Welcome to CULTure. Now, there are a couple of rules around here…

Worship money. Make money. Flush the toilet. Eat meat. Wear make-up. Shave. Fall in love. Break hearts. Watch TV. Live in the city. Go to college. Love what you do, but don’t do what you love. Preach to the inferior; listen to the superior. Follow the rules. Criticize the government, but don’t try to change it or leave it. Follow the crowd. Be the crowd. Don’t question of challenge things except if they are already being questioned or challenged. Settle. Compromise your values. Get used to it. Accept things passively. Don’t accept things passively. Hate your family. Complain about your life. Make friends for convenience, then stab them in the back to get ahead. Watch the news. Look outwards for help. Trust no one. Demand nothing. Laugh when you are made fun of—have a sense of humor. Don’t be sensitive. Be loved/lovable (a projection meaning please everyone except yourself). Wear clothes. Stay inside.

Sound good? Then the status quo is for you! Hesitant? Well, there’s another option…

Welcome to Counterculture. There are also a couple of rules you should know…

Worship the East. Complain about The Man. Dance freely. Be naked. Act care-free. Practice free love. Love everything. Profess tolerance and non-judgment. Worry about the state of the world. Be angry and frustrated about the state of the world. Take responsibility for saving the world. Talk about consciousness, synchronicity, and community. Meditate. Smoke/take substances, or act like you do. Be a vegetarian. Play music in groups. Care about the environment. Start a movement. Hug everyone. Gaze at people. Smile at people. Resist anything mainstream or conventional. Isolate yourself from the mainstream. Recognize the divine in everyone. Share your feelings. Don’t shave. Don’t wear make-up. Demand a radical transformation of society. Trust everyone. Write in a journal. Make art. Look inwards for help. Believe that you are free and everyone else is asleep. Try to wake people up. Think that you are right and everyone else is wrong; they’re just not listening; they don’t know what they want. Call your life “this world” and mainstream life “that world.”

…Now welcome to Dominique. She has some guidelines (ok, rules) too…

Have an attitude of gratitude. Appreciate the beauty of nature. Balance stillness and motion. Listen and evaluate. Ask questions. Love easily those who are like you. Work at loving those who are different. Learn lessons, relearn them, and practice them. Return to the source. Do not harm. Love. Explore. Be aware and mindful. Breathe. Pursue home and community, whatever that means. Pursue those “yes!” moments. Write to express and reflect. Read to imagine and learn. Value love, community, family, freedom, honesty, authenticity, ahimsa, awareness, life/health, spirituality, now, and nature. Live according to these values.

A little dogma in everybody! Hooray for dogma! We are set on our ways until we change our ways, and then we are set on our new ways. Lines easily blur between sharing and recruiting, teaching and preaching. We are intolerant of intolerance. We give advice to those who don't ask for it. We try to change people and things that don't want to change. We criticize the dogma in others and are blind to our own. We tear ourselves apart trying to simultaneously save the world and enjoy it...

DOGMA IS A SOURCE OF SUFFERING AND INJUSTICE.

How can we best live our lives?

Much of academia aims to answer this question, usually by selecting one aspect of life and investigating its history and future, constructing an ideal form or purpose for this aspect and then theorizing about the necessary steps to get there. For example, disease. Psychiatry and science aim to eradicate disease (this is the ideal form), studying the intricacies and backgrounds of particular diseases, their causes, and their effects. Science then takes this information and experiments with methods to prevent disease. Vaccines. Chemotherapy. Surgery. Medicine.

My field of study is love; my question, how do we best love?

More than merely an aspect of life, love is at the core of existence. Its presence or absence early in life drives the way we interact, intuit, behave, think, feel, live. Love is a motivating force; more than just a feeling, love is an action and way of life.

Love is a way of relating: to ourselves, family, friends, romantic partners, God or the divine, and the environment. Through listening and communication, art, intimacy, healing, service, kindness, meditation, care, compassion, peace, nonviolence, altruism, truth, justice, honesty, valuing, questioning, activism. This is what I plan to study—how do we best relate to the world, to each other, and to ourselves through these various methods?

The necessary step to arriving at any possible hypothesis to this question is to stud love in the past and present, theory and practice, cross-culturally. This entails thorough research and reading of texts that theorize about love, tell stories of love, and provide insight on the intricacies of relating. Hand-in-hand with texts are classes—classes about love, value, development, meaning, literature, communication, devotion, activism, family; tied together by the common thread of relating. For example, I have learned through my readings the three categories of love practiced by ancient Greeks: Eros, romantic love; Philia, brotherly and parental love; Agape, divine and ideal parental love. Some of my classes will fit into the study of these three categories: romance and sex, family, religion, and spirituality. Yet to base my entire study of love upon one conception of it would only present me with insight within that conception, preventing any cross-cultural insight. To study disease, I would study many of its forms and manifestations. To study love, I will deeply immerse myself in as many conceptions and manifestations—and practices—of love as I possibly can. Both breadth and depth.

Within this open approach, I will study love through the lens of Feminist Studies. As a woman studying the way we relate to each other, holding the intention of changing the way we love, I call myself a feminist. I stand for the rights, voices, and fulfillment of the needs of all, including women, and I recognize the oppression of women in the history of humankind. Love is not oppression.

Love itself is a feminist and a humanist, for love is mutually empowering and non-discriminating. Yet love ahs a history of oppression and is also tied to the oppression of women. The norm of love that I was taught while growing up in Los Angeles was one that clearly did not empower women; it was one that asked women to sit patiently by the phone and believe in a modernized version of the cult of domesticity; it taught me that as a woman, I was not enough. According to bell hooks in her work All About Love, quoting author John Bradshaw, “ending patriarchy is one step in the direction of love.” Part of my focus in studying love will explore this: the tie between feminism and love, our learned cultural norms of love, and the ways in which we grow into or out of them.

“Schools for love do not exist,” bell hooks writes. “Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. Those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. However, this love often eludes us. And we spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do.” In school, we are taught math, science, English, history, and social science, but not love. This produces a cohort of men and women who are experts in their specialized fields—neuroanatomy, hydroponics, ancient Swahili poetry—and succeed in the workplace, but then return to their abusive, or divorced, or loveless homes, where they struggle to raise children, sometimes facing a midlife crisis, often using their work as an escape from the realities of home. I am not presenting this as a universal case; I am bringing this case to surface as a subject that needs urgent attention, solely because it exists. Before and while we even begin to practice being the best human beings, entrepreneurs, artists, and family members we can be, we need to study how to do so. These are my intentions. Thank you.

Ok, so I have at least a little bit of something figured out: The meaning of life is love. And since I stay away from absolutes, love is the solution to most problems. When you think about it, it really all does come back to love.

Step 1 is complete, because I've identified the source of everything. But, of course, this opens up a larger question: what is love?

During work today, I tried to narrow it down. Can you love anyone? My original answer was yes. But then I asked, can I love Hitler? I don't know, I want to say no. Can you love someone without knowing them? Yes, I sure do. But can you love someone without having ever met them? I don't know. That might mean you love the idea of them, but not them them. This gets complicated. I really didn't get much further than this.

All the while, "I Will" by The Beatles replayed in my head throughout the night.

So, I have a problem with love. It's wonderful, it's terrific, it's the best possible emotion you can experience. But it makes you so goddamn vulnerable. Really. Your happiness lies in the other person's hands. Why does it have to be this way? It makes my life so roller coaster-y. Unstable. Moody. And also a little hopeless, because it's pretty much unrequited love. And it hurts--the smallest things he does mean so much to me. He doesn't even realize it. So what does this mean?

It means I'm loving while expecting love in return. But I don't know how to do otherwise. Well, I can love apples and almonds without expecting them to love me back. So why not with him? Maybe he doesn't have to love me. He just has to smile...Ok, I feel like I'm not making sense, so I'm going to leave this unfinished. It flowed so much easier in my mind...

Alone. If I had to summarize the whole of my experiences over the past 3 months, that's the word I would choose.

As I sit on this bench overlooking the lovely empty lake (no sarcasm), I see both literal and figurative darkness, emptiness. I want nothing more than for someone to walk up and ask to sit beside me, to share this moment of depth and (classical, not hip-hop) music with me. To share my willingness to shed the masks and skins I wear everyday here, because no one understands. They’re not ready for me. I’m not ready for me in front of them, because I won’t be received, just repelled. Dominique, why are you so ideal? And not independent as you are supposed to be?

A friend. Is that so hard to find here? No, not the friend you share your dorm and hometown description with. The friend you share you with, what you’re thinking right now. I finally found it at home and didn’t know I had been seeking it all along, now I am here, cursed with knowing what I’m looking for. You have expectations, and they ruin it for you! Or do they? Well, they make it a hell of a lot harder to feel happy. The kind of happy you’ve felt here on occasion, home more than occasion. The joy of living, that quote you put on the board: “The joy of being alive became so concentrated in me I wanted to scream.”

Pity, pity. It’s so damn hard to express myself here. So much conformity. And at Stanford, of all places. See, there’s that expectation! The hip-hop generation. I don’t mind the music so much as I mind everything that it implies in its listeners. Followers, superficial, amputated from the old appreciation of the beautiful, the real, nature, love, kindness, friendship. And I use those words in the purest sense, not in the sense of love as just sex, kindness as boasted philanthropy, friendship as someone with whom you can make fun of that girl who listens to classical music down the hall.

What are people so passionate about here? I don’t see it, though they may have done a good job of portraying it on paper. As I look among the—still foreign—faces surrounding me in each classroom, I see boredom, sleep-deprivation, indifference, facebook. Everything but passion and compassion. Is it really there? I want to believe it is, but my idealism has let me down too many times for me to be certain. Does everyone have a hard time opening up, then? Opening up to me?

You haven’t tried it all; come to think of it, you haven’t tried much. Patience, something I used to have. It’s just hard to wait when you’re alone. Why so much negativity associated with that word? Oh, I don’t know.

Is no one else here a freak? Am I the only monster who wishes to speak in a stream of consciousness as frequently as possible (current f: 0)? Who wants to defy convention, to stay up till 3 not on the computer with her face turned from the breathing, living, thinking, feeling beings next to her but forming deep connections with those beings? Talking about the power of love, the “gaze” of the entire world, where all is impersonal and no one sees through your sometimes fake smile. But also about the poetry of life, the happiness of a single moment. The million judgments we make about someone in the blink of an eye, turning our backs to real friendship. How we are at Stanford worrying about getting a B in IHUM while instead we should be worrying about all the amazing, inspirational people we don’t know, don’t—but should—care about. After all, “love is all you need.”

We wouldn’t even have to talk about all that and the meaning of life. With the right person, talking about the weather can be (and has been for me) the most meaningful conversation ever had. All it takes is that eye contact, that simple, genuine penetration into the soul/inside. That level of understanding, just that we are both humans who care, love, and, most importantly, are not perfect. Just the acknowledgment that yes, it is hard here without mom and dad, with no one to take care of you when you are stuck in bed in excruciating pain with a fever on your birthday. Just a nod yes that our shoulders are there when we need the support (or somewhere to rest our tear-stained faces), that it’s ok to be unhappy here! Just a hug. I haven’t had a real hug in too long…

Why are we forced to make life-changing decisions at such a young age?

We have to tell colleges who we are on our application, what makes us stand out from 6 billion people.
First of all, we shouldn't be expected to know ourselves at age 16 or 17, let alone decide something that could shift our fate (if it exists) in one direction or another.
On a side note, it has occurred to me that every decision could "change your life"-- would our lives really be the same if we had decided not to walk this way or go that way? Where would we be today if we had ordered thesalad instead of chicken or the soda instead of water?
Second of all, we shouldn't ever be expected to know ourselves-- isn't that what we spend our lives attempting?

ok, so maybe I'm taking this too far. Maybe you don't have to solve abstract questions to really know what you want to do with your life. It's just that sometimes, the pressure feels unbearable, and I have no complete outlet. Complete because running is my outlet, yet it never relieves 100% of my aggression; the only way to do that is to solve the actual problem.
...But how can I possibly do that? I won't know until May where my future lies, and I don't even know if I'll figure out the rest (who I am, what I want to be, etc.).



an off-topic paradox that irritates me:

It is certain that everything is uncertain.

So everything is unsure, but then that statement is so, which means not everything is unsure, but then that's not even valid because the first statement is not certain.

Same concept:
The below statement is true.
The above statement is false.

It ties back to the question, who made God?
(God Created Everything, so God created himself? How can one create oneself without first existing? Can something really come from nothing, or is infinity possible?)

Signed,
Confused

"What is it my dear?"
"Ah, how can we bear it?"
"Bear what?"
"This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?"
"We can be quiet together and pretend--since it is only the beginning--that we have all the time in the world."
"And every day we shall have less. And then none."
"Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"
"No. This is where I've always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."
-A.S. Byatt, Possession

Time is finite, and everything is uncertain. We spend the majority of our lives participating in pointless activities that do not contribute to our persona, such as spacing out, dressing, and brushing our teeth. Our perception of time is distorted--we cannot perceive long periods of time, so we approach life in intervals, with the goal system, ignoring the fact that our time will one day run out. Why is this? Because our lives would not be as enjoyable if we lived under constant pressure and dwelled on the inevitable. All we can do is make the best of our moments- the meaningful, the dull, the sorrowful, and the exhilarating.

Two more quotes:

"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of." - Benjamin Franklin

"To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society is connected by a common thread: emotions. We are able to grow, develop, and mature through our interactions and relationships with others. Our ability to empathize with each other and perceive emotions is what makes us human. Love and religion are simply outlets for our emotions; methods for us to establish intimacy with the world in which we live.

In contemporary society, globalization has prevailed. Individuals now have access to the worldly news. This has caused the media to portray atrocities such as murder and suicide bombings impersonally and nonchalantly, since such traumas are so common and the human mind would not be able to handle the truth. This has made humans less human--when informed about the death of 10 soldiers, they are able to disregard it and carry on with their lives without giving the trauma a second thought. What we fail to realize is that every death is the loss of a mother, father, child, or loved one. How would you feel if the persons closest to you were to die? I dread this possibility to the point where my mind evades the topic. I share a relationship with my family so intimate that I consider them my unconditional support, my reason for living. Without them, I cannot even consider what life would become. This is the situation of each death reported on the news: the loss of a family member or friend. If worldy tragedies were portrayed in this manner, society would feel much more cohesive, and more individuals would contribute to the recovery from such traumas. Individuals would be compassionate and inspired.

Cognizance of national atrocities, and sympathy towards them, resembles white noise: the tragedies will always be there, but we will not notice their gravity until we make the effort or are informed in a personal manner. Then, once we notice them, we will not be able to return to our oblivion. We will be compelled to act upon our sentiments, to become more selfless.

just a thought...