Love Is The Answer (What Was The Question?)

[omega minimo]

The biggest lie is that another day of this insanity is just another day. Peace.


Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.


6 year old Katrina NOLA Hero, Diamante (walldude image)

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr.


Mother, mother, there's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother, there's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today, hey

Father, father, we don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today, oh

Marvin Gaye, What's Going On


Name your price
And take it to paradise
I can't stay here any more
And I've looked high and low
I've been from shore to shore to shore
If there's a short cut I'd have found it
But there's no easy way around it
Light of the world, shine on me
Love is the answer
Shine on us all, set us free
Love is the answer
Who knows why
Someday we all must die
We're all homeless boys and girls
And we are never heard
It's such a lonely world
People turn their heads and walk on by
Tell me, is it worth just another try?

Tell me, are we alive, or just a dying planet?
What are the chances?
Ask the man in your heart for the answers
And when you feel afraid, love one another
When you've lost your way, love one another
When you're all alone, love one another
When you're far from home, love one another
When you're down and out, love one another
All your hope's run out, love one another
When you need a friend, love one another
When you're near the end, love one another
We got to love one another
Light of the world, you got to shine
Love will be a means, yeah, yeah
Shine on us all
Know that love can save the day
Just give it one more chance
Lord you just can't let it stop Lord
Love is the answer
Got to be free to let love into your life
Let it shine

Todd Rundgren, Love Is The Answer

[MuseRider]

1. Love Love Love

Love is all we need. John Lennon/Paul McCartney

:hi:

Edit to add Paul

[omega minimo]

2. Lennon: "Reality leaves a lot to the imagination"

:evilgrin:

[MuseRider]

4. Until your reality

is a government that does not allow imagination. If you continue to be imaginative you become one of the enemy and we all know what that means these days.

I prefer my reality to be liberally sprinkled with lots of imagination!

I love your post. :loveya: The nastiness of the world right now is being set up and encouraged from the top, of course you know that thus this lovely post.

Wouldn't it be nice to approach everything in the world first with love for each person and respect for them? I feel like a cavegirl, I do not believe we have progressed at all from the very beginning. We are now acting with our basest instincts. Think where we could be.

Edit again to add...I am just thinking out loud after a long, hard day. Not sure I am making sense at this point, I think I will sleep. Thanks for your post, I loved reading it and it will send me to sleep in a good frame of mind. Thanks for that.

[omega minimo]

5. A sword that heals

"The nastiness of the world right now is being set up and encouraged from the top" and we are all drowning in lies. How do we survive that?

"Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals."

Martin Luther King, Jr.


We need a sword that heals, that cuts through the crap, that cleanses the eyes, the mind, the soul. We are enabling "the nastiness...setup...from the top" by playing along with it, battling it on it's terms.

Time to peacefully and lovingly say :wtf: :bounce: :rofl:

[MuseRider]

8. OK, I have not nodded off yet.....

We survive it by holding the dear things in our lives closer and making certain that we remain human, humane and reach out. I refuse to make others the enemy just because they are others. I prefer to love our differences, it makes life interesting and peaks our imagination. That is what I am trying to do. I have to admit that my anger at this maladministration pushes me into a very bad state of mind and I do feel much anger and hatred toward them. I think to a point that is a good way to keep focused but it does not work to further the work we need to do and it certainly is not healthy nor is it the way I wish to feel.

I have no idea, not even a close thought as to what that sword is. They have pushed us to the point that there is now so much hate and fear toward them that to initiate a peaceful, loving solution with enough people willing to become that movement seems almost impossible. MLK did it. Gandhi did it. How do we do it?

[omega minimo]

12. "initiate a peaceful, loving solution with enough people willing"

Hating them may be a distraction from asking ourselves why we LIHOP.


Sweet dreams, MuseRider :hug:

[MuseRider]

13. Hmmmm

When I am thinking my best I often have to really stretch to understand and respond to what point you are really making, you intrigue me. Tonight at this moment I am totally incapable of responding to that really interesting point. Why we LIHOP. Lordy, why indeed.

Once again I must edit, see my pitiful state? Goodnight to you too and thank you for your interesting thoughts. Have a good, long, peaceful rest.

[omega minimo]

16. Another day

Focusing energy and "hatred" on this group tends toward thinking that this started in the "past five years." This has been a long time coming. And the same faces are involved.

While the nation was :boring: ......... they gradually built up all the mechanisms that we all talk about NOW as if it started in 2000.

Why is the nation reliving Watergate and Viet Nam? or as Dean put it "Worse Than Watergate"? Do the American people have/take any responsibilty for where we are as a nation?

[MuseRider]

18. Good morning!

Focusing hatred is never the answer, it is a temporary motivation perhaps but it is never the answer. (I sound as if I am able to do this but my journey has only just begun)

This has been going on for years and years. Actually it is the nature of humanity I am afraid and has been with us since the beginning. I always thought that the point of being here was to learn to be more enlightened, to be able to overcome your base instincts. To be better. We have become lazy, incurious and encouraged to be lazy and incurious. Getting through the day to your evening beers and TV seems to be the American Dream. School is out Whoopeeeee! Now I can live. How easy it is to give up like that. Somehow along the way the basic love of mankind kind of disappeared didn't it? I was always taught that loving your neighbor was the starting point.

Hell yes it is our responsibility. You can't be taken advantage of for this long without it becoming almost as much your responsibility as it is theirs.

[knowbody0]

3. amen

[jen4clark]

6. Love, love love, love, love, love, love, love, love.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy.
There's nothing you can make that can't be made.
No one you can save that can't be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be in time
It's easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
All you need is love (all together now)
All you need is love (everybody)
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

-(Lennon/McCartney)

[omega minimo]

11. "There's nothing you can do that can't be done"

:yourock:

[unkachuck]

7. the question was....

....what would we like to see generate more wealth, love or hate?....there's too much money to be made with hate today....

....but you're a better person than I....love would include a Rummy and a war chimp and that's beyond my capability....

....out of Iraq, NOW....but they won't listen....

[omega minimo]

9. Love can view the existence of Rumchimp on the TeeVee screen

with the sound turned off :evilgrin: Who can stand to listen to the sound of any of them anymore? :puke:

I propose that the power of love =

[omega minimo]

15. Why don't Dems hammer "war profiteering"?

"....what would we like to see generate more wealth, love or hate?....there's too much money to be made with hate today...."

That is the name of the game. War is good for business. Who will point out that their country has been turned into an ATM machine for arms dealer royalty? We are living in the middle of Eisenhower's warning.............

Is the "post-911 thinking" that poerfully embedded? Is that why -- even at this level of insanity -- it's just another day?

:kick:

[Cetacea]

10. "Just one candle...

...can light a corner of the darkness."

Roger Waters

Excellent post.

[opihimoimoi]

14. The Art of Enjoying your State of Being .. How to Enhance It to New Levels

Requires:::::??

[treestar]

17. Love your enemies

Since * is a Christian, does this mean he loves me?

Does Mann Coulter? Rushbo?

They must, according to what they preach.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

19. it's nice preaching but just so hard to practice. still, here's a 5th vote

[Hidden Stillness]

20. A Few Possible Suggestions for Keeping Sane

I can tell you several things that have helped me, things I realized or learned by experience that helped me understand that ours is the only way. First, you know that on the most basic level, we have to be constructive and trying to make things work--that is the Democrats' goal. The total difference between us and Republicans is that we are trying to build things up, make government work, and create a more equitable, fair society with laws and protections, and Republicans are trying to rip everything up, steal whatever was left, and send all of us back to the 1800s. The goals are complete opposites, which is why we can't "just act like them," "why don't we become as dirty and mean as they are," "we should 'frame' things the way they do," etc.--because then we could not possibly accomplish OUR goals anymore;we would be them. It is the difference between someone who wants to build a house, and someone else who wants to tear it down. You can't be "viciously" or "ruthlessly" constructive or helpful, or try to improve society with the attitude that "people are so stupid, let's not explain anything to them, but just lead them around by the nose with 'framing' slogans." You have to keep a respectful, optimistic attitude, or the whole framework dissolved. Theirs is the easy way--vandalism; ours is the building up.

I don't demand too much of other people, or myself, or everyone will get oppressed by it and give up and quit. I don't demand perfect love and service, etc., but just to do anything you are capable of. If you have so little money that you can't donate, if you have phobias so you can't run for office--whatever it may be--then you can do what you can do. Some people have so little that all they can do is pick up litter, and try to be nice and polite to people they meet; and that is fine. Imagine a world of people who did what little they could do--it would still be like Heaven. Appreciate what you have, so you don't just have this horrible feeling that you were "never there yet," always reaching for goals you can't get to, always losing and slipping, and all the rest. Those are horrible feelings, and if you can remember that you have some good things in life and that there are improvements, it helps.

I remember that just because they viciously attacked you, doesn't mean they got away with it and it worked. That is a real fear--that if they attacked you, you have to attack them back because they are "ahead," and sometimes that isn't really happening in the real world at all. Witness the Ann Coulter thing: there was a really great Larry King--of all things--last night on her sickening accusations against the Sept. 11th widows, and etc. She is so repulsive that she never worried me the way some others have. I have heard her before audiences on TV--once a few years ago on a live afternoon CNN program where she was so offensive, that the unscreened (key word) audience was really turning hostile, and believe it or not, the White House broke in to the coverage with a "terror alert"! It was fun. Remember, that hatred is repulsive, and always turned against. Don't let it be you.

People will never get to their higher levels unless they develop a kind of "first location" in their minds, where they really live and orient themselves, a mental place where the real influence and real basis of themselves is, their own framework of perceptions about things, and not so directly, and reactively, to the outside world of other people's opinions. People sometimes get too aware of other people's opinions, which then become a "problem" you are way too bothered by, and you lose the protective sense that not everything was the actual problem. People can remain relatively unchanged, keep most of their opinions and habits, and only a few key things are really relevant to the problem. You can be more casual about what they were thinking about every little thing, when you are not so reactive and over-aware, and instead push other people off to a kind of respectful distance, where you don't necessarily give so much thought to it all, because you cannot control other people anyway. I used to work at a place with rich, offensive customers, (I wrote about it on a thread here a while ago; horrible rich people), and worked with someone who didn't seem to be driven insane by these rich people the way I was. I asked her, How do you keep from getting really angry all the time, what do you do when they insult you, etc., and she said, "I don't react." That was it--I don't have a thought in my head, I don't react. Not "I have solved that great problem of the universe," because of course, paying attention to it can only make you feel bad; but, "I don't react." There is no other solution sometimes: learn what to shut out. You can't affect it, but it is not an immediate threat, so there is nothing good about thinking about it.

Just be aware of how appreciated and liked, intelligence and politeness is, how it impresses people, because if you have this nagging fear that their hateful way works and our constructive way doesn't, then you will be unable to avoid changing to their way. Remind yourself of all the laughing against Coulter, all the hatred of Bush, Cheney, Rove--all their poll numbers are permanently in the crap--and remind yourself that the most popular people on TV are still people like Oprah Winfrey, not these Republican assholes. There is a larger, wider world. Thoughts like this help me. Have good models to imitate, and think of their successes, like all these polls that show Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy as still greatest or most popular President, etc. We are the majority, we are the people, Republicans themselves are repulsed by the horror that their Party has become and are leaving it, etc. Know that we are the real way of things, and the real march of history, that we are being supported and will win, and that all the evil they do to us now will eventually be--every bit of it--the basis of the total turn against them. There are hopeful things to think about, and that always helps.

[omega minimo]

21. Sounds like Democracy

"You have to keep a respectful, optimistic attitude, or the whole framework dissolved." :evilgrin:

"I don't demand too much of other people, or myself, or everyone will get oppressed by it and give up and quit. I don't demand perfect love and service, etc., but just to do anything you are capable of."

"People will never get to their higher levels unless they develop a kind of "first location" in their minds, where they really live and orient themselves, a mental place where the real influence and real basis of themselves is, their own framework of perceptions about things, and not so directly, and reactively, to the outside world of other people's opinions."




Lovely post, HS, thank you.

[mandyky]

22. Check out "A Course in Miracles"

There is Love and fear and only Love is real. Fear and guilt based notions and actions are calls for Love, and when Love is given it is also received.

[omega minimo]

23. ...and Repugs are the party of fear .................. ..................

[omega minimo]

24. Bush in Iraq telling troops "Culture Of Light"?

:wtf: