The Paradox of Relationship and Avoidance of Relationship

What we consider and call, "relationship", is, when discerned by feeling, exactly the avoidance of relationship.  Even in pleasure, there is the "low note" of lurking dissatisfaction and avoidance.

Both the feeling of relationship and of what we call, "avoiding relationship", are the avoidance of relationship.

It's all avoidance. "Qualified" relationship is avoidance.

"Unqualified" (or "quality-less") relationship, by definition and in actual experience, does not exist in the experience of things-in-relationship, which are themselves, aggregates of qualities.

To exist is to stand out.  "EX": out, as in, "external".  If it stands out, it stands out by virtue of some quality:  it's "qualified".

Nothing unqualified can be said to exist, or can be located by attention.  Attention, itself, is qualified by its objects.  No quality, no experience of attention.

Therefore, to seek, work for, or reinforce relationship or relatedness is to reinforce qualification, and to reinforce qualification is to reinforce relatedness, which is by feeling, recognized to be the same as the feeling of avoidance.  That may explain the difficulties of marriages and relationships and the frustration of perfectionism.

To reinforce relatedness, and its qualities, is to reinforce avoidance.

No action in that domain of experience, relatedness, can undo avoidance.  It's all avoidance.

Even this knowing fails to avail, for the same reason.  Seeking the "quality-less" event flavors it with the effort of seeking.

Only the tacit recognition of the common identity of avoidance and relationship pops one free of the dilemma.  "Tacit" implies felt, not analyzed out, by thought.

Feeling is common, or in-common, to both relatedness and avoidance.

Feeling persists and persists, by changing.

Feeling underlies all thought, all assessments, and all experience.

The feeling faculty is the substance of relationship.  It is also the substance of avoidance.

Feeling is made of attention, intention, memory, and imagination.  When those are awake, integrated, and balanced, they "go transparent".  Their qualifies fade into balance and are lost.

In that manner, "form is emptiness and emptiness is form".

But not otherwise.

To seek relatedness is to seek the very distress that motivates the search for release from relatedness.

Only integration avails, and in so succeeding, disqualifies itself from (or dissolves) the qualities of relationship.

No-seeking is not an attainment, but "what" is "left", or felt, an absence of both relationship and of avoidance.

The Stakes -- and The Call

 It's a choice between betraying the spirit of the Founding Fathers by allowing a criminal to prevail and to destroy the American Experiment in favor of self-serving authoritarian tyranny -- or temporarily betraying the spirit of the Founding Fathers by using his own weapons against him in an autocratic way -- as an act of service to the greater good -- as authorized by the Supreme Court ruling on "immunity".

One is a long-term betrayal of the higher values of this country and the other is a short-term betrayal for the sake of preservation of those higher values.  The difference is one of a habitual pattern vs. a deliberate, but temporary pattern.

How well does the metaphor of "at war from within" fit?  Old saying:  "All's fair in love and war."

Sometimes, extreme conditions call for extreme measures -- in this case, sacrifice of ones self-image for the greater good -- to beat them at their own game.  The motive makes all the difference.

It would be a great and courageous -- not "gesture" (which signifies only a symbolic communication) -- but course of action (which indicates lasting consequences).

The biggest problem could have been solved, when it was small.

It's no longer small -- and it has the potential to get much bigger.

Alito, Thomas, Trump, et. al., who are no longer "playing by the rules", must be neutralized, the sooner the better.  "Neutralized" as in, "neutered."  Outside the "rules".  The same is true of all who have been accessories after-the-fact.

Freedom without responsibility is the ideal of the adolescent; freedom without conscience is the mode of the juvenile delinquent -- and of the Supreme Court Six.

Orchestrated action, carried out.  That's where the courage is called for.