Loving what is, including problem-consciousness 🫀

Thanks to Relatefulness it’s easy for me to fall in love with what is in myself and others, even loving what’s painful.

From this view, loving what is and wanting something to be different only seem like a paradox. The tension is pre-resolved when we look through the lens that “projection makes perception”: We must already be in love with whatever we’re getting. That means we’re in love with wanting (and not having) or in love with the process of changing things. Either way we’re in love, and we see that what my friend Hannah calls ‘problem-consciousness’ — the idea that something is wrong here — is possible only as a construct we overlay onto experience. We’re so free that we can overlay even the wildest madness… Even that must serve a purpose that we love.

In other words, loving what is doesn’t mean you like it.

I often live with this view. Sometimes I don’t. Recently I’m noticing subtle ways I have not been holding the variety of ‘problems’ our civilization is facing (that I hope UpTrust can help address) in the same way we hold ‘problems’ in a Relateful session. Nuclear weapons. AI. Climate change. Eradicating slavery (in practice, not just law). The “wicked problems”, hyperobjects, meta-crises, planetary potentials, existential risks, sense-making revolutions. The hard-to-define, interdependent, multi-disciplinary, all-quadrant, each-is-totally unique challenges.

How are these solutions? To old dilemmas, old threats, mistaken interpretations of what’s real and good? How can we appreciate and honor them, even as we give ourselves the freedom to let them go?

How are we already in love with these?

Perhaps like rock climbers—who define/create new "problems" as their capability grows—humanity is facing challenges like terrorism and mass incarceration not because we've gone wrong, but because our growing consciousness and capabilities allow us to recognize and address them. These potentials ask us to show up with more love, humility, awareness, cooperation and integrity than we’ve ever been able to muster as a species. Good for us!

So far this is observably the flow of evolution; each new form transcends and includes the forms that came before it into greater complexity, like the human brain including and going beyond the reptilian brain stem, or like children who master one skill and seek out something to take them to the next level. Yet this moment in history is extraordinary because unlike cyanobacteria, which transformed Earth's atmosphere without individual or collective self-reflective capacity, we can consciously participate in our evolution. Yes, the stakes are high—we wouldn’t find it meaningful if they weren’t! Perhaps they demand urgency—how are we in love with that? (again, loving what is doesn’t always mean you like it).

In a predictably loopy way, I think that this mindset of loving what is, rather than seeing the world as a problem to solve or place to improve, is a requirement for climbing these problems!

WIth love, Jordan