort of well, threshold vision relative to

good night everybody. Hope you're doing well wherever you are, and I send you a lot of love.

we can love beyond dichotomy, love is what holds us even when we cannot feel it