At the beginning of the 14th century in Italy, there was much political turmoil. Dante Alighieri, who had become a successful political figure at the precocious age of 36, was on the wrong losing side in a conflict and banished from his home in Florence. He spent the next 20 years in exile, never returning home. He suffered much. But through the suffering, as well as much deep inner work, he gradually gained the insight and wisdom that led to his writing of one of the most influential works in Western thought, the Divine Comedy.
The book describes a metaphorical journey, with the main character traveling down through many levels of Hell, making his way up through Purgatory, and finally ascending to the top stages of Paradise. He reaches the highest point possible for a human being, but he can see there is more, and he longs to glimpse the highest pinnacle. Because he is a living person, however, he cannot move into or see that highest realm. Yet his aspiration to catch a glimpse of the highest truth is so strong that his longing is fulfilled — not as a thought, but as a vision:
As I wished, the truth I wished for came
Cleaving my mind in a great flash of light.
What he glimpsed in that instant was that at the pinnacle of Heaven was not a figure, but a force, which was love. And his own deepest will and desire had always been drawn by that same love to the journey he was on, even before he was conscious of it. He felt that the love that moved his life and his journey was the same love that moved “the sun and the other stars.” In his vision, it is this love that moves the whole universe, and everything in it.
Five hundred years later, the great 20th century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead echoed this same understanding when he suggested that the mystery, the numinous, the sacred dimension may be — in some unknowable, unnamable way — “an all-embracing chaotic Attractor, acting throughout the world by gentle persuasion toward love.”
If this is true, then the love about which Dante, Whitehead, and so many of the saints and sages of history have spoken is still there, waiting for each of us to open into as our own birthright. But it is hard for most of us to believe this, living in our troubled times. Yet many of the saints and sages who affirmed this truth lived in difficult times of their own. In fact, the more troubled the times, the more crucial becomes the need for the profound love they spoke of and exemplified. Today, we definitely need it to deal with all the difficulties we face.
A vivid example of the possibility of living from love in the most difficult of circumstances is given by Viktor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. In his vivid account, Frankl writes about life in the Nazi concentration camps, and how a few of the prisoners transcended concern for their personal safety and comfort, instead spending their time helping others who were in need. Not only was this of great benefit to those being helped — raising their spirits and providing hope — but those who served others were the most likely to survive and successfully reclaim their lives after they regained freedom.
Another powerful expression of the importance of love comes from the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who also lived in difficult times and had a very challenging life himself. (Once he was sentenced to death by firing squad, marched outside, and only as the final preparations were being made and he awaited death any minute, was the order rescinded.)
In spite of this and many other struggles, or perhaps partly because of them, Dostoyevsky had a number of powerful experiences that gave him the answer he sought to life’s questions. This is one translation of what he said: “I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it with my mind. I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul forever … In one day, one hour, everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to Love.”
Leo Tolstoy, that other towering pillar of Russian literature, had a much more privileged life than Dostoyevsky, but also suffered much, and through his suffering and his own inner work came to the same conclusion. Here is his answer to the deepest questions about life: “Nothing other than the teaching of love undistorted by false interpretations.”
He continues: “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.” Tolstoy went on to say that this truth is at the heart of all the great wisdom traditions, “it has been proclaimed by all the world’s sages — Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Greek, and Roman.”
What Is Love?
Any time we use the word love, however, it is crucial to consider how many meanings it has, and how little any of us truly understood what real love is. Part of the problem is that all words are fluid, their meanings changing from age to age, and even from person to person. And there is no word about which there is more confusion than the world love, for it has been used to mean so many different things.
The ancient Greeks studied love intensely and defined eight distinctly different types. One of the most influential philosophers of all time, Plato, thought that the goal of life was to rise through the many stages of love to reach the highest levels of Wisdom and Beauty, and eventually to gain union with Truth itself.
It is actually amazing how often the word love comes up in attempts by the wisest among us to give voice to the most profound level of existence. One of the greatest philosophers of the modern world, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote a book entitled Works of Love, in which he tried to get at the many types and meanings of that one word. And one of the greatest poets of the last two centuries, Rainer Maria Rilke, extensively explored the many dimensions of love (Rilke on Love, translated by Ulrich Baer, is a fine book that collects many of Rilke’s poems and thoughts on love.)
This list could on endlessly, of course. The British novelist and philosopher C. S. Lewis wrote an influential book based on four of the types of love the ancient Greeks defined, and a runaway best-selling book today is The Five Love Languages, which deals with the five positive ways we can express love in one-on-one relationships.
This focus on the importance of love is worldwide. A few years ago, a movie from India called Dil Se presented the seven stages of love through which it is possible for a relationship to move, based on the Persian/Islamic focus of the Sufis on love. In fact, Sufi literature is filled with images and stories about the importance of love, especially for the spiritual journey. Love is the central teaching of Sufism, and explorations of it in Sufi literature are vast and complex through the centuries.
The Sufi who best captures this for me is the 13th-century teacher and poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi, who has been the best-selling poet in the United States over the last 30 years. Love is his most constant theme.
There is no solution for the soul but to fall in love.
Only lovers can escape from these two worlds.
This was written in creation.
Only from the heart can you reach the sky.
The rose of glory can only be raised in the heart.
Wherever you are, in whatever circumstances you may be,
strive to be a lover.
The way you love
is the way God will be with you.
Why Is the Highest Love So Difficult To Find?
If love is so important, why does its full expression seem so rare? The first thing to note is that the countless wise men and women through the ages who proclaimed the importance of love did not say it was easy to find, or easy to live. To be able to truly love just one other person, according to Rilke, is a monumental task:
For one human being to love another:
that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks;
the ultimate, the last test and proof,
the work for which all other work is but preparation.
One of the greatest English-speaking poets of the 19th century, T.S. Eliot, said it was love itself, as the Divine force in existence, that creates the difficulties:
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame.
But why? Why do we have to have difficulties? Because, Eliot says, we must keep moving until we reach the final level, so love gives us difficulties to keep us moving and not become comfortable with where we are:
Love is most nearly itself
when here and now cease to matter
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.
Thus the difficulties are necessary for us to be motivated to do the work of letting go of our small selves, so we can finally open into our highest possibilities. Eliot again:
Desire itself is movement.
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Another way to get at the reason the highest forms of love are so hard to find and live is to consider Freud’s model for who we are. In his view, a human being is made up of the id, ego, and superego. The id consists of our basic instinctual drives, the superego of the ways of behaving into which we have been enculturated, and the ego is the individual “I” that tries to create and maintain a separate, individual life — continually trying to balance the conflicting demands of the id and superego. Thus, the ego’s very reason for being is to create separation from others and from the world — in order that an individual “me” can exist.
In Freud’s view, early in our lives the ego coalesces, forming a boundary between self and other, between the child and the people and things with which it has felt merged during the first stage of life. But the formation of this ego creates separation. Why? Because without this separation there would be no human beings as we know them.
In short, the ego comes into existence to provide an individual identity for each person. Each person having an individual identity is central to our ability to understand the very nature of what a human being is. Further, nothing we think of as human civilization would exist without the activities that have grown out of ego development and ego motivations.
Keep in mind that what Freud and mainstream psychology mean when they use the word ego is each individual’s “I.” And your “I” is not something you can separate from with your thinking mind — for the thinking mind is part of you, a part of your “I.” Understanding ego in this way, you also can’t get rid of your ego by thinking. How can you think your “I” away? You might have an experience in which, for a time, you seem to be more than your individual “I,” but you cannot create that experience just by thinking you would like to have it, for the entity that is having the thought is your “I.”
This helps to explain why all the great wisdom traditions say it is the ego that stands in the way of finding and living the deep love the saints and sages have spoken of as the true goal of life. You have to get beyond your sense of being “I,” and that is no simple matter, for that sense is firmly embedded in each of us over many years of development.
This does not mean we cannot cooperate with others or even take care of others. A separate ego can and does decide to do these things. It can even decide to make sacrifices for others. But it does so from being a sperate “I” that is doing things for another, a separate other. It is one separate entity cooperating with or taking care of other separate entities. Crucially, the ego almost always does these things from motives it perceives to be to its advantage, whether consciously chosen, or by responding to unconsciously engrained indoctrinations.
Is a Strong Ego the Final Stage of Development?
This brings us to a fundamental question: Is the development of a well-functioning ego the final goal of a lifetime, the final stage of a human being’s development? Freud thought this was the case. In his view, your sense of “I” can never transcend separateness, for being separate is what an ego is — and does. In Freud’s view, there is nothing more, and this view has been widely accepted in our current culture.
But if this is true, what are we to make of the many saints and sages who endured hardship and deprivation to help others? Why have so many spiritual seekers forsworn comforts and conveniences to pursue spiritual goals? And why have so many otherwise ordinary people through the ages sacrificed ego advantage for others, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives?
Further, many of those who have made these sacrifices have been the best and brightest among us. The saints and sages were exquisitely aware of the feelings and needs of the people they met, and chose to respond to the needs of others rather than to their own instinctual cravings. If most of them had been unstable or crazy, that would be different. But the exemplars of human history have been the ones most likely to choose to make these sacrifices, often saying they were acting out of a higher love — instead of being driven by pure instinct.
Another way to say this is that when we are children, we are primarily motivated by our instincts, some of which are loving, kind, and benevolent, but some of which are selfish and even mean. A central aspect of growing up is to develop a framework for choosing which instincts we will follow in any given moment. Some instincts do not lead to positive results, and we have to make choices as to which we will follow. Then the task is to develop the ability to stick to the choices we have made. As psychologist William James said: “We have lots of urges and instincts … isn’t it fortunate that we developed consciousness to be able to make decisions between them?”
The next step is to begin to open to the experience of levels beyond instinct and enculturation — and then beyond ego as well. The possibility of experiencing a deep connection, beyond the ego, has been proclaimed over and over by the wisest among us through human history. They have said that we are all connected, in some mysterious way, to everyone and everything, and that we are each capable of a breakthrough, a direct realization of this connection to that which is greater than ourselves — a connection to the Oneness that lies at the heart of existence. As Albert Einstein put it:
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as separated from the rest… but (this is) an optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
The Guidance from the Wisest Among Us
The saints and sages, then, are the ones among us who have reached the point at which they can choose, and have the inner maturity to stick by those choices, to put love for others and unity with something greater before their small, ego selves.
Before it is possible for anyone to make this choice, and live it fully, however, they must do the work to become fully conscious. And the first step on that path is to develop ego awareness. To gain the wisdom of the saints and sages demands that we first understand ourselves and our ego motivations, as well as all the tricks the ego can play to retain its power. Crucially, the ego must be involved in that process, for the ego is the location of the thinking mind, and many levels of inner work require thought.
This is the reason why, if you examine the lives of the greatest saints and sages, you find they went through much struggle to develop ego awareness, and only then could move beyond ego identity to a larger one. Only then could they break free of the ego’s gravity field. Only then did they experience a profound connection to others and to a dimension beyond anything Freud accepted as possible.
Reaching this level of connection with something greater than the ego self is the wellspring of the highest form of love. From a direct experience of it has come the spontaneous out-flowing of love, kindness, service to others, and the compassionate acts of the saints and sages throughout history. But these acts are not limited to them alone; millions of ordinary people have had special moments of this kind of experience. The difference is that the wisest among us have been able to stay in this place much of the time, while the rest of us only have these experiences occasionally.
Of key importance, ways to open into this deep connection, and the love and compassion that flows from it, comprise the heart of the teachings of all the great wisdom traditions. For instance, in one of the first books of the Torah, the central work of the Hebrew tradition, the commandment is given: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus then emphasized this teaching as one of the two central commandments for his followers.
Jesus also said: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” In Jesus’ teachings, to live this fully means what seems to most of us an extreme form of love: “I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” I have struggled with this radical teaching all my life, and only a few times been able to live it. Yet I sense it is possible to do so more fully, from a place of great consciousness and inner strength.
The Buddha emphasized the word compassion more than the word love, but I am not sure there is a great difference between what Jesus and the Buddha meant. The languages the two spoke were dramatically different, as were their cultures, and translation to English from any language is very complicated. Further, several times the Buddha used the word love in much the same way Jesus did. For instance, one of the Buddha’s most powerful sayings is: “Hatred does not cease through hatred at any time. Hatred ceases through love. This is an unalterable law.” And one of my favorite of his quotes is: “In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”
The Buddha also instructed: “Love the whole world as a mother loves her only child,” and, “Radiate boundless love towards the entire world — above, below, and across — unhindered, without ill will, without enmity.”
Thus, for me, there is little difference between love and compassion, and I think both the Buddha and Jesus were pointing to the same underlying experience. It can be useful to explore the differences between these words, for that can help us understand the feeling sense of what the words point to. But for the deepest understanding of what those words mean, it is useful to follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s insight and recognize that there is a spirit out of which love, compassion, justice, and many other virtues proceed — a background field that gives rise to them all. If you can open into an experience of that field, whatever you call it, you will experience the meaning and significance of all those words more fully in your life.
As in the teachings of the Torah, Jesus, and the Buddha, love and compassion are central in every other wisdom tradition. In Confucianism, the cardinal virtue is Jen, which emphasizes goodness, benevolence, and human-heartedness — a feeling of shared humanity towards all others. And in the other great Chinese tradition, Taoism, the Tao Te Ching says:
See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.
Kabir, a 15th-century Indian mystic, poet, and saint — revered by Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs alike (and perhaps the most quoted poet in India) — had this to say:
Held by the cords of love, the swing of the Ocean of Joy
sways to and fro; and a mighty sound breaks forth in song.
The flute of the Infinite is played without ceasing,
and its sound is love:
When love renounces all limits, it reaches truth.
What About Today, in the Modern World?
Most of us struggle to make our way in the chaotic modern world, but it would be a terrible mistake to assume that the teachings of so many wise figures through history about the importance of love have been outdated. Many of the quotes used so far have been from earlier ages, but there are countless quotes with the same message in every age and culture, right up to modern times. One of the most insightful psychologists of the modern era, Erich Fromm, had this to say after a lifetime of study, and of helping individuals with their lives: “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
And the modern Indian sage Swami Rama, one of first influential Hindu teachers in America, said:
“The most ancient traveler in the world is called love. Even before this earth came into existence, the omnipotent and omniscient power called truth expanded to create the universe, because of love.”
Of course, some modern researchers insist that love is just an epiphenomenon of the brain, generated by hormones — that it is only sexual libido dressed up in sophisticated garb. But no one has found any proof whatsoever that this is the case — this is only a speculation. No modern researcher has found or measured love in a lab. Not one can point to a test that shows what love is, or what its significance for human life might be.
Few people would question that our sexual drives are, at the first level, biological. But to say that this is all love is can only be wild speculation. In fact, the biological level accounts for only a small part of what most people mean to convey when they use the word love. Further, the theories that diminish the importance of the higher forms of love are accepted by only a small minority of people. Even this minority is made up of several warring camps that do not agree with each other.
Any real understanding of love can only come by moving beyond reductionistic theories, until you open into what most human beings have felt, and sense, love to be. There are many descriptions about the levels discovered in this process, but beyond them all, you come to a great open space, beyond words.
The great advantage of this open space is that when we reach it, each one of us is free to come to our own conclusions about what love truly is. As for myself, one conclusion I choose was suggested by Mahatmas Gandhi, who said: “I infer that it is the law of love that rules mankind. It gives me ineffable joy to go on trying to prove that.”
Gandhi’s statement, Alfred North Whitehead’s sense that the center of the mystery within which we exist is “an all-embracing chaotic Attractor, acting throughout the world by gentle persuasion toward love,” and the insistence of so many saints and sages that love is the central force in the universe, leads me to choose to live with the intention of opening into and demonstrating these teachings. And trying to live into a full experience and realization of love feels like the most noble calling I can find.
Choosing this path means remembering as often as I can my intention to make living from love the organizing center of my life. And Whitehead’s image helps me understand why, although love is all around us, we humans do not live by its energy most of the time. Love is a field, but we are not forced to choose it as our organizing center. It is a force that attracts us toward its orbit, but living from that energy requires hard work, for there is also a force within us toward self-centeredness. Even more, to create a life in the world requires an ego whose job is to put self before other. In doing its job, the ego only thinks of love as one more tool to use to get what it wants.
With effort, though, we can begin to align with the field of love that is all around us. To do this requires intention, commitment, and much work over time, because aligning with love requires gradually freeing ourselves from the ego’s embrace. That, in turn, requires a significant degree of consciousness, which only comes about by much inner work. Thus Rumi tells us: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
The reason it is so hard to live from love, then, is that the ego can never understand or be expected to live from the highest form of love, the level of love about which the saints and sages speak, for the highest form of love is the opposite of the ego’s very nature. The exciting possibility, though, is that it is possible to move beyond an ego point of view and into living with love as the center. For those who can do that, life’s dilemmas are dissolved.
In addition, if the world’s religions would make love the center of their work — and the message of all the founders of the world’s religions was centered in love — all conflicts between religions would be resolved as well. The great Islamic scholar and Sufi saint of the 12th century, Ibn Arabi, shared his experience of this truth after a lifetime on the spiritual journey:
Before, I used to reject my fellow beings if they did not profess
the same religion as I.
Now, my heart has become receptive to every image.
It is a meadow for the grazing deer,
a monastery for the monk, a temple for idols,
a Ka’ba for the pilgrim,
Torah scrolls and a copy of the Qur’an.
I profess the religion of love,
wherever its caravan may turn.
Love is my law and my faith.
In a similar vein, one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr., used the Greek word agape to try to get at the highest form of love and capture the nature of its experience:
“Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive, good will to all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart. So that when one rises to love on this level, he loves men not because he likes them, not because their ways appeal to him, but he loves every man because God loves him. And he rises to the point of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does.”
The experience King is describing transcends all theological and religious boundaries; it is universal and all-encompassing. Perhaps this level of love is even the best instrument we have for understanding the greatest mysteries. As Rumi put it, “Love is the astrolabe that sights into the mysteries of God.”
If religions could only return to the core ground of their origins in love, it would go a long way toward eliminating the conflicts between science and religion. Albert Einstein was one of the greatest physicists of all time, yet many of his words make abundantly clear there is no conflict between science and his view that love, compassion, and care for others is of ultimate importance. For instance, he said:
“Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.”
The reason their work is so important, he said, is that the most pressing task we face is to arrive at a point where we “know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty.”
Because of these deep insights, it would be hard for any religious teacher to improve upon Einstein’s description of the ultimate task of life, which is, he said, to “widen our circle of … compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Even that non-religious scientist Charles Darwin became dramatically focused on the importance of love in his later years. Darwin’s first great book, the Origin of the Species, was primarily about the forces that developed into complex living things in the animal kingdom. In his second major work, The Descent of Man, he dealt more extensively with humans and human life. In that book, he continually emphasized the importance of love, and did not attribute it to evolution. Instead, he seemed to consider the source of love’s arising in human beings as quite mysterious.
In Darwin on Love, David Loye explores this in depth, finding that, in the whole of The Descent of Man, Darwin only speaks about “survival of the fittest” twice, but talks about love and its importance ninety-five times. It therefore seems that, as Darwin wrestled with what he had learned about human beings in his long life, he concluded that love is the power that has driven the development of the human species, but that he did not understand where it came from. Crucially, he did not suggest it could be understood by the scientific theories he had developed in the Origin of the Species.
Rejecting Nothing, Always Moving Higher
Many of the traditions, agreeing with Plato, make clear that the goal is not to reject or deprecate the earlier forms of love, but to move though them as best we can until we are able to open into the highest forms. It is a gradual process of opening more and more fully into the higher forms. Thus Rumi says that the first stirring of passion can be a doorway into deeper forms of love:
Advice doesn’t help lovers!
They’re not the kind of mountain stream
you can build a dam across.
An intellectual doesn’t know
what the drunk is feeling!
Don’t try to figure
what those lost inside love will do next!
Someone in charge would give up all his power,
if he caught one whiff of the wine-musk
from the room where the lovers
are doing who-knows-what!
Rumi goes on to make clear how hard it is to know when the shift from physical passion to spiritual passion takes place, for there is often no line of demarcation. One of his most prominent modern translators, Coleman Barks, says that the Sufis call all our wantings nafs, and our nafs move from the urgent way lovers want each other all the way to the spiritual seeker’s urgent search for truth. These two wantings, and all those in between, are nafs, and each and every one is ultimately a pull to the ocean of union with the Beloved. Rumi therefore instructs that it is important to live your wantings as they come, or you will get stuck, and your life will become stagnant in denial or repression.
According to Coleman Barks, Rumi is saying that:
“The nafs are energies that keep us moving, stopping nowhere. Union with the divine continually unfolds. Next to the glowing drive‑in movie, the junkyard’s rusted stacks of old desire‑bodies. Let the beauty we love keep turning into action, transmuting to another, and another.”
Rumi says, “What have I ever lost by dying?” [meaning to die to one level of desire in order to be born into the next, higher level]. Thus Coleman Barks says:
“We must keep exchanging one set of nafs for the next. Particles of praise shine in the sunlight. Anything you grab hold of on the bank breaks with the river’s pressure. When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.”
Opening to deeper and deeper levels of desire can lead to what the Buddha called “the Great Desire,” the one desire that he said was crucial to pursue at all costs — the spiritual desire to transcend the small self and awaken into freedom. When we do this, he taught, we will experience the dependent origination of all things. Then, at the most profound level of our being, we will have love and compassion for all living things, for all life is interconnected and nothing exists, or can exist, in isolation. Certainly you, nor I, nor any individual ego self can ever exist in isolation from all and everything. Just try to imagine yourself existing if there were no world.
Søren Kierkegaard called this same impulse our “passion for the infinite.” And the modern Advaita Vedanta teacher Nisargadatta captured the same concept when he said: “Desire is devotion … to the real, to the infinite, the eternal heart of being.” Therefore, desire is not wrong. The mistake is to become trapped in desires that are too narrow and small for where we are on our life journeys. All these teachers are saying that fulfillment comes from finally learning to direct our desire toward spiritual development, which will lead to the highest form of love. The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible speaks of this over and over, as in this verse:
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth:
I held him, and would not let him go,
I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me.
He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.
How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!
These erotic poems in the Bible are dealing with the conjunction between physical desire and the search for the divine, just as Rumi describes it. The same theme pervades the writings of the Christian mystics, who use the language of personal love and physical desire to express spiritual longings. In these passionate expressions of love, Jesus is often the “Bridegroom,” and the aspirant the bride.
Listen to the words of some of the greatest Christian mystics, such as Teresa of Avila. For her, the goal is to, “Take God for your spouse.” For Mechthild of Magdeburg: “Everything I think, and am, runs after You Like a bride hungry for her husband,” And Julian of Norwich refers to God as “our Lover,” saying, “our natural will is to possess you.” And John of the Cross ends his most famous poem, Dark Night of the Soul, with his soul encountering the Beloved:
On my flowering breasts
Which I had saved for him alone,
He slept and I caressed
I lay, forgot my being,
And on my love I leaned my face. All ceased.
I left my being: Leaving my cares to fade
Among the lilies far away.
All these mystics are trying to convey that by moving up through the levels of love, they finally arrived at the highest reaches of experience, and there, love finds its ultimate expression. As Rumi puts it:
The clear bead at the center changes everything.
There are no edges to my loving now.
I’ve heard it said that there’s a window that opens from one mind to another,
But if there’s no wall, there’s no need for fitting the window, or the latch.
All this to convey that trying to get at the meaning and importance of “love” involves a lifetime of discernment, to understand oneself and the many motivations we feel within, leading to a gradual realization of ultimate love within and without —with inner and outer merging to become One. But to arrive at this place involves letting go of self-centered drives and past beliefs, and then opening into the fullness of a love that transcends all smaller desires and ego-centered motivations. Because this requires a lifetime’s work, the great Sufi poet Hafiz said to his students:
The subject today is Love
And for tomorrow as well.
As a matter of fact
I know of no better topic
For us to discuss
Until we all Die!
Making Your Choice
If you commit to making deep and true love an important part of your life, you will almost certainly fail to live it fully at times. But by choosing to make the effort, the wisest figures in history say you will be on the best possible path to finding peace, wisdom, joy, and the highest fulfillment life has to offer.
In the cryptic verse quoted above, Jesus says, “God is love.” But what does this simple three-word phrase mean? The verse does not say that God has love, or gives love, or feels love — but that “God Is Love.” Full stop. Nothing else is added. Does the verse mean that this is the full measure and definition of God?
Theologians have debated this phrase for 2,000 years, but we do not seem any closer to understanding or agreeing about what it means than when the debate began. Whatever the verse means, however, one thing is clear: It definitely suggests that love is of the utmost importance.
Further, if love is the full and complete definition of God, we must understand God more as a force-field or energy than as a human idea based on what humans are like or how we think. Whatever love is, it does not have a physical form and is not confined to one location. It is not accessed through rules, or limited to those who hold any one set of beliefs.
Carl Jung wrestled with this phrase, as well as Paul’s moving letter on love to the Corinthians, all his life. Here are Jung’s final written words on these contemplations:
“I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love. I sometimes feel that Paul’s words, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love,” might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself. Whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence ”God is love,” the words affirm the complexito oppositorum of the Godhead [the complexity and final unity we see only if we come to an experience of the union of opposites].”
He goes on:
“I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain what it is. Here is the greatest and smallest, the remotest and nearest, the highest and lowest, and we cannot discuss one side of it without also discussing the other. No language is adequate to this paradox … we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic “love.” I put the word in quotation marks to indicate that I do not use it in its connotations of desiring, preferring, favoring, wishing, and similar feelings, but as something beyond the individual, a unified and undivided whole.”
Jung then tries to get at why it is so hard to understand love:
“Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. “Love ceases not”—whether he speaks with the “tongues of angels,” or with scientific exactitude traces the life of the cell down to its utter-most source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius [to know the unknown through the unknown].”
What Jung makes clear is that in using the word love to describe the most profound level of being, it can only serve as a hint pointing toward something that cannot be captured in words, or by the thinking mind. It can only be lived — by making it the organizing center of our lives. Psychologist David Richo makes the same point:
“Love is ineffable. We can never put our love into words because words are categories of our minds and love is a living experience. Love is not an emotion but an unsentimental Being-Here-Now in an unconditional way.”
As I read about the greatest saints and sages through history, those living from the highest form of love all generated a spontaneous out-flowing. They radiated the energy of love out to others, and even into the very atmosphere around them. They had an effect on others that Rumi describes: “If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love, you’re helping people you don’t know and have never seen.”
I have felt such moments, and when in that experience I felt at peace, beyond personal anxieties and cares, with no thought of myself, no thought of results or rewards: free of fear, free of desire, free of longing, free of anxiety, free of time, free of myself.
If you are fortunate enough to have a moment in which you experience this force-field of love, what should you do? Henry David Thoreau provides a marvelous answer: “All that man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love — to sing.”
And a wonderful statement of what love might ultimately be comes from the poet Frank O’Hara in his poem In Favor of One’s Time, in which he says that life is about “love assuming consciousness of itself.”
The Harvard psychologist turned spiritual teacher Ram Dass became famous with his book Be Here Now in the 1970s and 80s. Through his own journey over many years, he became increasingly focused on the importance of love, and finally wrote a book entitled Be Love Now before he died. One of his insights:
“Let me stay with the word “love” for a moment. I think there is a transformation that goes on in one’s conception of the word “love.” And I think one changes from seeing it as a verb, to seeing it as a state of being. And you move much more toward what would be called Christ-love, that is, the state of being where one “is” love. That is [you become] like a light that emits, you become a loving being.”
In the end, the final question we each face about love is this: Will we try to get love, which is so common, but ultimately frustrating — for it is always the ego self that is trying to get something. If the ego tries to get love, it will always fail, because the ego occupies a different level of existence. To experience love, a person must surrender ego wishes and desires and open to its presence.
The best way to experience love is to give it. When you are giving love, you are living in the field of love all the time, generating it from within as you simultaneously become a conduit for the field of love that surrounds you at all times. St. John of the Cross captures this perfectly, saying:
“Where there is no love, put love, and there you will find love.”
When you give love, it surrounds you, inhabits you, pervades you — no matter what anyone else is doing. That is why so many saints and sages are portrayed as giving off a sweet fragrance to the atmosphere around them — they are emitting the perfume of love.
Hafiz captures this truth beautifully, providing a wonderful image about how to move into the space of the highest love in his poem, With That Moon Language:
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course, you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying, with that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
Most of us are constantly looking for someone who will love us — looking into the eyes of everyone we meet, hoping to find love coming toward us. But if everyone is always looking for love from others, who is left to give love?
You can be that one. And so can I. As Hafiz says, we are each looking to be loved. But the crucial question is, how can we become the one who gives love? To repeat Hafiz’s lines:
Why not become the one who lives
with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying, with that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
Trying as best we can to give love is the most powerful solution we can offer to the people around us, and even to solving the problems of the world. And it is the ultimate spiritual practice, the way countless saints and sages have suggested it is possible to open into the greatest fulfillment. As the Hindu saint Ramakrishna put it:
“Divine Reality responds only to selfless love, because God is Love. What could infinite Love desire other than love itself? Would boundless Love yearn for golden ornaments, stylized rituals, abstract institutions? Divine Love longs only for true lovers — for heart-melting devotion, for astonishing intensity of feeling, for diamond-sharp discrimination between deceitful love and pure love, for courageous renunciation, moment by moment, of every self-serving impulse that may cleverly masquerade as love.
“Ecstatic love of God — heart and mind melted by passionate longing for truth — is the one essential factor in the process of awakening.
“The sole purpose and goal for human life, the supreme ideal of which all other ideals are simply an expression, is to cultivate love.”
Thought Experiment — Choosing love
There can never be any proof about the power and importance of love in the universe, or in your life. This means that each of us must decide how we will understand love, and how we will live in relation to our understanding.
Each of us is free to choose to organize around the message of the saints and sages, that love is central to a fulfilling existence, and no one will ever be able to prove in any way that this is not the best possible choice.
What will you choose in relation to the importance of love in your life?