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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Soulmate, Myself:
Omega Point

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Elenchus. Krissi, we have a new opportunity to address an important subject, but with better examples.

Kairissi. We'd like our readers to know that our following discussion is based upon two articles:

E. I find this scene very moving. The details were different for us, of course, but, in principle, this is very similar to what happened to us.

K. (sighing)

E. So long ago now, in your own way, you declared your love for me. You didn’t paint it red on a rock, but your intoxicated love and delight painted it on my spirit. And, once I acquired “eyes in my head,” a better level of maturity, to realize what happened back then, I’ve never been the same since.

K. (sighing) I guess I was like Erin. In the aftermath, I too mentally exclaimed, “You don’t like me?!” – in just that incredulous way.

E. You didn't do anything wrong. Before coming to me, you had a right to presume a certain sentiment from me. Your internal womanly “radar” had correctly informed you that, in the subterranean depths, I did love you. But I didn’t know this yet.

K. And so, it was a shock to me when you offered non-response. Erin demanded that her guy leave, and I just refused to look at you for all the years of high school.

E. What can we say about this to help others, and ourselves, understand a larger principle here?

K. We’ve talked about this before – in the “truth-goodness-beauty” writing -- and we said that “strange to say, love, per se, is not the zenith of the levels of consciousness.” But when we came across this example of Erin’s thwarted love, I said to myself, this perfectly represents what we were trying to express but, I think, failed to make clear.

E. The proposition that love is not the highest virtue or level of consciousness is so counter-intuitive that we could have ten articles on this and it wouldn’t be too much. So, please say more on this, Kriss.

K. I think we naturally want to believe that love is the highest mindset. Look at how the Bible extols it, and also our popular culture. But what everyone fails to perceive is that a sense of oneness is even more intense and potent.

E. What can we learn from Erin’s example.

K. Or, our own, for that matter. But, to focus on Erin – look how fast she pivoted from love to hate!

E. (silence)

K. This is the problem with what we call love. It requires a “lover” and a “beloved.” A subject and object. And when there are two distinct entities as this, then, automatically, there’s a kind of psychological “distance” between them.

E. Erin provides a good teaching example. She said that she loved Andrew, and we’re certain she did. But in this love, as with all love, there was a kind of existential distance between lover and beloved. And in that distance there was room for potential doubt, hurt feelings, misgiving, and fear of loss - all of the ego's dysfunction.

K. And how quickly that distance gave rise to these inwardly-focused pathologies, which turned love into hate.

E. Ok, but to play devil’s advocate, what if the love were more perfect? Some would say, well, what we need is God’s perfect love, and then it wouldn’t turn into hate.

K. Yes, we’ll grant that. If we had God’s perfect character, love would not turn into hate because God would have perfect control over the mind, and would maintain a view of love, even under duress.

E. So, is that the answer – we just need to become more mature and then we’ll have perfect love?

K. I think one day we will mature and we will have this kind of perfect love, but, even when we arrive there, I’m seeing now that this is not the highest sentiment, or pleasure, or intimacy, to be shared by lover and beloved.

E. Say more on this.

K. You and I offer affirmations of mutual love all the time, and we’ll always do that. But, when we do, we also realize that love’s experience cannot be compared to the intensity of pleasure which our spirits enjoy when we enter a state of “no you and no me” -- just as we inadvertently stumbled into that when we “first met.” The sense of oneness, with its resultant pleasure of intimacy, harmony, and union, was off the charts. And what we call “love” cannot compare.

E. In the “Touched By An Angel” series, in almost every episode, some hapless mortal is being informed by a divine messenger that “God loves you.”

K. “Touched By An Angel” means well, but the script writers, it’s obvious to me, had no concept of something greater than love. And so that’s what they talked about.

E. As we sometimes joke, there could worse sins.

K. Yes, there could be worse sins, but I will say this: Twins need to find that higher level of “no you and no me” or they will not, as we’ve asserted, “survive the terror of living forever.” We have to learn to put away the ways of the world and “live as the gods”, so to speak, to negotiate eternal life. The materialistic mind can’t do it. And what Erin – dear heart that she is -- was feeling for Andrew was just the ego’s needing-and-wanting. It’s not good enough. I know about this too well, as I lamented way back in "Prometheus."

postscript 

What is love?

Its mystery has been pondered and debated by poets, saints, and philosophers for millennia. And yet, we can know some things about it. There’s extensive discussion of love’s definition in “The Wedding Song” (also see Dr. Campbell's discourse on three different kinds of love); but, very briefly, let’s consider this:

Some of what passes for love in our hedonistic world is just bio-chemical attraction, Mother Nature creating illusions of fevered desire, doing her duty to perpetuate the species, stoking the "html programming" of one's DNA. It’s all very mechanical and ephemeral. This is not love in any meaningful sense, nothing more than a riot of mammalian instinct and protecting one’s territory on Animal Planet.

Some say that love is really good works, what the apostle Paul spoke of in I Corinthians 13: “love is patient, love is kind, love never thinks evil of another,” and similar aphorisms. Some legalistic churches like to reduce love to the observance of these precepts; for them, love is not a feeling but trying very hard to “keep the law of love" and to be good.

However, as God is “singular pervasive reality”, if God as Universal Consciousness serves as ontological basis of all things in the universe, then the life of God resides in everything – from stones, to trees, to organic bodies, to stars. Mindful of this fact, love becomes a sensing of the underlying, common one-life embedded in all aspects of creation.

With this latter understanding in place, we begin to perceive a linkage, a commonality, with all of God’s creation. And so, when we live our lives exemplifying the love-precepts of I Corinthians 13, we do so in response to this perception of an underlying one-life. Others are not foreign after all, not really so “other,” we’re connected, and so, in the spirit of Saint Francis, we commence to see, and to treat, all as “brother” and “sister.”

This means that these biblical platitudes issue from us not as an expression of will-power, of trying very hard to do the right thing, or worse, some authoritarian “law keeping,” but a natural outpouring toward that with which we feel an affinity. The word “kindness” offers the root concept of “kindred.” This is the natural agape love shown to ones deemed, and felt, to be similar and close - which would be everyone (though some will reflect our love more intensely than others). The feeling of love, the feeling of affinity, comes first, then beneficent actions, as consequence, effortlessly flowing to all. It is, as Jesus taught, the "sending of rain both to the just and the unjust."

Love is widely esteemed because of this perception of familial magnetism, a cosmic brotherhood and sisterhood, with all living in the house of God. Even so, the limiting issue of “subject and object” remains. And this is why “no you and no me” is a higher form of intimacy and oneness.