Love as Beauty and Wisdom

June 03, 2013

“As a rose among the thorns, so is my beloved amongst the daughters.”

The Zohar’s opening line

Every allowance of love is the sanctifying of a brick belonging to the universe’s holy temple. (For the irreligious, replace “sanctification” with “value response” and “holy temple” with “inherent value of existence distinguishing itself from nonexistence.”)

Allowing love is another way of endorsing forgiveness, forgiveness of yourself, forgiveness of others. Ultimately, love is like a state of equilibrium, and is likened to deep integration and self-sustaining systems, the characteristic of the Hindu chakra Anahata, the Taoist pivot point, and even Kabbalah’s Tiphereth. Allowing love brings about endless diversity of canvases and paints, ever shifting. This allowing brings wisdom, which may be another name for the ability to cultivate a vessel to receive love. Wisdom encompasses yet does not smother. A rose plucked dies quicker. Venus is a personification of an ocean when seen as a body of integrated drops. Venus is beauty and wisdom.

Knowledge itself only seems to simulate this wisdom of integration by its momentary pattern recognition specifically for getting from point A to B, showing a sanctioned version of integration. This attention to detail, this A to B, is an integration along a small field–itself–and may very easily forget the larger surrounding’s role in its very own sustenance, so its very own host gets destroyed. This motif has long been spoken about in stories of grandiose falls (Tower of Babel, Icarus, King Lear). If knowledge is power, then one should likely keep in mind that power easily corrupts.

If knowledge is to be likened to wisdom, then it may live where the A to B means going from non-sustainable to sustainable. The exception may be when one feels that non-sustainability is part of one’s will.

And so now non-sustainability enters the picture. This idea may be like the illusion that love has fled. There is ultimately one naturally-seeming result to this belief system, and it involves harnessing repressions, which can manifest into the motif of demons (illness), and ultimately the Reaper. However, this death personified can serve as a lover of the highest caliber. Every moment, for instance, is like a process, and if one is in the present and simultaneously pinpoints any point in the process, one may see how death of the moment simultaneously occurs. Love’s domain may be death’s domain, and the zero point of endless progression.

As for repressions, or demons, these can be viewed as darts. In South American shamanism, darts have two connotations–medicine and poison (the poison being like the thorns of the rose in the Zohar line). Repressions are a poison if they are ignored (though they manifested out of ignoring, likely ignoring one’s very own will), and a medicine if they are integrated. Integration, you see, can come right back into the picture. Love can appear anywhere. If one’s will is specifically for not integrating (not being sustainable), then one is preferring to play the game of ignoring.  If one is choosing, by will, to ignore, how can the individual tell he or she is not also ignoring the will? If one’s will is to truly be non-sustainable, then the results, death or pain, are to be accepted with open arms. This may be a bit of an extreme path–self-sacrifice–encompassing the idea of the dying God archetype (Osiris, Jesus).

Ultimately, beauty (love) is available anywhere–heaven and hell, sanity and insanity. In pleasure, beauty lives, and in treachery, beauty is an inevitable compensation. A rose can grow richer than any other for having its piece of earth mixed in with excrement. In history, genocides have opened up avenues of progress. The actions themselves have appeared inherently lacking of love (genocide as non-integration at an extreme), but the actions have come attached with lessons for humanity, and these lessons can in themselves be viewed as love only if one integrates with them instead of ignores them.

Knowing how love truly appears to work will have anybody viewing the human, animal, rock, and plant kingdoms differently, as vibrant and interesting. In associating with others, one will see actions as ones of love or consequences of repressions. A back-lashing individual may be responding to a former repression, and so if one holds onto this attack like purifying baggage, one may also see oneself back-lashing to somebody else who is not at fault. Stopping the cycle of pain at oneself is an act of self-empowerment, wisdom, and love, and in hermetic terms an act of transmutation.

For anybody who is into the idea of seeing love as beauty and wisdom, my suggestion (which I myself lose track of sometimes) is to be aware of how your actions are affecting other people. Also, be critical of your own judgments toward others. Judgment, in and of itself, can place a block between you and the other, making integration difficult if not impossible. One can keep distances, but outright attacking (I see the judge’s hammer as a weapon) will come back in another form as a repression, which will then likely be projected onto others, snowballing the whole affair.

Love is powerful and not to be underestimated. Love is the state at which we came into the world, the state at which playful children reside. Ignore the child and that child may manifest into a number of ugly things (as a resort to get your attention). So invite the child. Invite the dove. Shed that which is weighing you down. Let the dove rest on the crocodile’s head.