2 results for (book:notp AND session:774 AND stemmed:time)
[... 7 paragraphs ...]
I am not saying here that any given sexual performance is “wrong,” or meaningless, or debased, if it is not accompanied by the sentiments of love and devotion. Over a period of time, however, the expression of sex will follow the inclinations of the heart. These inclinations will color sexual expression, then. To that degree, it is “unnatural” to have sexual desire for someone whom you dislike or look down upon. The sexual ideas of domination and submission have no part in the natural life of your species, or that of the animals. Again, you interpret animal behavior according to your own beliefs.
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
The span of a god’s love can perhaps equally hold within its vision the existences of all individuals at one time in an infinite loving glance that beholds each person, seeing each with all his or her peculiar characteristics and tendencies. Such a god’s glance would delight in each person’s difference from each other person. This would not be a blanket love, a soupy porridge of a glance in which individuality melted, but a love based on a full understanding of each individual. The emotion of love brings you closest to an understanding of the nature of All That Is. Love incites dedication, commitment. It specifies. You cannot, therefore, honestly insist that you love humanity and all people equally if you do not love one other person. If you do not love yourself, it is quite difficult to love another.
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
Love itself seems to quicken the physical senses, so that even the most minute gestures attain additional significance and meaning. Myths and tales are formed in which those who love communicate, though one is dead while the other lives. The experience of love also deepens the joy of the moment, even while it seems to emphasize the briefness of mortality. Though love’s expression brilliantly illuminates its instant, at the same time that momentary brilliance contains within it an intensity that defies time, and is somehow eternal.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
This is difficult to explain, for these concepts themselves exist beyond verbalization. Some seeming (underlined) contradictions are bound to occur. In comparison with those times, however, children are now born ancient, for even biologically they carry within themselves the memories of their ancestors. In those pristine eras, however, the species itself arose, in those terms, newly from the womb of timelessness into time.
(Long pause.) New paragraph: In deeper terms their existence still continues, with offshoots in all directions. The world that you know is one development in time, the one that you recognize. The species actually took many other routes unknown to you, unrecorded in your history. Fresh creativity still emerges at that “point.” (Long pause, one of many.) In the reckoning that you accept, the species in its infancy obviously experienced selfhood in different terms from your own. Because this experience is so alien to your present concepts, and because it predated language as you understand it, it is most difficult to describe.
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
In those early times, then, consciousness was more mobile. Identity was more democratic. In a strange fashion this does not mean that individuality was weaker. Instead it was strong enough to accept within its confines many divergent kinds of experience. A person, then, looking out into the world of trees, waters and rock, wildlife and vegetation, literally felt that he or she was looking at the larger, materialized, subjective areas of personal selfhood.
[... 7 paragraphs ...]