#andreas weber

Love is not a feeling, but the characteristic of a productive relationship. Failing to understand this is our great error in a time when all of us are chasing love as a life goal, but finding only an extraordinary lack of love, for which we then blame ourselves. Our misunderstanding of love continues to make this situation worse. A world in which love exists in fantasies but has no actual potency loses the ability to facilitate fair negotiations, bestow meaning, or produce anything other than purely monetary wealth.

Openness must always take on fear. Openness to the shadows, one's own and the world's. Openness means accepting the holes and tears without lamenting them. Having curiosity for what might come. Accepting that this world is a terrain of transformation, and that there is no transformation that does not also hurt. This pain is part of reality. Every experience is one of being wounded by reality, but also, unavoidably, one of being transformed by reality. And on the other hand, it transforms reality into something that is entirely one's own.

Today I would say we’re individuals because we’re colonies. My teacher, Francisco Varela, coined this beautiful phrase. He said, ‘as organisms, we are a meshwork of selfless selves’. We’re ecosystems. This microbial ecosystem inside of you is in constant dialogue with the ecosystem(s) outside of you. Your gut biota are continuously replenished by the stuff you eat because it’s full of bacteria. Your skin microbiome deposits itself on everything you touch. If you touch somebody, you exchange microbiomes. You don’t have a border. To think so is another bourgeois Western illusion. In actuality, you’re constantly blurring with the animate world around you. This is the ‘conversational nature of reality’ the poet David Whyte talks about.

Today, we know that bees can feel euphoric or depressed and that fruit flies suffer with chronic pain if injured. We know that plants feel, too. If you feel what makes you thrive and what is better to avoid, you are a subject, an alive being whose sensitivity to the tactile world means everything to its existence. We are only human subjects because we are feeling biological selves entangled in a web of biotic relations. Our humanity connects us with life. It does not separate us, as is the mainstream belief. It’s worth mentioning that animism, which says that the world is peopled by persons or subjects with whom we share a basic level of embodied experience, is supported by this new biological research. This is fascinating, and deeply humbling.

Want to share a line from a modern philosophy book I've been reading, the book has wonderful prose and ideas and I thought you'd love this: