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Notes on the nature of love Chapter III We are finding that the point at which we started our discussion has changed from one which many people would think to be absurd, to one which can stand a reasonable and close-knit argument capable of carrying within it the motivations that we ourselves have experience of in the higher and more valuable characteristics of our own nature. We may begin to suggest that the nature of love is now only the one sure thread that relates us to one another and to our Creator, but it is also the means by which we can at least propose a valid understanding of the motive through which creation was undertaken at all. In doing this we realise that we are by-passing all those people whose opinions do not allow them to visualise or believe in a purposeful creation or creator. But to discuss fruitfully the possibilities of the philosophical perspectives which we are drawing attention to, it seems necessary to confine ourselves to those people who already possess a wordless agreement of experience at this fundamental level of their consciousness. We can only ‘preach’ to the converted; but we are not so much ‘preaching’ as looking at an area speculation which we may not have felt free to speculate in profitably. The God we are trying to understand is a living God. There are many dead gods in our culture. The most common one is never described in any specific way and yet it is a part of the attitude which most ‘educated’ people bring to bear on our present day civilisation. This is the mechanical feedback god. This God is ‘given worth’ or ‘worship’ through the type of thinking which sees all the phenomena of life in terms of an endless series of computer functions. Such an attitude never admits to a state of true consciousness being present in any event, but only to a series of learned responses which are truly a form of machinery. In such a frame of understanding nothing is ever real in its own right but everything is an effect of one set of things and the cause of another and in itself is left worthless and empty. What we would take to be our own consciousness is not admitted by this thought. Instead we are taught that what appeared to us to be consciousness is in fact a series of electrical and chemical connections in the physical brain which compute from storage circuits the patterns of behaviour which have occurred to us. Such patterns are therefore the complete effectiveness of our identity so that we have become the sum of what has happened to us. Thus we ourselves are nothing but a playback system to other playback systems, and all and everything is thus made out to be a complex build-up of accidents which are remembered by the system. There can be no such thing as individual effort or merit in this ‘scientific’ system and there is no way that we can be creative. What appears in us to be creative is the result of circuits of behaviour which have built up to a degree that they then begin to give off, in a mechanical way (because they can’t help it), further patterns for further circuits. This is the dreadful and insidious picture of reality which knowledgeable men are teaching as the proper education for our day and age. I have used the word dreadful in the last paragraph, because what has now become a common, but often unspoken, attitude in our way of life results in the opposite sense of values to the ones which we arrive at if we believe that we do possess a non-mechanical source of consciousness from which mechanical responses to life situations can be eliminated. It thus becomes possible for me, if living by faith in my God-like reality given to me by the living God and Creator of all creation, to know that I am inserting a deliberate and intentional expression of behaviour in amongst other patterns of behaviour which are otherwise partly mechanical or purely mechanical. I can learn to observe exactly where I can inject my true autonomy into life and where I can allow life to behave in a reactive way, according to the mechanical feed-back response nature that it does possess. The point at issue is whether I have the ‘faith’ in my identity as a God-like Being which allows me to make my responses to life from that purely numinous reality of awareness and consciousness, or whether that ability has been crippled in me by the insinuations of the culture I have grown up in that such free and responsible behaviour can only be an illusion. It is the more scientific members of our society who have suggested the mechanical and accidental model of our life. Those who lead us in social and political matters ask a great deal more from us in terms of individual responsibility and problem solving; but they argue their case in terms that are almost entirely concerned with the ‘second hand of the clock’ view of life’s purpose, thus throwing us our of context with the deeper and more universal attitudes of our nature, which again are treated as though they did not exist or are governed by a system over which we have no control. These deeper attitudes can only come to us, as a means of solving our problems, if we allow the time values that stem from the minute hand and the hour hand into our deliberations. The religious and spiritual nature which deals with these more timeless qualities must be seen by us to be the heart and lungs of our whole body of life and not some strange aberration or emotional illness which has no respectable link with researched and proven data and knowledge of the physical and social sciences. We are not arguing against these researches, but simply against them failing to set their findings within the context of man'’ whole significance by which failure they often add to the fragmentation rather than the integration of our sense of purpose and value. The terms God-like Being and ordinary human being together with the terms Living God and dead god are necessary to define the position of victory or defeat which will inevitably stem from our faith in the one or the other. The word faith is often used as though it only applied to the spiritual and religious areas of life, but it is in fact the master key which decides exactly which doors we will open in every area of our experience. The scientist who keeps his attention focused upon the measurable elements of life is using exactly the same faith that the religious man is using to respond to the most ethereal levels of consciousness. The one is saying that he doubts all things until they can be proven and the other that he believes all things until they are disproven. Neither of these two positions of faith to doubt all things or believe all things are ever achieved by us. For all people unwittingly believe in many things outside their conscious area of faith. Similarly we all have unrealised areas of doubt in amongst our areas of faith. But faith itself is a very vital ingredient within our nature for without it we would not be able to put one foot in front of the other, let alone design a space voyage to the moon or compose a musical symphony. Faith says ‘yes I can’, and in doing this releases our potentiality to become a primary cause and cease to be a mechanical effect. In the spiritual sense it includes the ability of the Creator to act in concert with our own effort. In the humanist sense it gives full worth to our individual ability. In the sense in which we are trying to understand the purpose behind creation we see that we need both forms of faith. For if we are to become companionable to our Creator we have to have faith in the independence and worth of our own spirit, whilst at the same time having a similar faith in the spirit of our God. As individuals, our Personal God and each of us have to have faith, and that is in the Absolute Divine Spirit, the ‘Species’ that we have all individualised out of and which is the everlasting ground upon which we are able to ‘Be’ together. It can now be seen that faith is the fulcrum upon which action can be injected in an original and intentional way into the continuum of awareness in our own nature and the nature of others. Without this fulcrum we are only in the position of observing the interaction of behaviour patterns in ourselves and others. With it, we halt the stream of action and reaction that pervades our individual beingness and we can then express some comment that is truly our own. From which comments we become real to ourselves and to others, from which reality we learn to have a great respect and gladness towards each other. As we know, faith may be the key which opens the doors in our individual mansions and our Creator’s mansion, but because the doors are open we must not assume that there is necessarily anything ready to be expressed behind those doors. If our Creator had furnished all our rooms as well as building our house we cannot say that there is much space left for our own self-induced individuality, and without that uniqueness of our own making we can never become the valuable unknown quantity of friendship that is the delightful and creative potency we can hold for this Creator and our other brothers and sisters. For we must remember that we are offering this understanding of mature friendship as being the primary purpose behind the whole creation. We suggested at the beginning of our discussion that we were about to look at the possibility that our Creators great art would express itself in the ability to lead out our potentiality in such a way that it would gradually take upon itself the initiative to continue the process towards becoming more and more mature in character, ability, affection, friendship and integrity. This gradual and continuing process would be the one which would furnish each room as we learn to open and use each door. So that faith is the key to the proper use of all our other attributes, it is the prime mover which liberates our full sense of valuing, aspiring, idealising, dreaming and imagining, for which the rational part of our nature must learn to create the fitting means of expression. Such become our furnishings within the rooms we love to share with others, and such are the fruits of this university we find ourselves in when we learn to use it rightly. Yet we must keep before us the fact that our Creator’s rooms are probably many and very well furnished. Nevertheless it would not be wise of Him to introduce them too directly for such knowledge must surely numb our own efforts if it came too soon. But no doubt a quick peep now and again would act as a real incentive, as does the interchange between our fellow students of this great university. We are observing that it is possible that the great beauty and love which characterises the nature of our Creator cannot stop short of wanting to give to each of His children all that it is possible to give. This possibility depends entirely upon our ability to receive. But what we should look at most clearly is that the gift passes through the child-like phase, in which the parental relationship must be dominant and authoritative, to a mature phase in which our Creator is trying to withdraw that dominance and authority and replace it with equality and friendship. As we develop faith, together with maturity of understanding, so we become wise and creative and thus companionable to our God, which we can imagine this reward to be the prime motivation for all manifestation. However in understanding that faith is the key to our active participation in this growth situation, we will realise that it is also the key to power which may enhance or diminish not only our friends but also the Divine Spirit itself. Therefore in order to avoid the damage we might inadvertently cause, and avoid the necessary censure that the Absolute Divine Spirit must exercise in order to preserve the integrity of the Divine Species, our family, we must learn to exercise the creative and experimental side of our nature with the utmost responsibility. Whereas we can see that such responsibility is a proper part of the perfect love of friendship which holds us all within it’s harmonising and caring spirit, we must never forget that the express element in a situation of exploration or experimentation is one of detachment from the maintenance aspect of love. For only by temporarily freeing ourselves from conditioning factors can we explore into something new and it is just on these occasions that we are in the most vulnerable condition in which, for an instant, we may be obsessed with the excitement of the newness we confront to the extent that we override caution, integrity and wisdom. In that brief instant it is, unfortunately, possible for an aberration to occur in our nature whose effects spread throughout our attitudes like lightning, but, most importantly, without our being aware of the fact. Such a temporary disharmony in our spirit carries the dangerous potencies of disease which can cripple ourselves and can infect others. To the extent that we recognise this factor as a possibility we become responsible and can hold within our nature deeper levels of wisdom. But so long as we treat it lightly, then just so long will we fail to understand the whole situation at issue in becoming friends and co-creators with our God. If we are not of the Divine Nature and to those friends of greater maturity who share life with us and to that greatest friend, our Creator, then we are exhibiting signs of foolishness and arrogance which say, to such mature friends, that we are not yet ready for the greatness of the gift for which they are trying to prepare us. The points we have discussed can be summarised as follows: 1. Gods are both living and dead. 2. Living Gods are non-mechanical while dead gods are all mechanical. 3. Faith is a fulcrum. 4. This fulcrum is a point of ‘leverage’ outside the mechanical activity of creation. 5. The Great gift we are being offered includes our individuality, objective understanding and use of our fulcrum. 6. Such a gift makes us a ‘God’ and hence a companion and friend of our Creator. 7. The growth nature of this friendship requires of us the utmost responsibility and integrity. 8. The Divine Spirit must guard against the misuse of Its nature for all our sakes.
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