In love the whole world seems beautiful1. In love we see the beauty of a forest and look beyond the value of the timber. This love is a lamp that allows us to move toward a greater light that suns our lives. We begin to see hints of loves sacramental nature – hints of the fourth kind of love where matter and mystic do not commingle.
This is the love of poets. “The energy of eternal delight” described by William Blake. A hidden power waiting to be discovered.
This is the love of mystic poet George Russell2 who said of his teenage romance claimed “intense and passionate imaginations of another world seized me …. every flower was a word, a thought. The grass was speech, the trees were speech; the waters were speech the winds were speech.”
No wonder he wrote “I think o f the earth as the floor of a cathedral where altar and presence are everywhere.”
This is the world of the Romantic movement, where imagination. Nature is a “plantation of God” said Ralph Waldo Emerson3 and “standing on bare ground … the currents of the universal being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
But this our own creative vision – an allegory of a greater divine state. This love is empowered by our instincts. Jung described the instincts of sex, the instinct to activity and by the reflective instinct. A seed of self awareness, this reflective ability allows us to see beyond ourselves, to build societies, ensure our societies survival. Yet we are gifted to be able to replay the experience in story and drama, and even science.
It offers catharsis, creative and intellectual vision and meditation.. This love takes us beyond the moment to moment snaps shot of momentary pleasure liberating us to creativity. Creativity that makes empathy possible.
Yet in cosmic dance of creation, Maslow reminds us that there are basic steps from biological, security, social and ego needs required before we are truly reach self expression. As much as it tries, It does not stand outside of life’s realities.
It could be argued that we mostly live in a world of fantasy. Yogic gurus and kabbalist’s argue we reflexively respond to our world as the monkey mind urges us forward from one sensation to the next. Each sensation giving us a chemical fix in our brains.
So this is the world both of delight, and delusion, a synaesthesia of dance and colour rushing in. It is the love that can enthral or crush us. Like love of Romeo and Juliet it frustrates all who seek to control the uncontrollable. It can enliven or destroy.
But if it destroys then is it really love – or love turned to lust? Perhaps this is a love of beauty that may be described by the intellect and faith of poets and believers alike.
Or perhaps the answer lies in our approach, the questions we ask of love and the degree of balance that we extend to it.
Unless we seek the hidden energy within, we can continue to grasp the pleasures of a lover. Once we know ourselves, we see our soul mirrored in a lover. Once realised, Its creative ability can build to unselfishness and empathy. Unknown or ignored it can collapse into lust and sexploitation.
This is the love of Venus, Isis or Aphrodite. This is the artistic love of the divine feminine, called both pure and a whore, depending on whose asking. She is Kali who is mother, carer and demonic destroyer ….
…. and here we face a dilemma.
Love is a pursuit of closeness. Once achieved, it can easily become routine. Each day must reawaken the search to discover what is new in our lover. To yearn cross a chasm for love, to bridge challenges, to discover what is closer to our lovers heart than us and become it.
The problem in failed romances is rarely lack of love. It is that I expect you to love me by my narrow definition. This is why it is nor right narrow love and restrict it. Because if I define love to narrowly it will not meet another persons expectations.
It is because I want you in my life, the traits I would tolerate in a friend bother me when from you. It is because I love you that it drives me crazy. If I didn’t care then I wouldn’t love you. I could keep you at a distance as I can separate from a former school friend.
In the heat and intensity of passion, emotions are fragile and fickle – but that is what makes them exciting. If it never changed it would not be love – it would be security.
If you want stability, stay with your mother.
On the path of true love we arrive at a unity where artificial distinctions dissolve and we discover the whole person we admire – and in so doing we discover ourselves.
In a 17th century allegory called The Chymical Wedding, the hero climbs into the bedchamber of the Naked Lady Venus which is described psychologically by Esther Harding4:
“To raise the veil of Isis is to see nature as she really is, to understand what it is that underlies the manifestation of this world and of the emotions that so move us, to see them in their ultimate reality, not veiled by rationalisation or illusion. He who is able to do that and so face reality, becomes consciously immortal, or perhaps it should read ‘conscious of immortality’, for he has released his mind himself from the conditioning of time and space, and especially from the distortions of facts bought about by his own ego orientation.
The centre of consciousness has shifted from the personal ‘I’ of his ego, to a more disinterested focal point which embraces in its outlook a larger range and has in consequence a more detached attitude.”
Clearly this requires a balance of both passion and reason. Romantic success requires the creative healing, the creative growing of love.
But how, will be addressed in our next article.
Image: Love In Lights by ~kevio89
loving You by ~lovelybutterfly
1Much of this section is derived from meditations on Naomi Ozaniec’s The Kabbalah Experience’
2AE(George Russell), The Candle of Vision, Inner World of the Imagination, Prison Press 1990.
3Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, Penguin Books, 1985.
4Esther Harding Womens Mysteries, Rider, 1971.
