Reconciliation is where two people bring their reality back to one another and with honesty and hospitality allow their mutual reality to dissolve alienating images. Only a mutual participation can effect this essentially transcendent movement.
One-sided imagining of the other is what alienated us and keeps us alienated. The one-sided reconciliation with imagined others advocated by new-age wisdom is the precise opposite of reconciliation.
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Thoughtless people protest malevolent dehumanization, while celebrating benevolent dehumanization in the guise of pity and worshipful dehumanization in the guise of exaltation or admiration.
We think exclusively in sentimental terms — for or against, friendly or unfriendly, sweet or mean — and miss the one thing needful: embrace or avoidance of genuine human encounter.
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It is possible to feel affection toward people in ways that protects us from love between people. These protections are valorized with the language of respect, individualism and most of all altruism.
“I only want you to be happy, and if I must lose you forever, so you can pursue your own greatest happiness and fulfillment, that is what I must do.” From one perspective, this is an act of the deepest love. From another, it is an act of a shallow understanding of love.
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Some things can only happen between real humans, but precisely there we desperately pretend they can happen within an individual. Love, understanding, forgiveness are three. We love images of people, we understand theories about people, we concoct stories of finding peace with the irredeemable.
Analagous counterfeits are abundant in religion: idolatry, fundamentalism, religious sentimentality.
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We whistle autobiographical ditties in the dark to displace the dread of who surrounds us.
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Other people exist independently of us. Yes, in a sense this is very true.
To the degree that we love we join being that exists beyond us, partly beyond our control, where we can be hurt very badly. Any parent who loves a child will confirm this. An unloved child will also confirm it, but in a different way.