Love, like self-preservation, is a psychological program. A program controls behavior. The program “love” controls human behavior. The principle of this behavior is attraction or affection in the sense of union. This union has several stages, as can be seen in the example of entering into a romantic relationship, for example in the form of mutual glances, touching, hugging, exchanging kind words, kissing, and sexual union.
The goal of striving for union in the sense of becoming one is then unity (see Chapter 3), which is not achievable on the psychological and, of course, on the physical level, but it is very much achievable on the spiritual level in the sense of consciousness.
However, “love” has two opposing halves or directions: one of the two forms is toward oneself; it comes from ‘below’ (see Chapter 1) from our mammalian nature and expresses itself as self-preservation. It is the material part of love, its “lower” half. Self-preservation is indeed love, but only for one’s own well-being and survival at the expense of others, i.e., the ego. This behavioral principle is also that of all other mammals.
The other love, its “upper” half, so to speak, is that for others, for the preservation and well-being of all others and for all others, namely by sacrificing one’s own interests. Animals do not have this kind of love.
Love for partners, children, parents, friends, etc. is predominantly nothing more than an extended form of self-love and therefore belongs to the ego. Every pride of lions also cares sacrificially for its own offspring, thus ensuring its own survival. Any care for another pride is not possible for the lion’s consciousness.
| SPIRIT Indiscriminate love (divine) |
| MATTER Love only for one’s neighbor (human) |
Jesus used the term “neighbor” in the sense of “not selfish toward oneself,” but at the same time, his choice of the word “neighbor” produced a misunderstanding: the human ego immediately established a privileged relationship with close people in the social environment, such as partners or children, and thus constructed indifference, rejection, or even exclusion of others. This applies to all possible distinctions, such as nobility and rabble, East and West Germans, evil neighbors, rivals in matters of love, career, worldview, and, of course, excesses such as anti-Semitism, racism in general, etc.
Although he repeatedly made the actual meaning clear, such as “love one another as I have loved you,” the human ego has always been able to successfully obscure these clarifications.
However, there are also components of the aforementioned love for one’s “neighbor” that are not unconsciously ego-related. They can be recognized by the behavior of self-sacrificing giving as opposed to taking, whereby giving is all too often only a means of unconsciously wanting to have something, for example, in order to bind a partner to oneself or at least to want to keep them. The difference, i.e., “truly selfless selflessness,” can be recognized, if at all, through negative experiences or intuitive guidance.
The norm in charity is preferential love (see Chapter 1). It distinguishes between useful objects and those that are not:
“As in every human being, two people lived in Nechljudov: the moral person who sought his good in the good of others, and the animalistic person who sought only his own good and was prepared to sacrifice the whole world to this good…”
(Leo N. Tolstoy: Resurrection; Volume I, Chapter 14)
The universal and unconditional love for strangers is described in Christian wisdom as love for strangers (parable of the Good Samaritan) or love for enemies (Sermon on the Mount). In contrast to preferential love, Samaritan love excludes no one and is indiscriminate, as can be seen in Jesus’ forgiving behavior toward his torturers:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12)
This category of love (Greek: agape, see chapter 17) has nothing to do with affection or emotion: it is the rational understanding of the spiritual unity of human beings. It disregards the surface of the material person – physically and psychologically – (“God does not look at the person.” Acts 10:34) It focuses its gaze on their spirit soul, which is the same as its own, the divine soul spark in man (Meister Eckhart), the Son of God. This recognition of spiritual unity corresponds on the material level to the understanding of the substantial unity of the fingers on the hand: their unity behind the differences between thumb and index finger, etc., consists on the material surface of the life-giving bloodstream. As far as the spiritual level is concerned, this refers to the consciousness and reality of the unity of all being (cf. chapter 3).
The meaning of true love is union with the other and with others in consciousness, the recognition of the same common spiritual identity of the sonship of God. This requires a considerable amount of attention and discipline on a daily basis, in order to establish a deep insight into the spiritual identity of all other people in all worldly matters and to maintain this expansion of consciousness—as far as the situation allows. This applies both to direct conversation and to thoughts about these people, whether they are friends or enemies. In doing so, it is always important to begin this training in insight with oneself.
Through this work of consciousness, one comes ever closer to the ultimate goal, the realization of the unity of all being (Chapter 3), the restoration of an original state, as depicted in the parable of the Prodigal Son. This return of consciousness to the spiritual level is now equipped with greater insight, with experience and understanding of matter in the good-evil dimension, and the attainment of freedom from suffering.
It is obvious that following the principle of love for strangers would mean the immediate and lasting material preservation of all human beings. So if everyone were to behave in a non-self-centered way – based on self-preservation through food, shelter, etc. – this would be true self-preservation, both collectively and individually.
In this respect, widespread egocentric self-love is the only cause of the appalling suffering on earth. This is why all wisdom teachings without exception emphasize love for one’s enemies (classic example: Gandhi), because only in this way is the preservation of humanity possible. In contrast, self-love leads to its destruction, as we can see every day through hatred, jealousy, betrayal, rape, manslaughter, massacres, environmental destruction, wars, and their catastrophic consequences.
The path to overcoming animalistic ego love and moving toward spiritual (!) love for strangers is the path to intuition, to inner guidance, usually through meditation. (A clear indication of a stage on this path—even if not yet connected to a spiritual understanding of Jesus’ love for enemies—was the welcoming behavior of many people toward the predominantly Syrian refugees: “Refugees welcome.”)
The turn inward leads to intensifying the flow from the soul, from “above,” in order to allow its creative powers, which had been overshadowed by the ego from “below,” to enter consciousness. In this respect, we are puppets, but with the strings in our own hands.
Natalie_ iStock 1133862591
If we allow the influx from “above,” i.e., from within, we recognize the ego’s previously dominant control of consciousness. Then we can increasingly consciously practice love for our enemies (see chapter 17) because we recognize our spiritual unity with everyone else, like the unity of the fingers of one and the same hand.
However, this insight would be deadly poison for the ego, because then more and more perfection and harmony would flow into our personal lives and the corresponding menus of hatred and enmity would automatically be deactivated.
In the play “No Exit” by French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, three people find themselves in hell after their physical death because of their earthly sins. They are locked in a room there, constantly bothering each other and getting on each other’s nerves: “Hell is [always] other people.”
In Sartre’s play, the protagonists end up in a state of hopelessness. They are unaware of the existence of the ego program that controls them, and even if they were, they would not know if there is a solution at all and where to find it. So it is no wonder that they see no way out of this hell – just like the author himself; this is probably also true for 99% of people. That is why they resign themselves to it. Garcin says: “So – let’s get on with it!” But he is mistaken, there is a way out. It consists of exposing the ego as such and as a control program from “below” and then expanding it step by step, i.e., recognizing preferential love as such and adding spiritually based love of one’s enemies to one’s consciousness.
Love for strangers is the higher control program in humans, in contrast to their lower program of animal self-preservation. Love is the energy that overcomes separation, overcomes opposites, and thus removes boundaries; it is therefore the energy that creates unity with everything and everyone, all of which are components of creation.
As mentioned, egoism is also love, but love in the wrong direction, namely only towards oneself. The falseness of this love is demonstrated by the Golden Rule, which in turn calls on us to behave towards others as we would like them to behave towards us.
True love does not come from below, from the instinctive soul of mammals, from exclusive love for oneself, but from above, that is, from the spirit soul.
It overcomes self-preservation and concentrates on being there for other people, as shown in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The “side effect” is that this, and only this, enables fundamental self-preservation.
True love (agape) is based on the intellectual recognition of the same spirit soul in the other, a look through (Buddhist: “deep look”) through the surface of the physical person to their spiritual core. For this X-ray view through the mask of earthly physicality, Saint-Exupéry uses the phrase in “The Little Prince”: “One sees clearly only with the heart!”
Illustration of rainbow human aura – DeoSum iStock
True love is the program that goes beyond the necessary function of self-preservation and relates to the preservation of others. It is sacrifice, devotion, service, the partial postponement of one’s own interests in favor of others. This love is based on the principle of overcoming the material boundaries between humans and their fellow humans. It has nothing to do with the relationship between one person and another and is, in this respect, of a higher nature in terms of consciousness. Only for this reason can Jesus call on us to “love” our enemies.
The misunderstanding is obvious: everyday people understand everything that has even the slightest connection with the concept of “love” as an emotional matter. Spiritual love has nothing to do with earthly feelings; it is purely intellectual and an act of recognition. Only in this context could Jesus express forgiveness on the cross for the soldiers who had tortured him and nailed him to the cross.
Once again, let us return to the ambiguous and misleading concept of “neighborly” love. It seems obvious that this refers to love for those close to us, for partners, children, friends, etc. However, the exact opposite is the case: as already mentioned, the word “neighbor” refers to everyone else, because, due to our common characteristic of being created in God’s image, we are more than brotherly close to each other, like two organs of the same organism. Jewish wisdom demonstrates this in Lev. 19:34, Christian wisdom in Luke 10:29 (“Who is my neighbor?”), answering the question with the parable of the Samaritan and making it clear that “love of neighbor” refers not only to those who are emotionally close to us, but to everyone, and therefore also to our enemies.
Matthew describes in 10:37 that earthly love—i.e., love that only appears to be giving on the one hand and is exclusionary on the other—for oneself, partners, children, parents, friends, etc., has no value for higher development:
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. ”
Jesus here refers to the spiritual part of his identity, to the son of God within himself, he is not speaking of himself as a material person (“God does not look at the person”): “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” (Luke 18:19)
Every person is an individual mixture of ego and love, depending on the intensity and extent of influences in their upbringing and through their own efforts. In the male program, the ego component clearly predominates and is often total. In the female program, the ego component is, so to speak, rather halved. Everyone can see this at first glance, not only in nurses and mothers. Incidentally, this is also the background for the expression “helper” in the Christian story of creation, which was mistakenly interpreted by feminists in particular as servant, maid, or a kind of slave. Rather, it is about the answer to the obvious question: “Help for what?” Of course, help in learning to love through her empathy, which also means the “daily death” of the ego. Without this “helper,” who shows him how to love and exemplifies it, man would be lost. Goethe knew: “The eternal feminine draws us upward.” (Faust II, final verse)
The feminine does not refer to women, but to the qualities of the feminine that are present in every woman and every man, namely empathy, devotion, and receptivity—though much more so in women. However, this is not primarily about receptivity per se, but about the “eternal” receptivity to the impulses of the soul, to intuition.
In the mixture of love and ego in human beings, there is a lot of black and little white, and many different shades of gray. Most of them are on the dark side, otherwise we would have a different world.
The antidote to hatred
The only antidote to these self-centered maneuvers is insight and understanding of the person’s drive control, who actually does not know what he is doing. The application of this understanding is true charity:
“Hate can only be overcome by love.”
(Mahatma Gandhi)
The modern Sufi* master Vilayad Inayad Khan notes the same thing in a different way:
“It is easy to love someone for the sake of beauty, but the test is to love a person even though they cannot fulfill the expectations of others.”
(Sufis: Islamic mystics)
This recipe is the only one that can free people from the vale of tears of our disastrous planet. The Buddha formulated it over two thousand years ago:
“A person should overcome anger with love, he should overcome evil with good… Because hatred is not resolved by hatred, hatred is only resolved by love.”
But that doesn’t work through the “love” that the ego understands. Its “love” looks like this: when it whispers tenderly in your ear, “I love you,” what it really means – unconsciously – is that it loves above all its own feelings of pleasure that your soft skin gives it.
Our lips are not only donors, but also recipients of pleasant and tingling feelings, but for the ego part, every kiss primarily serves one’s own well-being. Ego and love are opposites, because love has the well-being of the other in mind, the ego has its own. For the ego part of a person, love is a deal.
“…we only feel for ourselves. …One loves neither father nor mother, nor wife nor child, but the pleasant sensations that they give us…”
(Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: On External Objects)
True love knows that one’s own fulfillment only works through the good of the other. (But anyone who understands this knowledge as a business, as an investment, will fail.) But to primarily pursue the well-being of the other is only possible by looking through to the perfection in man, to his (and also my) essence, the spiritual soul. But the pure ego cannot refrain from its exclusive interest in itself. In its self-understanding, for example, tax increases are bad because they do not benefit it personally. The fact that taxes are used to finance general infrastructure and welfare means nothing to it.
Overcoming hatred through love is only possible through the aforementioned insight. This then almost automatically leads to the ability to forgive constantly as the basis for a harmonious life.
Love for strangers or even enemies does not mean building emotional bonds or even friendship with opponents, but, as already mentioned, it is an exclusively intellectual process. Of course, this applies to the worst criminals as well: it is “only” a matter of understanding that their spiritual soul is so cemented that an escape from the stench of their wickedness, brutality and violence seems almost completely impossible and any prospect within this life, as understood by Hindu wisdom, seems impossible.
There are exceptions, as the case of Jürgen Bartsch shows. He was one of the few who were at least more or less aware of the control behind his behavior. Bartsch was a sadistic pedophile serial killer who committed his first sex murder at the age of 16. After he was tried for the fourth murder at the age of 21, he openly admitted to his crimes and stated that he had acted under an “irresistible urge”. At least he realized that there were forces driving him that were stronger than he was. He therefore wanted to be castrated.
If I had shot someone, it would be ridiculous to say, “It wasn’t me, it was my hand that pulled the trigger.” And that’s exactly what people fall for, focusing on the hand instead of broadening their perspective to include the force behind the act that triggered the atrocity.
The enlightened insight “Don’t shoot the messenger!” has been known since ancient times. It expresses itself in the criticism of the execution of the messengers of bad news, instead of looking for their sender or originator.
It is about spiritual understanding, the view of one’s spiritual essence through the outer appearance (“looking through”). This is the soul’s point of view, which is not oriented towards form and shape, so it does not use sensory perception, but looks at the other soul with spiritual understanding, with intuition, through the surface, like an X-ray, and recognizes the unity of the two sparks of God. This is what leads to the ability to forgive unconditionally. Everything else then comes “by itself”, or rather, from the self.
Ignoring the surface and looking beyond it is not as unrealistic as it seems at first glance. In fact, everyone is familiar with it: in the first months of a new love, each partner is only too willing to look past all the strange idiosyncrasies of the other. It is love that looks past the negative aspects of the surface, but remains on the material level.
This ability is shown in the folk tale (later made into a film) “Beauty and the Beast”, in which Beauty (La Belle) does not orientate herself by the repulsive outward appearance of the monster (La Bète), but recognizes more and more its radiant core. She intuitively knows that there is a jewel hidden behind the surface, the spiritual soul, symbolized in the film by the “prince”, i.e. the king’s son. In doing so, she frees the other and also herself. In the film, this is symbolically expressed by the fact that she kisses (loves) the monster (enemy), thus transforming it back into the prince and in this way elevating herself to the level of the king’s daughter. Typically, this ability quickly diminishes in normal lovers due to the pressure of the ego. But it is an throughlooking experience that makes the transfer to the spiritual dimension understandable.
Those who hate show that they cannot love. In this respect, hatred poisons relationships with others, but most of all it poisons the hater themselves, because it permanently poisons themselves, that is, their attitudes. It is a kind of self-harm. Who would take an axe in their right hand and chop off their left hand with it? Certainly no one, and yet this is exactly what people do every day because they have lost sight of what connects the two hands.
Overcoming hatred of others (including myself) is only possible through the spiritual view of others, through the realization of their spiritual identity. If I then discover my own hatred, my awareness of my own spiritual identity saves me. Herman Melville describes in his novel “Moby Dick” where unquenchable hatred ultimately leads, he describes the path to self-destruction.
That is why there is hardly any real love in the world, because true love is not deterred by superficialities, but always recognizes the inner substance of a person.
The same theme can be found in the libretto of “Swan Lake.” The animalistic surface of the swan, who is in fact the princess, is seen through.
Only the heart can see
In the Gospel of John, Jesus does not condemn the adulteress because he looks beyond the surface, called the person, and sees her spiritual core. This is an omission of the outer man and a view of his spiritual identity, a penetration of the mask, a de-personalization, so to speak. He has the ability to distinguish between the person on the one hand and the controls (of the spiritual soul and the self-preservation instinct) that he unconsciously follows. Anyone who can distinguish between the appearance and essence of a person is well on the way to realizing the goal and purpose of life: “Gnothi se auton!” Know thyself! Know your spiritual identity!
The medieval poet Wolfram von Eschenbach describes the overcoming of the surface in a parable through the fight to the death between Parzival and Feirefiz. When the two knights lift up their visors (see mask) during a break in the fight, they recognize each other as brothers (!) (Parzival. VIII,14).
When Saint-Exupéry writes in “The Little Prince” that one sees “only with the heart well”, then exactly this looking through is meant. (He illustrates this connection with yet another example, namely in the drawing of the elephant in (!) the snake.)
The evil in the world is not created by the physical human being, but by the self-preservation instinct within him, which is not recognized because the general view is limited to the surface (mask) of the person.
In contrast to the animal, however, we can free ourselves from this mammalian heritage.
All the original texts of all cultures have only this one theme, the “daily dying.” Goethe calls it “die and become!” (Poem: Blessed Longing)
This dying refers to the “death” of egocentrism in man. In lockstep, the human maturing and “becoming” of the person takes place. The poet laureate calls on them to change their animal behavior (“more animal than any animal”: Faust I, Auerbach’s Cellar), and to change from this animal to a Samaritan human, to “become” one. The characteristics of the latter are described in all (!) wisdom texts, such as in the Sermon on the Mount.
The disease of humanity is personification: shooting the messenger! They kill those who deliver the bad news instead of asking for the perpetrator and sender.
The uncovering of assaults and rape by powerful men in show business (MeToo) suggests to readers that the respective perpetrators are consciously and culpably faced with the decision before each offense, whether they should do it or not. However, they were “only” externally determined executors of their urges, to which we are all more or less subject. (Of course, that doesn’t mean letting the delinquents go unpunished. After all, in the ego-dominated world, the ego-generality must be protected from the ego-violent. The ego software seduces us to superficially identify the perpetrators as people without a spiritual core.
Insight is needed to free ourselves from the hopelessness of our planet. Because in doing so, we do not switch the lever from bad to good (positive thinking), but from bottom to top, from horizontal to vertical, from surface view to depth structure. The subconscious realizes all the inputs we make. We live in the vale of tears because we are out for discord out of self-protection, have switched the lever down and left it there.
Insight and depth of understanding, seeing only with the heart: That sounds plausible and also hits the core of the problem, but nobody realizes it, on the contrary. That is why practicing implementation is the central point of spiritual work on oneself. Anyone can try this out on themselves, for example, when dealing (initially in thought) with right-wing extremists, criminals, angry citizens, nasty neighbors, refugees, highway hogs, enemies and other opponents. This is difficult because, as the wisdom scriptures unanimously recognize, we are “sensually attached”. We only believe in what we can grasp with our senses, instead of paying attention to the impulses of the spiritual depths.
When the Pope asked uncomprehendingly at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in May 2014: “Man, who are you? What made you fall so low?” The enormous hurdle that must be overcome to do what Jesus demonstrated by the example of the adulteress, namely to look behind the mask of the person (Latin: per-sonare = to sound through!), becomes clear. Only in this way is forgiveness possible.
You can see through if you examine how you mentally deal with a speeder who, while you are in the fast lane, repeatedly flashes his lights behind you, honks like crazy, then shows the bird while passing, swears and is clearly cursing. You can check him by looking at his reaction when someone drives too close, causes an accident and then aggressively refuses to take responsibility for causing it, whether it remains superficial or looks behind the scenes. “Affirm Tao in your neighbor.” (Tao Te Ching II, 54)