Thursday 25 October 2012

Love and its uses II

Guest and friend Magi Whisson explores Love and Its Uses in the second special presentation on the subject in this blog.

By Magi Whisson

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The evolution of chastity" in Toward the Future 

These words by de Chardin herald the primacy of love as an evolutionary imperative and sound a beckoning call to humanity to enter into critical and profound relationship with this new fire.

de Chardin's view is supported by many other great mystics. Rudolf Steiner states in Love and its Meaning in the World that "the mission of our Earth is the cultivation of the principle of love to its highest degree by the beings evolving upon it. When the Earth has reached the end of its evolution, love should permeate it through and through."

Love stands as one of the deep creative powers of the universe. It is relational and purposeful as it directs and binds all forms of life towards a greater whole. It is always in service to forwarding a completing design, an ultimate sacred geometry that will hold all life in accord. Through love we can enter into a pattern of dynamic, cohesive, redemptive relations.

For Socrates love was a daemon, an inner god or spirit, an inspiring force.

Love is so known and yet unknown to us.
Love is fundamentally and intrinsically woven into human nature while also remaining transcendent to it.

Parents are often unbelieving at how much they love their newborn child. The immanence of love is all-consuming. Reciprocally they are profoundly touched by love when the child, in innocence and without scholarship, smiles in recognition of them for the first time. Love draws and binds people together.

We 'fall' in love when pierced by cupid's arrow and, for a period of time, the 'other' and the world around us is euphorically embraced. Destinies are brought together. New unions that will then need to be lived into life are formed. Love draws the future into the present, that which is yet to be, into time. Precursive love offers leadership, a pathway through the ensuing mystery.

Alternatively we may have matured the wisdom, or experienced the isolation and limitation of the single 'I' and will self-initiate the outreach, the opening towards the wider group, the 'we'. In doing so we open the door for love to enter - for love's focus is the whole, not the part.

Love can penetrate our life from the 'top down', allowing that which would otherwise remain transcendent to immanently enter our lives. We are graced and shaped by love's entrance. We are gifted by the gods.

Or it can be we who from the 'bottom up' recognise the pathway to right relationship and through our own empowered, conscious actions anchor love in the world. In so doing we not only create a better world around us, but also a direct relationship with love and, indeed, return a necessary gift to the gods. The circle of love becomes a returning spiral.

The quest of love is a long, relational journey towards oneness.
This journey asks us to resolve deep complexities of difference and unity both within us and without. It asks us to relingquish all that inhibits unification with the 'other' while standing true to that which is integral and essential to our own true self. It also asks us to hold relationship to a higher order of Life, a greater whole, that serves the interest of all.

This task can only proceed and mature through eons of time. Along the way there is that which could not or has not been met by love, by right relationship, and therefore a heritage has been created. The sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons. In Jungian terms we become bound by both our individual and collective unconscious shadow. Love is misappropriated and misunderstood, tied up with conflicting, unconscious wishes and desires at all levels. Without conscious, redemptive loving, perpetration and the abuse system continue with cumulative and devastating effect.

Humanity today has crossed an evolutionary threshold. For eons we have been sustained, gifted and resourced by the gods of heaven and earth. But humanity has now used up its quota of giveness and is now at a point in evolutionary development whereby it must become the giver and enter into a co-creative relationship with life and with the gods and all they issue. We too have to be the 'Gods' that sustain and forward the Life around us. The stars will no longer sing man into being, it is we who must sing the stars. It is time for humanity to act with empowered love.

Love holds a deep paradox. It asks us to surrender into the whole, while remaining integral to it. Love asks of the 'I' that it dies to the 'we' yet in doing so finds its own central life.

The hidden jewel of love is its inherent gift of return. This is poetically expressed by Rudolf Steiner: "One's love of another being will shine back into one's own self. The self will then be able to love without loving itself." Love offers an ultimate freedom with and from oneself.

Love is generative through inter-relationships in their manifold expression. Love is directed towards the will-to-good for the good of all.

May the fire burn.



 

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