What is Love and Where Does it Come From?

In the sixties we thought we had found love, but we confused love with sex. Esoteric Christianity holds that we should love our neighbor and even love our enemy. The Work says that the most damaging aspect of our personality is Self Love. In the Fourth Way it is said that the energy force that is the invisible source behind all being is what we normally call God. Could it be that this energy force is Love? Make love not war! Love one another! Free Love!

The sixties had many pro love slogans, and lots of pure love too. But most sixties people fell short of reaching the esoteric goal of unconditional love. Many confused the urge for sex with the real emotion of love that cannot be experienced through the sexual center alone. Real love needs attention of all five of the lower centers. One must reach the level of Balanced Man to experience unconditional love. Sex with love is a very positive experience and can lead to unconditional love. But sex without love is mostly a negative experience that leads to pain and sorrow.

Henry Miller looked at sex as something real that we should not hide or be ashamed of. Decades before the sixties Miller tried to open the doors to sexual freedom. I think he would agree that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction today. He stated that the free love movement of the sixties failed because the advocates of free love were interested in sex and not in love. Miller felt that real Love was the most important thing in life and the hardest thing to come by. I remember Alex back in the late sixties saying that the girl up stairs in his Palo Alto apartment house told him that love is seeing and being seen. Vance though out the sixties told me, “ If God made anything better than love he saved it for himself. Krisnamurti says that living, death, and love are one. He states, “One must totally die to find what love is.” 

One of the highest tenets of Esoteric Christianity is that one should love one’s enemy. We have difficulty with loving even our selves, as we do not know our Real Self. Can you love your neighbor? Can you love your friends even? To love one’s enemy is far beyond our reach, as we exist in our state of sleep. However it is only logical that one should love one’s enemy, as we are not separate. We are one world, and when we hate and kill our enemy we are destroying a large part of what is really one on both a material and a spiritual level. We cannot love unconditionally because of our Self Love. We cannot see that the self that we hold in such esteem in not one ‘I’, but a collection of ‘I’s.’ We cannot see that the ‘I’ that we take as our self is a mechanical collection of habits and acquired conditioning. And the main reason that we cannot see is that we love this machine so much that we will not admit and criticism of it into our consciousness. We fail to see what we are really like because we cannot stand to injure this life long picture of our self.

The Work says that God, The Absolute, The Otherness, is the invisible force that created the universe and all that is in it. Because of self-love, we cannot conceive of any power greater than our own. So we do not really believe in a life force that is behind our very being. We do not love God as much as we love our self. If we loved God we would obey his commandments. We would not kill. Even in our hearts we would not kill. Can we love God if we do not love his creation? And is there anything in all creation that was not created by the Absolute? If we loved God we would love our environment. We would be conscious of the vast harm that we are doing through our love of self. What is this energy force that some of us call God? It is invisible. It is beyond time-space. It was before time came into being. It is the source of all being, the creator of all life. Could this energy force be pure unadulterated Love? Where does real love come from?

The love that we feel at our level of being comes from the sexual and emotional centers and can easily turn into its opposite through jealousy and self-interest. Even at this level one does not love on command. We fall in love. Love comes to us through our contact with the loved one. Even on the unconscious level love is a gift rather than something that we can acquire through effort. Real love, conscious love can never turn into its opposite. Conscious love, unconditional love also is a gift to man rather than something that he can obtain by effort.

However, to reach the level where real love is possible one must work to cleanse ones self of negative emotions and self love, so that effort is necessary. One must empty one’s self of one’s self in order to be able to receive the gift of genuine love. The Work says that we were created as self-evolving beings, and that we can only evolve through conscious effort. We can receive help once we begin to apply the Work to ourselves and at its highest point that help is conscious, unconditional love, the energy of real Love. Could it be that Love is the energy force responsible for all of creation that enters your Real I when you die to self love and are reborn in the silent otherness?

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