Love and its uses

I've been privileged with many wonderful teachers in my life. One of them, Nicky McCartney, here contributes to this blog on the theme of Love and Its Uses.

By Nicky McCartney

Love is instrumental, but it is not an instrument. We often confuse the two: we try to use love to make us happier, to guilt trip and put pressure on others, to wheedle and bargain.  And we are often confused about what love is. It gets mixed up with commitment, responsibility, duty, romance, feeling good, feeling safe, being generous, cooperative, receptive, flexible. Love can lead us towards these things in its instrumental capacity, but when we try to use love to force any of these, we get victimhood and perpetration.

As soon as we try to capture and control love, the corruption starts. Love knows no boundary, and capture and control are all about boundary and the use of individual will for private ends.  Love has no private ends: it interpenetrates and infuses all of life. Love knows only oneness, the group. 

Our receptivity to love and our ability to be a conduit for it depends on our capacity for inclusiveness and oneness with a greater whole. When we are able to focus on the whole, and not just the parts that make up the whole, we enter the territory of Love. It does not matter how small that whole is. It may be the whole that is produced by 1+1, me + you, or the whole that is the manifested universe.

Love asks nothing of us except receptivity to it. As it infuses our lives, we are more and more bound by its law, which is the law of Oneness. This causes a slow but inevitable revolution in the way we think, feel and act. 

Material existence has its own necessities as well: those of categorisation, boundary, separateness, personal survival, time, priorities, different physical, emotional and mental gifts and limitations, physical and psychological developmental processes.

These exigencies define much of our lives, until love creeps in to change everything. The illusion of separateness and the divisions which serve it become more apparent. The eyes of love allow us to appreciate the multi-coloured, heterogeneous reality of the material world, while seeing and experiencing the source of oneness that binds it all.

Paradoxically, in the concrete world, love without power becomes weak and open to victimisation. Will or power provide energy, boundary, direction, focus, purpose and decisiveness: the very antithesis of love.  

Wrongly used, love and power are repellant to one another or bound by an abuse system. We take advantage of love's receptivity when we try to achieve selfish ends by directing our power towards the loving, receptive part of others or ourselves. This attempt to coerce, manipulate or ignore the right place of love in our decisions and actions makes us into perpetrators. Yet if these polarities can be resolved, the marriage of love and power produces empowered love and loving power.

There is power in a factory, power in the land, Power in the hand of the worker.

But it all counts for nothing if together we don’t stand. There is power in a Union.

There is Power in a Union song, version by Billy Bragg.

How then can we bring power to love, without violence? The only way is to direct our individual will towards our best understanding of a higher order good: a good that is inclusive and which seeks to do no harm.

The boy who decides to stay away from the gang robbery on the pretext of having food poisoning, because he feels that this is a step too far, may not be yet expressing empowered love or loving power, but he is pointing himself in the right direction. His fear and distaste for the gang action and his decision to stay away are early signs of a capacity to think beyond himself and to take action in accordance with a higher order good. He may not yet be able to articulate what the good is that his decision is directing him towards, but if nurtured by multiple such choices he may one day be an embodiment of empowered love or loving power.

His embryonic capacity for love influences his discernment and his choices. His embryonic capacity for power enables him to take purposeful action. When he brings the two together towards a higher order goal, that of removing himself from possible harm to himself and others, he begins the journey which ends with enlightenment.

Step by step the longest march can be won, can be won

Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none

And by union what we will can be accomplished still

Drops of water turn a mill, singly none.

Traditional song. Anon.

In the concrete world, love orients itself to and expresses itself through group relations. Our participation in groups, whether physical or virtual, on the inner planes or the outer, is the only way we have of entering love’s embrace. Here we realize something of a great truth: that all is relationship; that nothing exists outside of relationship with something else; and that Love is the binding ingredient.