Research notes are posts making a single point which I’d like to have in the database and on the record but which don’t warrant a full article.
How is experiencing love like drinking a milkshake?
From years of experience, I know that drinking something like a milkshake shows up as an experience for me when the milkshake passes over a taste bud.
And they seem to be located in the upper-back roof of my palette and the back of my tongue. I also have one or two in the back of the lower wall of my mouth.
So, in drinking the milkshake, the experience of it comes as it passes over these taste buds.
Similarly, in the impact on me of love passing up from my heart and out to the world lies the delight of it. I lift up and rest in the experience of that love, which arises and subsides, leaving me with a wide smile and a memory.
As with the milkshake, I get to experience the love as it passes through me, albeit going in the opposite direction.
You might experience love if you saw me beaming. It isn’t that you love me. It’s that I’ve reminded you of your own love and you’ve – perhaps unwittingly – drawn it up from your own heart.
You’d then think I brought my love to you. That’s true enough. But the lion’s share of love comes from our very own hearts. (1)
Footnotes
(1) The downside of thinking that I bring my love to you as the lion’s share of the love you feel is that it misconstrues the situation so that, when we have a fight, you think “he’s taken his love from me.” You then either withdraw from me or hammer me for stopping loving you.
It’s more probable that we’ve stopped drawing it up from our own hearts where it resides. If you draw your love up from your own heart, you’re independent of me.