Love Down

"Nothing can be unconditional; consequently nothing can be free."   ― George Bernard Shaw

Affectionate love is the type love we feel for our parents, our brothers and sisters and those close to us in our daily lives. The Greek words storge (family love) and philia (brotherly love) are ancient sources of affectionate love which can be found in the interpersonal love order “Love your neighbor as yourself”.

Love Yourself
We’ve always been taught, religiously, spiritually, to love our neighbor. That was the unselfishness. Not everyone can be, or should be a ‘Mother Teresa’ type – a selfless person who loves everyone; dedicates their lives to serve others who are in need (tragedy, disaster, social injustice). Loving oneself doesn’t mean being egotistical. Ego, taken from Latin, means ‘I am’. Aristotle said it better than anyone, “The essence is that which is and without which it doesn’t exist.” Our essence is what we are and what we are not. For example, divide a paper and on the left put everything you are not and on the right put down everything you are. On the left you might say, “Maybe I’m not as caring as I should be”, but on the right side, “But I really do love”. The discovery that the right side will be longer than the left should inspire one’s love of oneself (big note: all bets are off for the Dark).

Life is a long journey of discovery, wherein each person must meet and love themselves, overcome their own fears, and learn the truth about loving.  It is a process of discovering, and then perfecting our souls' innate, God-given beauty and ability to love.  This may be easy for some, a challenging for most of us.

In ‘Religion – The Divine Within’  the fundamental aspect of self-love was disclosed:  to acknowledge the spark of the divine within us.  That self-love is not selfishness, but an awareness of our individual ‘divine spark’.  Self-love is about maintaining the ‘trinity’:  the physical, the mental/emotional and the spiritual. 
• Physical - to take care our bodies with good nutrition, exercise, hygiene and sleep.  To honor the ‘body temple’.
• Mental/Emotional - to learn to adopt a positive attitude and maintain it through tough times.  It is very difficult to stay optimistic in a negative world, but we have no right to be negative.  To know not to return negativity after receiving it (it isn't easy).  To program ourselves not to get addicted to the pains and hurts.  To cement the intellectual with the emotion (very important) and that intellect must reign over emotion.
• Spiritual - to be "above the body" not "of the body" leads us to spiritual wisdom. We can get bogged down with negativity when we stay earthbound in our bodies (Lower Mind).  The essence of spirituality is to link the God within with the God without, to fight the battle against negativity, to extend goodwill in the light of adversity and to realize that good - the good in us and the good in the world - will be challenged.  We should try to bringing light into the world, which is like the nature of of electricity – the positive strives to meet the negative (the negative rises to meet the positive).  We need to develop a clean ‘blue line’ track; to stay on our written chart.  No fault if you’re off-track – you’ll just feel off-kilter to what you should be doing.

Love Your Neighbor
One Universal Law is, “As much good as you do for other people, you are then guaranteed that your life begins to stabilize.  Your mental, physical and spiritual health will become better.”  There are not very many Universal Truths, but this is one.  The more you give out and care for, love, give to others, the happier and healthier you will be. 

The time-honored Golden Rule and its complement, the Silver Rule, have been passed down over the centuries:

• Golden Rule:  “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself”.
• Silver rule:  “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you".
 
The Golden Rule is arguably the most essential basis for the modern concept of human rights, in which each individual has a right to just treatment, and a reciprocal responsibility to ensure justice for others. The key is that doing good for others and offering charity should be voluntary, done out of the heart.  Charity and ‘good will toward men’ is rendered impotent when it is forced.

Brotherly Love

“In Hawai'i we greet friends, loved ones or stranger, with Aloha, which means with love.  Aloha is the key word to the universal spirit of real hospitality, which make Hawai'i renowned as the world's center of understanding and fellowship.  Try meeting or leaving people with Aloha. You'll be surprised by their reaction. I believe it and it is my creed.  Aloha to you.”    Duke's Creed - Duke Paoa Kahanamoku

"The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic."
    Rod Serling, screenwriter, television producer

In regards to Brotherly Love, Duke hit it on the mark and out of the park. Few have better interpreted and conveyed the spirit of brotherly love as the legendary Duke Kahanamoku.   Aloha - what a beautiful word to encapsulate the spirit of brotherly love.

Friendships fall into three basic types:  Utility, Pleasure and Virtue.

• Utility – often found in business relationships or relationships motivated by a common purpose or goal usually related to personal gain. In such relationships, ‘friends’ often call each other colleagues, partners, teammates, associates, collaborators, coworkers, affiliates, and sometimes acquaintances. Communication involves buying and selling things, or exchanging ideas and teaming up to make money. This is not a bad thing, but as soon as that motivation is gone, so goes the relationship between two people unless another motivation is found. Complaints and quarrels generally only arise in this type of friendship.

• Pleasure – based on pure delight in the company of other people.  People who socialize together, share a hobby or an interest in a sport may have such friendships.  However,  these friends may also part—in this case if they no longer enjoy the shared activity, or can no longer participate in it together.

• Virtue – friendships where individuals enjoy each other’s character.  As long as both friends keep similar characters, the relationship will endure since the motive behind it is caring for each other. This is the highest level of philia - true friendship, sometimes friendship of a lifetime.

Romantic Love

“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”       Mignon McLaughlin, Vogue Magazine

"I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you."      'Love', Roy Croft

“When love comes to town I'm gonna jump that train. When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame. Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down.  But I did what I did before love came to town”       'When Love Comes to Town', U2 & B.B. King

“One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”   Simone de Beauvoir, Social Theorist

“Hell is other people”    Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialist Philosopher (partner to Simone de Beauvoir)

 The Movie Mirror

Romantic Love can be viewed as a long running theatrical play in the course of human affairs.  Key themes in our romantic lives are often reflected in romantic films:  drama, comedy and the musical (song & dance).  Like the movies, romance can have a fairy tale quality to them where fantasy gives it a magical quality (‘Knight on the White Horse’).  There are other sub-themes in romantic movies, like action and adventure, mystery and suspense or the ‘melancholy’, but those, for the most part, are simply for entertainment (contrived at best, superficial at worst).  Hopefully our romantic lives are not tragic, but unfortunately that drama often cannot be excluded.  Looking at that positively, a miraculous outcome can come out of a dark drama, where the unexpected happy ending is the rebirth in a couple’s relationship or even a renewed faith in life.  Shipwrecked by the seas of sadness, one's self-love takes pride in not giving up and rejoices in finding its life raft of rescue:  “in my weakness, lies my strength.”
Romantic Love has its comic quality, like in the ‘meet cute’ plots of romantic comedies where the potential couples meet in comic circumstances (run into each other while skiing or the ‘fender bender’ incident).  The humorous drama of awkwardness and clash of personalities often remind us of and endear us to the people in our own lives.  Of course romantic comedies can have contrived characters (MPDG) and arch plots like in Woody Allen’s film ‘Annie Hall’ where the impossibility of love is satirized.  But that’s ok.  If the movie gets us to laugh that’s good; if it remind us of the powerful role of humor and laughter in love, even better.

Bungle in the Jungle
As the curtain rises on Romantic Love, Anouchka Grose, author of 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love', narrates on love’s lair,

“With all the improvements that resulted from the efforts of Ms. Wollstonecraft and et al (ie, college, vote, have sex for pleasure, do interesting work), contemporary women must wonder if the balance of power shift isn’t a complete solution to the problem of human misery.  The so-called natural world is mainly ordered around the notion that you have to be a bit tough and cunning if you want to breed.  There are bribes, lies, fights and pay-offs everywhere.  Girl birds go out with boy birds because they have good nests. Humans are unique animals in that we develop all sort of sophisticated ways in which to overcome the limits of nature—we fly food around the world so we can eat strawberries any time, freeze our eggs, cut bits off and add bits on, and pull all sorts of tricks in order to live—and mate—for bloody ages.”

Love’s Forest

“You led me down to the water's brink,
‘The Spring where the Panthers came to drink
At night; there is always water here
Be the season never so parched and sere.’
Have we souls of beasts in the forms of men?
I fain would have tasted your life-blood then.”   The Teak Forest, Adela Florence Nicolson

If Love’s Law I and Law II are born from Love’s Garden, then Romantic Love reigns from Love’s Forest – an ancient forest full of beautiful and exotic creatures, pleasures and passions, delights and dangers. 

The bold achievement of humanity’s healthy heart binds all the ‘Loves’: Divine love (love up); love of oneself, brotherly love and romantic love (love down).  The uncompromising empiricist can’t explain the torrential passion between young lovers or a child’s fierce and inarticulate longing for his parents or a mother’s unshakable devotion to her child.

The heart of love’s forest has its “reasons where of Reason knows nothing”.  In a forest where blind babies know how to smile and reptiles do not.

The Golden Seat’s ‘Frame of Mind’ is spiritual – a quest for spiritual discovery.  One of the spiritual principles is that true human self-hood is divine.  And that its goal is to harmonize the two great movements in the Religious/Philosophical realm:

Ascend:  Matter to Spirit.  The Many to One.   Transcendent.  The path of wisdom.
Descend:  Spirit to Matter.  The One to Many.  Immanence.  The path of compassion.

From the Good Book, we find a glimpse of Love’s Forest:
 
“Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us delight ourselves with love”   (Proverbs, 7:18)

Man: "As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters." Woman: "As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste."   (Song of Solomon 2:2,3)

So we come full circle where the ‘trinity’ of love finds unity – Divine Love (Mother-Spiritual), Self & Brotherly Love (Father-Mental) and Romantic Love (Son-Flesh).  Where Love’s transcendent Garden embraces Love’s immanence Forest with wisdom and compassionate grace.  Love of God (Love Up),  Love of Man (Love Down).

Journey of the Soul (Book 4 – Soul’s Perfection) concludes on the nature of love:

“Very few of you in physical life know what true love is.  It is because on your plane of exitence, it really is almost impossible (infatuation is the closest feeling).  Because you get a brief glimpse of this with a partner of friendship, you are constantly looking for the next “fix”.  The older you get and the more rubbed down you are from life, the less it comes.  Something must replace it.  Some deep inner peace and security that you are finishing out your time, and you will go Home.”

“Every single one of you are individually alone, making your way in a path to get back where you came from.  You may select partners and companions along the way.  Because of your physical body and because you cannot merge, it puts every single one of you into a state of isolation.”
“The only love affairs that last are the love affairs that you have with God, yourself, and the deep abiding comforting love that you have for people around you.  Infatuation is why so many people commit and uncommit, because again they are looking for that gigantic thrill.  It does not come that often, nor does it last.”

The Ecstasy

Love - The Lighter Side

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