Rupert,
I attended the meeting in Marin in which you responded to a question from the audience with, ‘Because there is love’. There comes a generalised quietude when the essential emptiness of the self is apperceived. Here it is experienced as an artesian warmth that seems to spread out wherever awareness is focused. But it seems that the consensus concept of ‘love’ falls short in its description. Do you think that love has any reality outside of the conceptual arena?
Toombaru
Dear Toombaru,
The answer ‘Because there is love’ was given to the question ‘How do we know that consciousness is impersonal?’ The implicit understanding in this answer is that the word ‘love’ is used to point towards the experiential understanding that there is only one consciousness.
If a number of people were asked if they knew or felt that the consciousness with which they were hearing this very question is unlimited and impersonal, most would answer, ‘No’. However, if one asked those same people if they felt or knew that love exists, most, if not all, would answer, ‘Yes’.
In other words, few people doubt the experience of love, but most of us misinterpret it. The mind, in fact, knows nothing of love, precisely because it is not present during the experience. That is why we like it so much!
Love could be said to be the dissolution of those boundaries or borders which seem to separate us one from another. In other words, it is the dissolution of the dualising mind. When the mind returns and tries to describe the non-objective experience of love, in which it was not present and about which it therefore knows nothing, it misinterprets the experience.
The mind returns saturated, as it were, with the taste of love out of which it has arisen. It retains, so to speak, the perfume of this non-objective experience. Not knowing where this perfume comes from, the mind manufactures a story to account for the new and happy state in which it finds itself. Out of the seamlessness of experience it imagines two entities, in this case a loving subject, ‘I’, and a loved object, the other, ‘you’, which are supposedly connected together by an activity of loving.
As the shine wears off the mind, it seems that the experience of love is lost. Bewildered by this apparently lost love, the separate entity goes out into the world again in search of a relationship that will recover the experience of love, not realising that it is its own presence, the apparent presence of the separate entity and its counterpart, the separate other, that veils the love for which it is searching, and that in fact lies at the heart of all experience. So off we go again until we meet a face that reminds us of the true Beloved, at which moment the separate self plunges again into non-existence and love tastes itself anew.
So, in answer to your question, ‘Do you think that love has any reality outside of the conceptual arena?’ I would say that love’s onlyreality is outside the conceptual arena. Our conceptualising of love (such as I have done here) is a feeble attempt, using the abstract symbols of the mind, to point towards the reality of our experience, which is intimately and directly experienced, known by everyone, and yet completely beyond the capacity of the mind to know, grasp or understand.
In fact, the mind does not even know how to think of love, let alone to know or define it. If we try to think of love, we do not even know where to start looking. It is closer than close and yet in an unknown direction. Love only knows itself.
With warmest regards,
Rupert
