yves commented recently and has me thinking. he said;

"There is no problem with this idea of spiritual as you have expressed it. The problems come from everyone's attempt to hijack our feelings in order to influence us. Religion, politics, advertising and the tangled web of civilisation try to hijack our feelings, just as pornography tries to hitch a ride on our sexuality."

this everyone that he refers to begins with the media. the pictures we are fed become our reality. we then cut and paste these images together for our own pleasure. the problem becomes when we make real people into pictures and try to combine the pictures with pictures of other elements of our lives and then close the book, as if to trap the images for ever like so many snapshots, to only open the book occasionally when we feel like it.

example; i dated a woman recently and was enchanted by her east indian beauty and her joyful attitude. we spent nearly five hours talking and laughing and i am planning to repeat the experience soon. she told me about a man she dated who seemed nice and they went out a few times. on the third date he wanted to show her something. he took her to a house and asked her if she liked it. she was impressed but he then asked if she would be happy there........after three dates. she was very troubled by that and asked me what i thought about what had happened in his mind.
my answer was that he had taken a snapshot of her, a snapshot of the house, and a snapshot of the life he saw for them and then tried to put them together with her permission into a scrapbook and then closed the lid.

it`s quite a common practice, and quite deadly.

it leads to people being put into moulds that trap them. some are willing to go into the picture at least for a while, if they believe that`s what they want. but it`s only a picture. it doesn`t move and flow and grow and feel and love and laugh and age and what if we want to have some human experiences and someone has closed the book on the pictures?

we all need new pictures every day. it`s hard at first, but then it becomes the only way. new ways of seeing the same familiar things.

what happens then is that it`s like falling in love with life each time you open your eyes.