(The transcript of a webinar held in February 2024)
The word love is certainly one of the most used words worldwide, and every human being has their definition of what it is, consciously or unconsciously. And that’s the way it should be, of course. In this talk, we would like to highlight what we, as Rosicrucians, mean when we use the word love and what the universal doctrine says about it.
The word is used anywhere from “I love ice cream” to “I love God.” In many old documents, it says that “God is love”, and one of the founders of our Spiritual School, J. van Rijckenborgh, writes somewhere that the love we are talking about is not a quality but a totality, the divine itself.
The text “Tao Te King” from ancient China begins with the fact that it is impossible to talk about Tao, God or Love. As soon as we do that, we aren’t really talking about what it is.
We will return to these thoughts later because we will first try to define the word, by seeing what it is not for us.
It is common to hear or read that love is only a matter of chemistry, a consequence of certain substances being released into the blood. That this is not the kind of love we are discussing is probably apparent to you, even if the word is mainly used for the love between two persons.
Then there is the love that parents feel for their child, the love between friends, the love for their people or their country. Or simply the love of a cause or belief.
What is common to all these types of love is that they are linked to a strong emotion. Another distinguishing feature is that when people have such a strong emotion and are betrayed, let down, or abandoned, that their emotion tends to turn into its opposite. It goes without say that this is neither the kind of love we mean.
What kind of love are we talking about? We will make use of one of the most famous texts that exist that describes what love is, namely 1 Corinthians 13.
In verses 4 and 5, Paul describes what love is like:
” Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. “
Especially the words “it is not self-seeking” is for many the image of true love. The parent who is prepared to sacrifice himself for his child, the person who sacrifices his life for a friend, for his country or for his beliefs. And here too we can consider the martyrs of church history.
A concept that is close to love is goodness. For many the definition of a good person is a person filled with love who is prepared to sacrifice his own comfort, sometimes his life, for another man or for his convictions.
That this is not entirely unproblematic is clear, not least in our time in which people are prepared to sacrifice their lives in acts that lead to violence and death for others.
In conversations about goodness, the opinion is sometimes put forward that no human being is completely good and unselfish, but that what ultimately drives them is that he or she feels good about acting in this way. It’s simply a selfish perspective because they feel good about being “good”.
An objection to this is that this reasoning leads to the absurd conclusion that only actions in which the person does something for others while he or she feels miserable, can be “counted” as good.
But let us now leave these philosophical subtleties aside.
All these examples underline what the Rosicrucians and the Universal Doctrine say about love, which is the following:
The force that keeps us going through life from our birth and onward is what we call our ego. It is the force that makes us move forward in life, to quite simply survive. None of us would have made it this far in life without it.
Among people with a strong ego, we find those who are generous and those who are stingy. There are those who are caring and those who only look out for themselves, etc. But what we all have in common is that life revolves around ourselves. Paul writes of all this: “The good I want to do, I do not do, and the evil I do not want to do, I do.”
What is described in the Scriptures of the Universal Doctrine is that man must be prepared to give up his self in order to stand in love. This is how we understand the words of Christ: “only he who is prepared to give up his life for my sake shall gain eternal life.”
And this does not have to be a dramatic event at all. Paul writes elsewhere that “I die daily” to show that this can be a slow process that the disciple enters.
How to enter into this process is described in a number of documents. For example, in Buddhas Eightfold Path, while the Gnostics talk about the fivefold Gnosis, which we have talked about in previous webinars, but here is a brief summary:
- Insight both into how this world is governed, and a self-awareness of what has been the driving force in one’s life so far.
- This leads to a longing for something else and the discovery that there is something eternal deep within ourselves, something that is not touched by the emotional surge of the moment, and that it is this core that is the root of our longing.
- The more we give this longing the space in us the more we surrender the guidance of our life to the God-spark within us.
- Man is now entering a new life of new action that is entirely guided by this spark.
Man and the Gnosis are now one; he or she acts and lives out of love.
This may feel abstract, far from our everyday lives, and the road certainly looks different for different people.
For one person, it may begin with a powerful longing that drives him to search further; for another, it begins with the urge to act—the urge to do something for others, and so on. But somehow, we can’t get past these steps on our way.
Sometimes, divine love is described as a higher vibration than the one we live in now. And to some of you, it might sound as technical as the chemistry we discussed earlier. But even the most recent scientific description of our world describes everything as vibrating fields that create attraction and repulsion.
It is like the well-known scientific example of the hand and the tabletop. We are pulled towards the earth and cannot put our hand through a tabletop, which is ultimately so because our hand and the tabletop repel each other when they come into contact.
What 1 Corinthians 13 writes about is simply that love is a power and that without this power, without us living from this power, all our endeavours are in vain. But with this power, we overcome all things.
In the following lines of text, we can easily discern if an action springs out of this love or not:
” Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
And it continues:
“Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails”
When you read further in the text, then it describes the characteristics of what this love is and is not.
So when we talk about love, it’s only this love we’re referring to. This does not mean that we now stand in this love, but it is the love to which our longing is directed, and that is the whole goal of our path.
At one point in the Bible, Jesus says that he will come with the sword and not with peace, and it also says that love is a double-edged sword.
This means that the one who stands in love is filled with this love and can, on the one hand, completely embrace anyone who seeks this love with this love. The other edge of this love is that if someone wants to move forward, he must completely free himself from his ego in the process of being able to go into this love. This other edge of universal love helps with this, which sometimes has painful consequences.
But doesn’t what we usually call love have any value? Well, we all know that it has. For example, a child growing up in a loving home has a greater chance of living a harmonious life. Yet this is not the love we are talking about. How can we look at this love around us, which we perceive as positive and essential?
In good cases, it can be a reflection of divine love. In the example of the parent’s love for her child, it may be that a love can almost “endure everything” even if he/she is betrayed and abandoned. But, after all, it is a love directed to one person.
Divine love is universal; it is addressed to all living things and human beings. It is a force, a vibration if you will, that paves the way for those who seek. A power with which he/she can help and serve his/her fellow human beings in their quest for liberation in life.
We wish you all this power in the coming days.
We finished with some words from the Book of Mirdad:
“Love is the Law of god.
You live that you may learn to love.
You love that you may learn to live.
No other lesson is required of Man.”