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Notes on the nature of love Chapter II If we can imagine a time before creation began when our creator was alone in the Absolute Divine Being then we can suggest that the greatest desire in His being was to bring into existence other individuals who were able to share a living process with Him in as mature a way as possible. This attitude we may extract from the spirit of highest love, which we observe delights in the existence of others and in living an active expression of values with others. In this we are saying that the nature of love is such that it contains a series of values in the understanding of its being which are, as it were, its treasures. These treasures are living expressions and not objects, and so they require to be expressed in a life situation. And we are also saying that love would delight in the living out of these treasures with other individuals who were capable of responding to them and appreciating their meaning and value. It can be felt by us that Divine Love would wish to personify or focus itself so that it could behave as an individual towards other individuals. Then the fullness of its nature could be exchanged and expressed; the potentialities and possibilities could widen and widen in the context of love between individuals which we call friendship. So we can say again, that our Creator wished to have a number of friends to live with in a loving and learning situation. But let us remind ourselves that we are talking about the highest sense of love and of learning, and these two senses do not bear any close relation to a passing gratification of our sensual desire, or to the mechanical addition of concrete knowledge to our memory processes. These higher senses of love and learning express a sublime attitude of affection and gladness towards the unique reality of other individuals and the increase of understanding of one another. Such understanding may well contain some concrete knowledge, but this will form but a small part of the larger understanding of the treasures, inherent in the spirit, that one individual can call into expression for the other. So learning, in this sense, is growth towards deeper wisdom and deeper beauty for which any technique must always take second place. Let us also consider that individuals live together in two forms of loving when they are being true to their highest nature. The one can be thought of as a continuing ‘maintenance’ condition of united and close ‘being together’. The other is an unpredictable and creative activity which needs to explore and experiment, alone or with others, in order to achieve the enlargement of our knowledge of all things: whether in existence awaiting discovery or latent in the Absolute Spirit requiring to be expressed for the first time. This second condition of love can be called the ‘growth’ or ‘creative’ condition. We may agree that our Creator was moved to bring into existence this scheme of manifestation which we find ourselves engaged in to fulfil both forms of love which has an on-going, ever expanding need. Not a need which has to be met in any cold or calculated way, but a need that can grow out of the maintenance love of Divine nature in an attitude of delight, affection and friendship. The most fruitful and enjoyable friend the Creator can have is one who is truly independent and possessed of the objective understanding of the values which belong to the nature of the Divine Spirit. This degree of wisdom has to know why the treasures in God’s nature are treasured as they are and, so, this wisdom has to understand how these values were arrived at. Knowledge may tell us that such a condition is felt to be very good in the eyes of our Creator, but wisdom is necessary to know the full reason for that being so. It is as though wisdom has to understand the matrix in which all knowledge has it’s validity; so wisdom has to understand another ‘dimension’ beyond the dimension of knowledge. The friend that our God will delight in is thus required to be able to relate to Him in a mature way. This other being must therefore be a truly unique individuality, standing on his own feet, as it were, and able to express an original point of view towards all values and situations. It must also belong willingly to the fundamental integrity of the Divine Spirit, and the discipline which emanates from the need of that spirit to be whole and healthy unto itself. This integrity points to the fact that the Absolute must judge experiments by what can add to its wholeness with profit and what may be detrimental. It follows that if the Creator wishes to make experiments which may develop in a detrimental way, these experiments must be carried out in a condition which can be isolated, until the good can be sifted from the not good. Now it is a possible motive for creation that our Creator felt the need to bring into existence a ground upon which He could sow the ‘seeds’ of other ‘Beings’ who would then be in a position to grow out of their seed condition into a condition of consciousness. This elementary consciousness would grow in a partly guided and partly free way, in order that it should achieve self-consciousness, leading to wise and loving self-consciousness. Such wise and loving self-consciousness being a point of growth at which the individual can become aware that it has the relationship of a child to it’s Creator. This child condition may then continue towards a more mature situation as a result of further experience, and with the freedom that its unique individuality requires may be aware of its movement from that of a child to that of a mature Divine Individual; who is then in a position of detachment from the child-parent relationship and thus able to sustain itself upon the ground of Divine Absolute Being in a similar fashion to our God. Our God will have then brought about His great desire, which is to share the potentiality of Being with other independent ‘persons’ whose friendship is freely given. It seems that, if our understanding is correct, we must look carefully at these few salient facts that we have already suggested. Each one of these steps that we have taken in our discussion may well appeal to the reasonableness that we have learned from our own experience of life, for the feeling of like or dislike towards these arguments will have to stem from some resonance in our own nature which again stems from the nature of Absolute Being. Such reasoning will however require that we have already succeeded in freeing ourselves from a framework of reality which is confined to what is known as normal perception of normal man, which in our day has become biased towards a purely physical view of reality and has lost faith in the spirituality of life and of the non-physical value and identity of it’s Being nature. We who try to understand one another by these more philosophical means know very well how important it is to be able to life our nature to a point of detachment which is able to view in deep perspective such overall concepts and yet remain in sympathy with the whole world of events around us. It is most difficult to bring about an independent view of the possible nature of reality while still carrying in our consciousness the variety of all that is lived our by humanity. We become aware, through our various disciplines, that we often free ourselves from one set of limitations only to be held by another, such as too much pride in the discipline itself. But the time has come, we may feel, when mankind can only progress safely with all the knowledge and technology at it’s command, by being able to free itself from the thrall of such technology and its powers long enough to see clearly a vision of purpose which is resonant with the highest values we can hold and is not self-defeating. It is as if we have, say, three levels of time and value within our consciousness, like the hands of a clock on which the second hand is seen to move perceptibly the minute hand barely at all and the hour hand seems to be static. One attitude towards ourselves is entirely bound up with the quick moving and obvious content of life, while another is from time to time able to look at ourselves in an historical context which is barely moving, but, all too rarely are we able to take up the attitude of the hour hand which is outside historical time and within a more timeless world of principles. Yet we are also saying in our argument that we cannot take a proper view of the world of principles unless we can stand clear of the whole clock, upon some further dimension of reality which can describe to us a valid individuality but also needs us to participate in it as deeply as possible. The attitude of our Creator which we are trying to describe is one which requires the utmost from us in terms of individuality, maturity, friendship and wisdom. It is an attitude which sees us as potential companions in the endless exploration of the possibilities of the Divine Spirit, and this means in terms which include that which is within creation and also that which is outside creation; for creation we are now seeing to be a temporary ground on which the first part of God’s desire may be brought to fruition, namely the bringing to birth of new individuals who are both children and friends. The second part of that desire is that there should be more friends and fewer children, and these should then enter freely into the growth towards further knowledge and definition of what we feel to be the endless potentiality of Divine Absolute Spirit. Not because growth is an end in itself, which could appear to be the beginning of a sort of megalomania, but because growth is an intrinsic part of the delight and aliveness of the spirit we all share. It is this part of our nature which sorties forth from the maintenance condition of love and unitedness of our spiritual society, which we can think of as centred upon a family situation in which our God will ever be the most responsible and leading member. But if His plan succeeds he will at last be able to drop the name of God, for we will all be Godlets and He will be glad to receive from us a name and a place in our relationships which is more personal and endearing. Although we have mentioned creation and the life we find ourselves in here on earth, we are really still considering why there should be any form of creation at all or any life on earth. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely because we have experienced this life on earth that we may be in a position to understand with detachment and objectivity what we are achieving here which can show us the reason behind our Creators great work. In order to do this we will have to progress step by step through the principles that we can understand to be necessary to provide the best conditions to satisfy that which we feel to be the greatest purpose that love itself can have. In doing this we have to beg the question over whether our God is a God of love or not. If He is not, then all our reasoning will be thrown into confusion and we will very probably not be at all keen to known anything further about Him or his motives anyway. For we may all know for ourselves that it is only love which provides this keenness, and only love which creates a space for us to consider such things in which is free from fear. Let us then examine love and look at the type of love which is self-contained and the type of love which requires another individual to love before it can express itself in a living condition. In fact we must ask ourselves if self-contained love can ever be what we understand that word love to mean. We may well arrive at the conclusion that the term self-contained love is a contradiction of is own meaning, or we may temper this with an understanding of the relativity of the nature of love and suggest that it is in fact a spectrum of value with a correct attitude of non-self-containment at the other, with a consequent mixture of these attitudes in between. This latter suggestion is the more appealing since we observe the phenomenon in our earthly experience of psychology that one does not like other people unless one also likes oneself. Another way to express the last point is to recognise that we cannot give value to other individuals unless we feel instinctively that we are carrying sufficient value within ourselves to be the arbiters of such judgements towards others. If we lack confidence about the ground that we judge others from then they will feel this weakness in the expression of that judgement. When we love others, we are saying that we judge them to be loveable and thus to carry within their individual reality a set of qualities of great value. If we do not feel that we also carry those values in our own understanding, we do not have the means of measurement from which any judgement can arise. So self-contained love is one of the requisites for the whole expression of love, but on its own it would seem to be unbalanced and only a part of what the nature of love means to us. This other expression which love needs is somehow expressed in what we can call the confirmation and recognition of our lovableness through an independent other person. It is precisely here that we see most clearly that the value of this other need is not fully met unless this other person is mature enough to perceive our values and sufficiently detached from us to constitute a proper otherness. If there is dependence between us and the other person, the signs we look for in him of the expression of this love are bound to be clouded by the others awareness that he is dependent in some way. With the strength of full maturity and independence, this problem is resolved and also the truly independent Divine Person becomes a more fruitful source of originality. It would be as well if we could make a summary of these principles which govern the nature of love and which cause it to fulfil itself across this spectrum of its nature. For the principles may appear to us to be reasonably specific, and when we add them together, we may arrive at a much fuller understanding of what the term Divine Aspiration or Longing or Purpose can signify. The difficulty being that in our present human condition we confuse the simple phrase ‘Divine Longing’ with our experience of passing fancy and unpredictable desire which so confounds all our efforts to live purposeful lives. These Divine Longings for fulfilment are of an order of integrity, affection, creativity and beneficence that our imagination can hardly begin to behold. Yet try we must, or we will not achieve our own sense of fulfilment or be able to gather up the gifts of life which we are being offered.
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