THE 28-DAY VALENTINE CHALLENGE

The EIGHTFOLD PATH graphic novel is now finished. The last thing written for it was an essay by Charles Johnson, my collaborator. In it, he describes how we honored EC Comics by acknowledging that the ghastly little nasties they dealt out month after month were actually highly moral fables, using Via Negativa, the exaggerated negative example, to point in the direction of being a loving, honest human being.

Remember this term

##

I want to talk about love during February. It is, after all, Valentine month. Love is at the root of that five step process for awake, aware adulthood:

1. Love Yourself
2. Love one other person
3. Understand History without guilt, blame or shame
4. Avoid trolls, aid your tribe
5. Win with integrity.

Levels 2–5 make no sense if you don’t first love yourself, so we have to start there. From the perspective of the Warrior’s Journey, loving yourself demands that we ask a couple of essential questions. “What is Love?” is certainly a good one, but “what is Self” is better. It is CENTRAL. And while it may be impossible to use language to describe Self clearly, we CAN use language to point in the right direction…primarily through “Via Negativa” of a kind: describing what the Thing is Not. “Not this, not this” eventually gives glimpses of what the truth MUST be, even if it is disturbing.