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Three Faces of LoveWeek 4 ResourcesiEvolve: Global Practice Community

Copyright iEvolve, Marc Gafni, & Diane Musho Hamilton 2010 All Rights Reserved

Engaging Love in 2nd-Person : Week Four

Question:

What does Love mean in the inter-subjective or relationship context?

How can I practice love in order to realize and live it in my relationships?

Intention:

To explore Love in the 2nd person perspective including:

• An embrace of paradox and polarities of experience• A communication and energetic field of connection• A transformative exchange born of genuine relationship

Practices:

1. Perception: Bring a person into your mind’s eye. Intentionally move your perception to see them through a lens of love. What in your experience of him or her changes? What is the effect of this shift of perception on you?

2. Giving: Enter the shared second person space. First, give your attention to each other. And then in the virtual space of communication, find a gift that you can offer to each other.

Teaching:

Three Aspects of Love in the 2nd Person

Love arises in all four quadrants at once, but in this week’s exploration, we are looking at the dynamic, enlivened quality of Love in second person. In the third person, we saw love as a power in the universe, with properties of cohering and of reaching out to in-clude more and more levels of complexity and of consciousness. In the first person, we experienced love as innate to being, arising directly from experience - free from ob-jects, conditions, and even of our concepts “about love.” This week, we will explore Love in the Second Person, in the dimension of “you and me,” with the dynamic energy and challenges that are always present when there are two of us.

Love as the embrace of paradox, polarity, and contradiction

iEvolve: global practice community

Copyright iEvolve, Marc Gafni, & Diane Musho Hamilton 2010 All Rights Reserved 2

In the second person, love naturally embraces the lived experience of the paradoxes and polarities of our life: of sameness and difference, of responsibility and surrender, of give and take, and of heartbreak and joy.

This paradox of second person love is expressed in many ways. The faces of great saints are described as being an ineffable mix of suffering and joy. People often re-count how the experiences which have most instructed them in loving are often the most painful - the death of a loved one, a chronic illness, a defeat or failure. Love be-gins to blossom in more profound and durable ways when the polarity of the two-ness of our experience is lived and embraced. We begin to see, as Mother Teresa has said, “Christ, in all of his distressing disguises.”

The most powerful form of the practice of loving comes from the embrace and inclu-sion of the difficult aspects of our day to day experience with other people in our lives. Whether it is the simple negotiations required with our intimate partners, or the integra-tion of the great disappointments, betrayals, and losses that accumulate in our life, keeping the heart open and choosing to love instead of shut down is the requirement of the second person of love.

Love is a communication with measurable energetic effects

Love exists in the second person precisely because the sameness of identification in the first person joins with the difference in identification of the third person, in what Ken Wilber refers to the “Miracle of We.” We would not be a “we” if we could not find the sameness in us, and we would not be a recognizable “we” if we could not acknowl-edge our differences. A “we” is established when there is a recognizable, mutual com-munication which helps to organize experience between individual holons. When love is the communication, an energy flows which has the power to move and change other’s experience, their perception’s, moods, and even their overall health. The same is true of aggression, hatred, and ill-will. Marilyn Schlitz, the Director of Research for the Institute of Noetics Sciences, says that “I have worked to shed light on the relation-ship between consciousness and healing, and love is a fundamental aspect of that. Re-lationship is a fundamental aspect of what is unfolding as a new ontology. There have been several epidemiological-type studies looking at people who are in relationship, and it's clear people live longer and are happier on average if they're in a bonded lov-ing relationship. When love is expressed in relationship or in community, it is palpable. As scientists, are finding ways to define and to measure the felt experience of love.” (FOL dialogue with Marilyn Schlitz, April, 2010).

Love is a transformative exchange

Love is the expressive, explicated transformative process between two or more people and between ourselves and the divine. John Welwood writes that “Love is a transfor-mative source because it brings the two sides of ourselves - the expansive and con-



tracted, and the asleep and the awake - into direct contact. (Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love, Shambhala Boston 1990. pg.13). The tension that arises from the opposition of these poles is precisely the transformative energy that moves us from our small identifications into a larger field of awareness, of compassion, and life pur-pose.

Advanced Teaching

“You are a divine elephant with amnesiaTrying to live in an ant hole.”

- Hafiz

Reading from Rabbi Marc

I love you.This is our oath of allegiance to a higher order of being.

The true nature of your values is always revealed in death. At your funeral you will hear in the eulogies, both in what is spoken and unspoken, something of the essential na-ture of your life. Before you die you might well be privileged with a final invitation to de-clare where your ultimate loyalty lies. It was 9/11/ 2001. The planes were about to crash into the twin towers in Manhattan. People had very short moments to use their cell phones. No one called asking for revenge. No one offered philosophical explana-tion or profound insight into the nature of reality. People did one thing and one thing only. They called the people close to their heart to say, I love you. I love you is our dec-laration of faith. Implicit in those words is everything holy.

And yet we no longer really know what we mean when we say “I Love You.” It used to mean, “I am committed to you. I will live with you forever”. Or it might have meant, “You are the most important person in my life.” But it no longer seems to mean that. That old Greek, Thucydides, wrote in his great work, The Peloponnesian Wars, some-thing like “When words lose their meaning, culture collapses.” When you no longer un-derstand your own deepest declarations of love, you are lost. The very foundation of meaning upon which your world rests is undermined. You lose your way. You become alienated from love, which is your home. Despair, addiction and numbness become your constant companions.

For so many of us, love has lost its luminosity as the organizing principle of our lives. Love seems to have diminished power to locate us and to guide us home. “I love you” has become banal, casual, and desiccated.

One day you feel the love, the next day you do not. One day love holds you in the place of your belonging, and the very next day you are cast out, exiled and lost. For so many of us, “I love you” has ceased to be a place where we can find our home.

What do you really mean when your highest self says to another, “I love you?”



Said differently and more directly, What is Love?

To know the way of Unique Self you must know the way of love.

To find your destination in love you must consider the reason for all of your detours.

You must wonder about all your wrong turns in love.

Where did you go wrong? Is there something you did not understand about the nature of love?

You are not alone in your question. There is hardly a person alive who is conscious who has not asked this question. This writer included. So I will speak to myself through you.

Love is a Verb

If you are like most highly intelligent and sincere modern seekers, you are making two core mistakes about love. First, you think that love is an emotion. When the emotion is gone you feel like you are no longer in love and thus can no longer stay in the relation-ship.

Second you automatically identify love with a particular emotion. The emotion with which you identify love is usually the emotion of infatuation. Both of these mistaken be-liefs are significant obstacles on your path to spiritual Liberation. Both of these obscure love’s innate ability to take you home.

Love at its originating core is not an emotion. Love is the ultimate verb in third person.

To love another human being is to perceive her true nature. To love is to perceive the infinite specialness and divine beauty of the beloved.

To be a lover is to see with God’s eyes. You beloved is both your lover and all that is.

To be loved by another human being is to have your true nature seen. Your true nature is your essence, your true self and your Unique Self, the personal face of essence.

To love God is to let God see with your eyes, to empower God with the vision of your unique perspective. You are living out of a passion for God.

You are being asked to live with his eyes.

To act with his eyes, to react with his eyes - to write your book of life with this eyes - as he would see with from your perspective. If you are successful then your perspective becomes available to God. It finds him and feeds him. It gives him strength and joy. You must consider that being a devotee is nothing but actually being him from a dis-tinct perspective.



This is the only truth about individuality. Mature individuality is not about being sepa-rate. It is about having a distinct perspective within the context of Union.

To be responsible for this perspective is to declare the truth from this vantage point. But without making it the only perspective. And without any degree of attachment to the vantage point we have clung to from the past- from our previous conditioning. This is what it means to be a lover.

This is the great paradox again and again. To be a lover is to see with God’s eyes. To love God is to let God see with your eyes.

Once, I shared with this understanding of love with the Dalai Lama. “Beautiful” he ex-claimed with sheer and utter delight.

Beautiful was the Dalai Lama in the direct and delicious expression of his delight.Particularly he was excited to shift the understanding of love from am emotion to a perception.

The Dalai Lama was puzzled in our conversation by the biblical commandment to love. How can you command an emotion? And yet in the evolutionary mysticism of Unique Self teaching, Love is the the ultimate commandment. Citing the old biblical text, “Love your neighbor as yourself “I” am God.”

The answer to the puzzle is now clear.

Step One: Love is not an emotion. Love is a perception.

“Love you neighbor as yourself,” is the seemingly impossible demand of the biblical book of Leviticus, echoed in the New Testament in the book of Matthew. At least this is how the text is usually cited. But the quote is actually missing three words. Too short. What all too often gets left out of the passage are the three last, and perhaps most crucial, words. The complete verse is, “Love your neighbor as yourself – I AM GOD.” To love your neighbor is to know that the “I” is God. To love your neighbor is to perceive her divine beauty and let it fill you with wonder and radical amazement. To love your neighbor is to behold with wonder her infinite specialness. Love is what the Hindus called Bhakti, to truly see the other bathed in their divine radiance.

Love is not an emotion. Love is not infatuation.

Emotions are involuntary reactions that come from the nervous system. The emotion of infatuation is usually a pre- programmed reaction that takes place when you meet someone that you recognize. You re-cognize them because you remember them. They evoke in you a sense of familiarity and intimacy. They unconsciously re-mind of you of your parents or early caretakers.



The person with whom you are infatuated holds out to you the possibility of completing the unfinished emotional business you have with your mother, father, or early caretak-ers. Or you fall in love with them as an expression of your unconscious rebellion or al-ienation from your parents and caretaker who you experience as painful or dangerous.Only when you fall out of infatuation do you see—sometimes for the first time. Before then, you cannot see the other clearly. Your perception is blurred. Infatuation is blind. Love is a magnifying glass. Initially the perception yields a more complex and less rosy picture then the blind adulation of infatuation, but if you stay with it, remain focused, and invest your self with full passion and heart, the perception begins to clarify. You begin to genuinely see the full splendor and beauty of the one you love. The delight of love is a natural result of your perceptions.

Love is perception’s gift. Love is a faculty of perception, which allows you to see the inner nature of all that is. Love is a realization. Love is a verb. Love is the true inner na-ture of all that is. Love is.

Love is a Perception-Identification Complex

When we say that love is a perception, we do not mean it is merely a perception. It is, as we have implicitly seen in our discussion till now, a Perception-Identification Com-plex. And this is not complex as in Oedipal sense, but rather in the simplest sense of a two-part structure. Love is a two-part formula.

The beloved not only perceives the divine, the Unique Self of her lover, she identifies him with that divinity. She understands his divinity as his essence. She sees and identi-fies her beloved with his infinite specialness.

This notion of perception identification is most clear in reference to parents and chil-dren. You love your kids. The neighbor’s kids however – well, they are just so incredibly rambunctious, annoying and immature…

In fact, we all recognize that there may be no appreciable difference between your kids and the neighbor’s kids. Why then do you love your children and not the neighbor’s? Not merely because they’re your children, but rather, because they are your children, you are invested in them. This investment causes you to focus your vision on them more intensely than on other kids. The result – you are able to perceive them in ways other people are simply unable to do. You perceive your child’s beauty in a way that no one quite grasps.

But perception is not enough. If you are a good parent, you know your child also has faults, and those shortcomings are real. They need to be addressed forthrightly and never swept under the rug. Remember, love is not blind. Infatuation is blind. Love is a microscope. Parents should be madly in love with their kids – they should never be in-fatuated with them.



How is it then that you love you children even after you know their long laundry list of faults? The answer lies in the second step of the love formula, identification. You per-ceive both your child’s goodness and her flaws – but you identify her goodness as the true core of who she is. All the rest you will deal with in whatever way necessary – but you know that at the core the trailing clouds of glory are the essence of your child. And you love her for it. With kids not our own, what we often (wrongly) tend to do so is to identify the child with his failing or acting out instead of with his infinite specialness and grandeur.

Have any of your friends every gotten engaged and the response of your circle was something like, “I can’t believe it – SHE is going to marry …HIM. Candice.. is going to marry …Tim??!!” We do not understand what she sees in him. But see in him she does. She perceives him, sees him, discloses him in a way that we are unable to ac-cess. Our eyes are too “furnished” to see the miraculous, infinitely unique gorgeous-ness that is Tom. To love is to see with unfurnished eyes. But let there be no mistake about it – Tom is stunningly gorgeous. To Candice, the man is a miracle. The word “miracle” comes from the Latin mirari meaning “to behold with rapt attention.” Candice has beheld the glory of Tom and found him to be divine. She has seen his infinite uniqueness, the snowflake essence of his soul that most miraculously never melts. To love is to witness the miracle of your beloved. Love is a Unique Self Perception.

[This is an excerpt from forthcoming book. Your Unique Self, The Future of Enlighten-ment: This excerpt had been adapted and edited by Diane and Marc for the Three Faces of Love: Week 4]

Giving

The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infi-nite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.- Goethe, “Elective Affinities”

Recapitulation

I want to be a lover. You want to be a lover. Together in this course we are charting the course of love. What a tremendous privilege to journey with you, to share with you the secret of the cherubs, to be in awe together over the mystery of love.

As we have said, I see you and you are gorgeous, magnetically dazzling, to me. I yearn for you – all of me wants to break down and dissolve the barriers between us, to enter the inside, where the world stands still for a moment and I am inside the chrysalis of all reality. You-nified.

We understand that love is a perception. Moreover, love is a Perception-Identification Complex. I perceive the infinite specialness, the God point in you, and identify that highest point in you as the Real You.



In the understanding of the quantum spirit, I understand that my perception not only discloses a reality that exists, it actually brings this particular reality into existence. “I love you” means both “I perceive you in your beauty” and “You become even more beautiful under my gaze.” Remember, love is a verb. So just as when I shine shoes, they become shinier, when I love you, you become lovelier.

Built into our spiritual hard-wiring is a great desire to realize the beauty and divinity that is our birthright. The experience of falling of love is a true perception of this. It allows us a glimpse of union; of what life might be when the thick walls of ego dissolve. We un-derstand, nevertheless, that those walls will always be raised again Though but a po-etic paradox, it is true that that which is razed, will be only raised again. Ego separation will, sooner or later, always snap back into place. It is precisely at this time, that the real work of loving begins. We seek, by doing the work, to reclaim the heights we glimpsed in the initial ecstasy. Those heights, and even greater ones.

At this point that we are ready to embark on the next tantric path of loving. The path of Giving.

Transcendence & the Gradual Widening of Self

To be a lover is to be a giver. It is through the consistent commitment to the growth of the other expressed through regular and spontaneous acts of giving that you become a lover. Slowly over time – in a gradual expanding of self – you are able to regain and surpass even the initial ecstasy of falling in love. The ego boundaries dissolve, self is expanded to include other, and the true intimacy of shared identity is achieved. This is the spiritual dynamic between lover and beloved. It is of course important to remember that the beloved could be a man or woman, a community, a child, a vocation, location, animal or cause. The principle remains the same. There is no loving without giving. Love always involves the willingness to transcend self for the sake of the growth of an other.

For the Hebrew mystics, the word for love itself expresses this notion of giving which they so cherished. Love, in the original Hebrew – ahava - is sourced in the word hav. Hav has three meanings. Love and Giving are the first two. There is no love without giv-ing. The third meaning is the glow of passion. Thus the word ‘lahav’ comes from this root. Lahav is Hebrew for ‘torch’, as in the familiar phrase of “carrying a torch” for someone. “Carrying a torch” is the convergence of all three meanings of Hav – it is be-ing in love with, invested in and passionately entangled with another.

Hav in this sense is not at all dissimilar to how the Greeks sometimes talked about Eros. This is a wonderful thing to notice. Remember that for the Greeks, Eros was pas-sion while Agape and Philia – two completely different words – represented giving, care and concern. For the Hebrew mystic, that chasm of separate words dividing eros from agape and philia, is bridged by one wonderful term, hav. Like a single wagon carrying three passengers, hav holds together love, passion and giving – eros, agape and philia.



The Hebrew mystics knew that language is a portal to powerful and profound under-standing. They go on to point out that the Hebrew words chovah and chibbah share a common root source for Chovah is “commitment expressed through giving,” and Chibbah connotes love and affection. Chovah says that, if you are a lover, you must expend effort for the growth of your beloved. Through the giving implicit in love, you expand the limits of your narrow self and become an erotic lover.

The Baron Loves

The giving necessary in love is made clear in a great folktale.

There was once a fisherman who caught a large pike. Seeing what a substantial catch this was, he says out loud, “I won’t eat this fish. He is such a great catch that I will take him to the Baron. The Baron loves Pike.”

Hearing this the fish breathes a sigh of relief. “There’s some hope for me yet!”The pike is brought to the manor house. At the gate the guard asks, “What do you have?”

“A large Pike!”

“Wonderful,” responds the guard. “The Baron loves Pike.” The fish is by now sweating profusely and gasping for breath but he is relived. A few more minutes, and he will be safe with the Baron. The Baron loves Pike.

The Pike is brought into the kitchen; The Baron himself enters with a big smile on his face. “I love Pike,” says the Baron.

As the fish, with its ebbing strength, wiggles around to ask for water, he hears the Baron say, “Cut of the tail and head and slice it down the middle.”

In his last breath of terrible despair, the fish cries out “Why did you lie? You don’t love Pike – you love yourself!”

To love is to be committed to the growth of the other. This always requires at least the temporary ability for self-transcendence.

We are divinely hardwired for giving as self-transcendence. God in the meditations of the mystics reveals herself as a giver, not a taker. The very formation of the world is motivated according to the Kabbalah by a divine love expressed in an infinite desire to give. If there is any need in God – it is the need to be a giver. Our own deeply felt need to give is our overwhelming desire to incarnate the God point in our lives. To give is to be like God.



A Light Motif

Now the core intuition of all the great systems of the spirit is that love is captured best by the image of light. Kabbala teaches that the light which fills the vessels of creation is love.

The word Torah itself – an all-encompassing Hebrew term meant to refer to all divine wisdom – means light. (Interestingly, the Hebrew word for light – Orah - is also the ba-sis for the English word aura.)

This idea is not just a nice image; it has fantastic implications for the nature of giving. Usually, when I give you something, it means that you now have it and I do not. Not so in reference to light and love. One candle can light a hundred candles without losing any of its own brilliance. It is for this reason precisely that light was held to be the in-carnation of love. When you give in love, much like a candle, you are able to illuminate many people without ever losing any of your own luminescence. Giving love only cre-ates more.

Love is as Love Does

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” - Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven

Loving and giving are inextricably bound up. The great medieval philosopher Maimoni-des teaches that to love God is to know the divine in both world and self. Maimonides understands well that to know and not to love is not to know. But he goes one step fur-ther; to love and not to do is not to love. Love is as love does.

So when Maimonides lists what it might mean to love God, he talks about a broad range of simple acts of goodness that we do for other people. Helping the poor, rejoic-ing with the bride and groom, escorting the dead at a funeral, and the list goes on and on. Small deeds, simple acts of kindness – that is what makes me a lover of God. Peo-ple are God incarnate in this world. Each person is a different face of God. To love people by being a giver is to love God. There is no great deed of loving God. There are only small deeds of giving to people – done with great love!

One of the great Biblical loves is that of Jacob for Rachel. The scene where Jacob, having left fame family and fortune behind, meets Rachel at the well is well known. He loves her, kisses her and cries. Love and kisses we understand, but why does Jacob cry? One teacher, 11TH century sage Rashi, from Northern France, explains that Jacob cried because he had no presents for Rachel. When you love you have an enormous desire to give. That, for the Hebrew mystics, is the great litmus test of loving.

For the average person, it is painful to give something up. For the lover, it is painful when she feels she has nothing to give. The lover longs to incarnate her love in gifts – small deeds filled with great love. Lao Tzu captured it so well when he said in his typi-



cal understated style, “Kindness in words creates confidence; kindness in thinking cre-ates profoundness; but only kindness in giving creates love.” I remember one evening when my second son,Yair, first asked me for a new bicycle that I could not afford. It hurt. I thought about it all night. Had I pursued other directions in life, I would be able to easily provide him with what he wanted. Although I knew full well that the gifts of the spirit I had for him were infinitely more valuable than those momentary material gifts, it still hurt. And that’s okay. We’ve all had moments where our hearts crack a little because we can not give our beloved every thing they want or even need. It is a bittersweet hurt which reminds you just how large your love really is.

Small Deeds of Great Love

The paradigmatic Biblical myth tale of love and giving is the story of Abraham who sits, sick, at the entrance to his tent, in the heat of the day. He is greatly saddened for there are no guests to grace his house on that day. Tradition tells the story of God who, hav-ing compassion for Abraham’s suffering in his sickness, made the day especially hot so as not to disturb Abraham with guests. Yet Abraham has a deep need to give. He gets sadder and perhaps sicker because there is no one to serve. Until – lo and behold – in the distance, he espies three men.

The Biblical myth narrative describes in great detail how Abraham rushes to greet them, and hurries with great alacrity to wash their feet, prepare them food and lodging. In reward for his hospitality, tradition records that Abraham merited many wondrous divine gifts. One contemporary mystical teacher, Chaim Shmuelivitz, Dean of the great-est Talmudic academy in Jerusalem, asks a simple but highly provocative question.

“Big Deal!? So Abraham was generous in his hospitality. So am I. So are many other people. What was so special about Abraham that his hospitality earned for him such abundant divine reward?”

Responding to his own question, Shmuelivitz writes, “There are no great deeds of giv-ing; there are only small deeds with great love.” When Abraham served his guests, he was doing it from a place of unending and pure love. All of the infinite love in the uni-verse was contracted into his every small deed of hospitality. When the infinite and the finite merge in a small point of goodness all of the worlds are raised higher. A smile. A good word. Abraham is the master of “small deeds with great love.” This is why only Abraham, of all the Biblical myth heroes, is called by the text a “ lover.” For to be a lover is to be a giver.

In Every Detail

One of the most gorgeous things about committed relationship is that it is so clear that every small act of attention and giving weaves another strand in the fabric of the rela-tionship. There is no such thing as a casual favor or fruitless giving. Everything goes into the mix. Every act is deposited into that great bank account of love. In fact, in



every interaction of our lives with whomever, whenever, about whatever, worlds are at stake. Loving or non-loving responses in the most random of situations can change the course of your life.

“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” –Richard Feynman, physi-cist

“Two men were sitting together on a train traveling from Warsaw to Lemberg. A long ride…one older and the other younger. The younger asks the older very politely, “Ex-cuse me, sir, could you tell me what time it is?”

No answer. So the younger man repeats the question, this time a little louder. Again no answer. A third time he repeats the question, but this time it is already clear he is being deliberately ignored. He is a bit hurt since he cannot understand what he did to de-serve such rude treatment. “What, sir, could I have done to insult you so that you ig-nore my simple question?” he asks.

“You haven’t done anything, son,” comes the response, “but there is no way I am going to give my daughter to a guy who doesn’t even have a watch.”

When we were young, we simply didn’t get the story. It was only when we got older that we realized that from this initial exchange would ensue a conversation and then a relationship that could lead to the younger man marrying the older man’s daughter. Every small act potentially creates or destroys world of love.

Give First, Love Follows

“Giving is not only the litmus test of love; it also leads to love,” teaches the holy Israel, Master of the Good Name. “If you want to be loved, be a lover.” Raised on the love ethic of western capitalism, we view love as the necessary prerequisite for caring. Only when you love someone will you be ready to really give to them. For the Hebrew mys-tics, it is precisely the opposite. Don’t wait to be a giver until you are a lover. Be a giver and you will become a lover. In the act of giving to an other, you invest yourself - liter-ally! - in them. They become, in a small way, part of you. This allows you to focus on them in a far more concentrated and sustained fashion. Focus creates attention and listening, which is, of course, the essence of perception. Since love is at its core a per-ception, then giving is both the essential expression of loving as well as the path to lov-ing.

In the language of the Kabbalists, giving moves you from narrow constricted con-sciousness to mochim de gadlut, expanded consciousness. This is critical to under-stand because what it means is that agape and philia lead to Eros. The loving of giving, care, and concern leads to the ever deepening love of passion and depth. Once you give to a person you always start to love them. Is there is someone you simply do not



like at work, but have to ‘put up with’ all day? Bring them a present. And witness the subtle shift in your own, not to mention their, attitude.

To be a lover, then, means to be there even when the feeling is not. In the good months and the bad months, in the heat of passion and in the cold dreariness of life at its toughest. When you say “I love you,” what you are really saying is that you will stay even on the days when you can’t fully access the depth of that passionate love. Even-tually it is only in the dynamic of commitment that the heart opens in a way that out-lasts the vagaries of time and the fickleness of human emotion.

“Love is as powerful as death,” Interpret the third century Babylonian wisdom masters, “Charity saves from death.”

“What could that mean?” ask the disciples. What is the spiritual death that results from living without loving and giving? Undoubtedly, the divine universe is not a cosmic vend-ing machine in which you insert some coins and pull the lever for an elixir for “long life.” The original Hebrew word used for “giving” in the epigram is tzedaka. Usually mistrans-lated as charity, it really means justice. The difference is enormous. Charity means that the money is mine, and if I feel magnanimous, then I can give some to you. Justice, the correct translation for tzedaka, is understood by the masters to mean that your money is not owned by you at all. In Hebrew law, a portion of your money is in reality owned by the poor in the community. According to one legal school, the Tosafists, the only right you have to the money is to determine which poor person will receive it.Wow! What this law reminds us of is the great truth of philosophy. You are not separate from everyone else. The accumulation of property and possession in this life time is overwhelmingly due to sets of circumstances entirely beyond your control. You may have worked hard, but there are a million people who worked just as hard and the uni-verse did not allow them to accumulate your level of wealth. Those possessions are not essentially yours. And so, a portion of your possession, according to Hebrew mystical doctrine codified in law, belongs to those less fortunate than you, not because the government legislated taxes, but because non-separateness is the essential meta-physical truth of reality.

Not to experience the entire interconnectivity of being is to live a non-erotic dead exis-tence. Charity saves from death.

Commanded to be Interconnected

This helps us to understand beautifully one of the most counter intuitive dictums of Hebrew wisdom. “Greater is one who does out of command –(metzuveh) than one who does even though he is not commanded (Eino metzuveh).” Logically, the opposite should be true. Is not the one who does good because of his own moral feeling supe-rior to the one who gives out of a sense of obligation. Respond the wisdom masters - No!



Imagine that one person encountered a poor man on the street and was greatly moved by her plight. Even though he had given her ten percent of his income to charity that year- his heart was so moved that he gave him a hundred dollars. The next year the same two people encounter each other on the street. The poor man is still poor. This time however our Good Samaritan is in a foul mood and barely has room in his heart to notice the poor man. However he remembers that he has not yet fulfilled the Tzedaka – ‘Just’ Giving - obligation of ten percent of his income. So he perfunctorily gives him a hundred dollars out of a sense of obligation.

Which act of giving was higher? Primarily the second. For in the first case the giving welled up out of his separate sense of self. I who am fortunate will give to you who are not. However in the second case his giving welled up from an essential connection be-tween him and the poor person. He felt Metzuveh. Usually translated as ‘commanded,’ Metzuveh also has the sense of Tzavtah, meaning ‘To be together with’. In that light let’s re-read the dictum in a beautiful way. “Greater is one who gives out of a sense of Metzuveh –interconnectivity – than one who gives out of sense of’ ‘eyno metzuveh’- disconnection and alienation.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke understood this deeply when he wrote:

“Love is… a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in him-self, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake. [Love is] a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”

Practice Assignment for Week 4:

This week’s practice: Listen to the FOL interview with Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughn. Post about what you learned from these two veterans of loving. Choose one practice from this week’s material, either from our session or from their interview, en-gage it daily for three or four days, then post about it.

You can find the Future of Love dialogues here.

Please post your practice assignments in our online group here.



http://integrallife.com/FutureofLoveTeleseriesContent

http://integrallife.com/FutureofLoveTeleseriesContent

http://ievolve.ning.com/group/thethreefacesoflovetelecourse/forum/topics/open-to-the-three-faces-of

http://ievolve.ning.com/group/thethreefacesoflovetelecourse/forum/topics/open-to-the-three-faces-of

three faces of love - center for integral wisdom · john welwood writes that “love is a transfor-...

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