Love and the Magic of Simplicity
Motto: “Seems that the only aim of nature is throwing all beings one in each other’s arms,
and make them share, in virtue of love transfiguration between two infinite noughts,
the frantic intoxication of the divine embracement.”
We are living hasty lives. We are caring “synthesis” of experiences inside of us. We are caring bypassed love stories, victories and defeats. But when we remember love, everything is covered with a living, special and mysterious light.
You may not remember what you have exactly done three years ago, on January 7, but you definitely do remember the day you have met her or the day he said he wanted you to be together… and all sorts of details start passing through your mind, that used to touch you deep at the moment and now cast a beam on your face…
If you did experience deep love, you have doubtlessly felt handsome and forceful; you have trusted a mission that fate has exclusively spared for you. After a while, when love has passed through the forest of your wishes and it removed all remains of selfishness, you did find yourself stronger, although there apparently was no shoulder to lie on. Therefore your life became more intense, conscious and wider…
Love is constructive and creative, it unifies and uplifts. It is a rejuvenating principle, a substance that converts all spleen, scepticism or loneliness. The masterpieces, poems, inspiring music, they all contain in their unseen texture: love. Just as we do all of us, in fact.
Love is real; it is as real as us. It is no barren intellectual concept, it is mysterious magic of our whole being. As long as the boldness of a leave of grass is no accident, the fact that somewhere it can be a person that loves you deserves all the more attention. For, we are living on earth particularly in order to fully express love towards whoever may deserve this and mostly towards God.
Few people know that evolution by means of love is the fastest way; it always is the only standard to measure everything. Plenary love, shared together in endless hues and forms is the very task of our life when we deserve this.
Love is the simplest way to live one’s life, for it is the best and the most natural. You hardly need to do more. Everyone feels like loving, before really loving someone or something. This pure and overwhelming love will get an answer sooner or later.
Love is what makes people look for their match and fulfil their dreams. It engenders the mysterious longing for self knowledge.
If you feel no more love, it means you have never felt it for real, or you cannot look inside of you, where love still exists. Love does know that whatever exists inside the mind is subject to changing and can be forgotten or lost, whereas the pure overwhelming love always makes you win.
Love simply exists… It’s our mere conviction that we feel it in the one we love, during our moments of joy; it does not need all these. Love never takes possession nor does it want to be possessed. Love does not ask, above of all, it gives. It is divine simplicity in action and feeling.
Love is the mirror on earth of this divine emotion, which makes it boundless. Would it know time, love would be an endless moment. Would it know space, its place would be inside of us, for we are the quintessence of all we love.
If love exists it is all over. And if love exists now, it may exist forever, hereafter.
Real love always is the opposite of selfishness and it expresses in strong, free longing of the one who loves to spread his entire affection over the subject of his love, whoever that might be: a human being of opposite sex that attracts us, a group, a concept, value or activity. The fact that love manifestations can be so enormously various from one man to another, and they often differ from one man to another is due to the hues this universal feeling can borrow for every human being, which is unique by itself. The emergence and persisting of this deeply unifying feeling, euphoric, divine and blissful – also its enhancement, when it manifests from one being to another, in its individual area, is closely connected to the shaping crystallisation of the personality.
Love between two human beings of opposite sex aims, by means of worship and deep amorous transfiguration, to complementary fusion, ineffably unifying at all levels (including the physical-sexual plan) with a certain human being (plenary healthy, morally and intellectually powerful). Such person will appear to the one deeply in love marvellously individualised, as the very unique and unrepeatable source of huge, genuine happiness for the one who loves him/her. The nature and the incredible role assessed to love, if highly and freely expressed in people’s lives have been given various interpretations along time. One of the most ancient interpretations for love is the cosmo-mythological one, i.e. the expression of endless euphoric force, of transfiguration, sublime, divine, cosmic, magnificent, endlessly creative and source of all beauties.
For instance the rejuvenating Eros in the Orphism, the organising divine principle of the Universe at Empedocles, the heroic enthusiasm of G. Bruno, the unifying principle of the heaven (+) and earth (+), of the finite and infinite at the German romantics. Also, the energising, complementary polarity of the Sun ((+), the emitting masculine aspect) and the subtle force of the Moon ((-), the receptive, feminine aspect), which is the principle to direct the matrix power of manifestation and evolution in Yoga.
As differed in several love kinds and considered the most powerful transfiguration, the most spiritual (the purest, the most divine, uplifting) and the highest one, many philosophers have assigned cognitive properties to love. To mention some of these: knowing the ideal of beauty itself, the ecstatic identity between love and knowledge at Plato, attaining the ecstatic summits of the intelligible world and blissful love, at M. Ficino; the fullest inner freedom, stem in the rational and intuitive knowledge, “amor dei intellectualis”, at Spinoza; the self-penetration (due to ineffable inner resonance to the ideal containing), or the self-dissolution, due to the complete fusion and perfect identification of the thing, or human being (where the knowledge to result is one and only), known as if in erotic love making, at F. Schegel.
Love was given lots of meanings and human and spiritual values in modern philosophy, which disclosed its role as an agglutinating agent of the deep human solidarity, as the supporter of the ideas community of the humankind, as the sublime, divine essence of transfiguration of the man. The representatives of the religious philosophy, particularly the Christian philosophers (e.g. the Neo-Platonism, the Thomism, the Neo-Thomism, the personalism, the religious existentialism), clearly highlighted some aspects of love anthropology (charity – agape), and construed them in a divine, uplifting transcendental way as God’s love, subsequently identified with the universal love (the unitary ground of the three hypostasis of God).
In this respect a special position among theologians belongs to Theilhard de Chardin, who erected an ethical conception based on fellow love, on a unifying collectivism at an affective and intellectual level. There are many pessimistic and irrational points of love, proper to many philosophical interpretations in the XIXth and XXth centuries. Schopenhauer, for instance considers “Love is but a trap to the individual for him to perpetuate the species”, also Nietzsche, M. Scheler, K. Jaspers, Sartre, Gabriel Marcel.
As they pointed out the love influence upon psyche and mind, some philosophers did underscore the deep power of transformation of this feeling and highlighted its decisive role in self-knowledge, in attaining happiness, in the human shape and mould along time.
The yogis always appraised love as utterly important and often depicted it as a sui-generis criterion to asses the level of human elevation in man’s natural behaviour. It is the extent to fathom how in the most inner and individual part of the microcosmic being, the one in love can therefore become a macrocosmic and divinely unified expanded up to the infinite.
Considered from a psychic point of view, we may say love is the fruit of a complex process of inner “crystallisation”. Stendhal rendered this in his famous work “About love” and he analysed there a process of conspicuous emotions, triggered by ineffable, empathic communion and identification with someone belonging to the opposite sex, who makes us complete and complies with multiple levels of our being, which makes us feel much more unified and consonant.
Stendhal opposes this intense, lasting and true love, full of transfiguration to brisk love affairs, frantic and thunder like (coup de foudre), which by ephemeral, incomplete attraction that lacks some depth and complexity are often liable to vanish away as quickly as they have appeared (for, whether one of the two lovers or even both may lack emotional support and transfiguration, which enables deep love making at multiple levels, as in a loving, profound couple that stays together).
At a moral approach, the yogis would figure love as an euphoric feeling, quite sublime and engendering deep transfiguration unlike selfishness. Therefore, true love is a quite simple way to overcome or transcend selfishness. If we deeply understand this by direct, spontaneous and sublime experience of true love, we may very easily understand the divine fundamental saying of Jesus, which paradoxically few Christians only seem to consider nowadays: “Love your fellow man as you love yourself”. The Russian writer Tolstoi would marvellously say: “The real love is always based on giving in one’s own good”.
The great saints see love as the source of the supreme, divine virtue, which is compassion. The philosophical problem is to the yogis whether love can stand for a genuine way of knowledge or not. From this point of view, they do consider love a quick way to knowledge (the philosopher Spinoza said: “The intellectual love of God emerges from the third way of knowledge”) and they decline the aberrant idea that belongs to Decartes claiming that love is but mind blinding: “Love is a passion that may be highly aroused inside of us, without our knowing whether the object or the human being to stir it is good or not”.
In fact, love is but a way that the human being is given in order to get closer to God, but also a swift way to get aware of the divine reality. This aspect is brilliantly rendered in Kahlil Gibran’s work, “The Prophet”.
“When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.”
The Bible also contains countless inspiring lines referring to love as a straight way to know God. To mention one of such excerpts:
“If I speak with the tongues of men or angels, but have not love I become a sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
Love suffereth long, and is king; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil; (n. therefore it never leans on the evil realms), rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.and there it embraces and transfigures everything); it trusts all that is good, divine and elevated, it strives for and trusts all that is good and beneficial (n. and thereby all that it perseveringly covets at will come true), it humbly suffers everything.
Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part; but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away (n. for we will be one with God).
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away (n. got detached) childish (n. infantile) things.
For now we see in a mirror, darkly (n. due to ignorance);; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then (n. when we are one with God) shall I know fully even as also I was fully known(n. by God).. But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” (Paul – “Corinthians”, 13).
As the basic aspect of human existence, love has been given numerous earthy and spiritual values and the word itself has met lots of definitions and interpretations along ages, according to the existing philosophical currents and the spiritual degree of those to issue such perspectives.
The countless sayings about love, inspired quotations that all times literature teams with stand for evidence that love has always been the essence of humans’ spiritual life, for it is the very source of it, in fact, any artistic expression is inspired of love.
Here are some excerpts about love:
“Oh, love, full of transfiguration! – The beautiful arts are thy children; thou were the first to guide on earth the holly poetry, the sole food for noble souls, who send from their solitude their divine chant to the most remote generations, urging them to glorious deeds by words and thoughts inspired from above. Thou fill again our souls with the only virtue useful to the mortals, thou are the Charity to cast sometimes a beam on the miserable doomed and you ceaselessly restore the divine engendering power of the beings, out of which all is but chaos and death. If thou desert us, Love, the earth would become barren, animals would hate each other, the sun would be but injuring fire, and the world sorrow, fright and universal obliteration”. (Ugo Foscolo).
“Why do we always love with passion? – for this makes us really happy; why should we confess it sincerely? – for this makes the other happy; why should we try to prove this against all sacrifice? – to make us believe that it’s the only way for humans to succeed one day in giving up their meanest sin: the coarse selfishness”. (Panait Istrati)
“Everlasting love is possible one condition: that it may be strong enough and released from casual, memory, hue and detail, from any specific detail that might have pre-determined it, so that it may effortless subscribe to the purest pattern of transfiguration love” (Alexandru Ivasciuc).
“I’m in love. There is a heavenly rainbow / above the world of my heart”. (Nicolae Labis).
“The sublime, true love is a feeling of transfiguration, divine and complex, essentially featuring kindness. There must be a feeling of devotion in love, a wish of protection, an urge to well doing and providing pleasure and happiness – this is to completely lack selfishness”. (W. Somerset Maugham)
“When you feel high love and transfiguration for the beloved soul, there is no better thing than giving, giving all the way: one’s life, one’s thoughts, and one’s body, giving everything, feeling that you always offer and being ready to give ever more” (Guy de Maupassant).
“Love… one passion, one divine flame carrying with it, no matter if lasting or not – just like our own human condition – happiness and life alike”. (G. Meredith)
“The lover, when filled with love, loves and transfigures the flaw of the one he loves.” (Molière)
“Such a poor and miserable being that must be if cannot say: “I’m drunk, most of the time with the strong wine of love”, / How can he feel the nature marvel at dawn / and the holly spell of moonlight, at night?” Omar Khayyam).
Love between two human beings of opposite sex is not just sexual intercourse, which is but an element (necessary, though vulgar) of this wide feeling. Although for most of the people, the concept of love confines to this (lovemaking) aspect, true love, full of transfiguration, as considered of all wise men, is a process of gradual submergence, crystallisation and persuasion at the level of the ineffable, affective communion and empathic identification with a specific human being of opposite sex. We may feel at first, beyond affection towards that being, some sort of unreasonable chemistry, but we gradually discover that he or she is complementary at all our levels and also makes us feel much more affectionate and consonant. Therefore, by means of deep transfiguration and worship, we may reach a fulfilling, unifying fusion to the beloved one at all levels (affectionate, mental, spiritual and, obviously, physical-sexual), this fusion being the source of high, genuine and lasting happiness.
