Like self-preservation, love is a psychological program. A program controls. The “love” program controls human behavior. One form of love is love for oneself, it comes from “below,” from the stock of our mammalian nature. It expresses itself as self-preservation. In this respect, self-preservation is indeed love, but only for oneself and for one’s own survival at the expense of others, that is, the ego.
The other love from “above” is the love for others, for the preservation and well-being of others and all others, and that is to say, the sacrifice of one’s own interests. The animal does not have this kind of love.
Love for partners, children, parents, friends, etc. is nothing more than an extended form of self-love and therefore belongs to the ego. This love is preferential love (see Tolstoy Chapter 1). It distinguishes between useful objects and those that are not.
Love for others is a love that the wisdom of Christianity calls love of strangers (Parable of the Good Samaritan) or love of enemies (Sermon on the Mount). In contrast to preferential love, Samaritan love excludes no one and is therefore love for all. This category of love has nothing to do with affection or feeling: it is exclusively the rational awareness of the spiritual unity of people, an intellectual insight that disregards the material person – physically and mentally – and focuses exclusively on their spiritual soul. On the earthly plane, the realization of spiritual unity corresponds to the understanding of the unity of the fingers on the hand.
The meaning of true love is union with the other and the others, the restoration of an original state, as depicted in the parable of the Prodigal Son. This return to the spiritual level (“were not ashamed,” Gen. 2:25) is now, however, equipped with a higher consciousness, with experience and understanding of matter (“they sewed themselves loin clothes,” Gen. 3:6) and spirit, of the instinctual soul and spiritual soul and of suffering and freedom from suffering.
It is obvious that following the love of strangers meant the immediate, only and sustainable material preservation of all people. So if everyone would behave selflessly – based on the essential self-preservation with nutrition, shelter, etc. – this would be true self-preservation, both collectively and individually.
In contrast, widespread self-centered love is the cause of the terrible suffering on earth. That is the reason why all wisdom teachings without exception emphasize love of one’s enemy (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 impressively every day through hatred, jealousy, fraud, rape, manslaughter, massacre, environmental destruction, as well as wars and their catastrophic consequences.
The conscious path to intuition is to intensify the influx from the soul, from “above”, in order to let through its creative powers, which have been overlaid by the ego from “below” for so long. In this respect, we are puppets, but with the strings in our own hands.
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If we allow the influx from “above”, i.e. from within, then we recognise the dominant control by the ego. Then we can practise love of our enemies (see chapter 7), recognise our spiritual unity with everyone else like the unity of the fingers of one and the same hand.
But this realisation would be deadly poison for the ego, because then more and more perfection and harmony would flow into our personal lives and the corresponding enemy and hate menus would automatically be deactivated. The protagonists Estelle, Ines and Garcin in the “Closed Society” are not aware of the existence of the ego programme that dominates them. And if they were, they still wouldn’t know whether there is a solution and where it is. So it is no wonder that they see no way out. This is probably also true for well over 90% of people.
Love is the high basic program in humans, in contrast to the lower one of self-preservation in animals. Love is generally the energy of overcoming separation, of overcoming opposites, i.e. of cancelling boundaries; it is therefore the energy of establishing unity with everything and everyone, who are all part of creation.
Egoism is also love, but it is love in the wrong direction, namely only towards oneself. The falseness of this love is denounced by the Golden Rule, which 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, from the exclusive love for oneself, but from above, i.e. triggered by the spiritual soul. She overcomes self-preservation and focuses 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 sustainable and harmonious self-preservation.
She (Agape) is based on the intellectual realisation of the same soul force in the other, the looking through (buddh. “deep view”) through the surface, through the mask of the surface, the physical person.
Illustration of rainbow human aura – DeoSum iStock
True love is the programme that goes beyond the necessary function of self-preservation and relates to the preservation of others. It is sacrifice, devotion, service, the partial setting aside of one’s own interests in favour of others. This love is based on the principle of removing the boundaries between man and fellow man. It has nothing to do with the relationship from person to person and is therefore of a higher nature in terms of consciousness. This is the only reason why Jesus can call on us to “love our enemies”.
The misunderstanding is obvious: everyday people understand everything that even remotely has to do with the term “love” as an emotional matter. Spiritual love initially has nothing to do with earthly feelings; it is purely intellectual and an act of cognition. Only in this context was Jesus able to express forgiveness on the cross for the soldiers who had tortured him and nailed him to the wood of execution.
The term “love of neighbour” is misleading or even misunderstood. It seems obvious that it refers to love for loved ones, partners, children, friends, etc. However, the exact opposite is the case: the word “neighbour” refers to everyone else, because due to the common characteristic of likeness we are more than fraternally close to each other, like two organs of one and the same organism. Jewish wisdom demonstrates this in Lev. 19, 34, Christian wisdom in Luke 10 (“Who is neighbour?”) by answering the question with the parable of the Samaritan, making it clear that “love of neighbour” refers not only to emotional neighbours, but above all to everyone and therefore also to enemies.
Matthew describes in 10:37 that earthly – i.e. marginalising – love for oneself, partners, children, parents, friends, etc. has no value for higher development. It is receiving, while true love is giving.
Every person is an individual mixture of ego and love, depending on the intensity and scope of the influences in their upbringing and through their own efforts. In the male programme, the ego part clearly predominates and is often total. In the female programme, the ego component is more or less halved. Everyone can see this at first glance, not just carers and mothers. Incidentally, this is also the background to the term “helpmate” in the Christian creation story, which has been misinterpreted, especially by feminists, as a servant or a kind of slave. Rather, it is about the answer to the obvious question: “Help for what?” Help in learning to love through her empathic part, of course, which also means the “daily death” of the ego. Without this “helper”, who shows him how to love and sets an example, the man would be lost. Goethe knew: “The eternal feminine attracts us.” (Faust II, final verse)
The feminine does not refer to women, but rather to the characteristics of the feminine that are present in every woman and every man, namely empathy and receptivity – but much more in women. However, it is not primarily about receptivity per se, but about the “eternal” receptivity for impulses of the soul, for intuition.
When it comes to the mixture of love and ego in people, there is a lot of black and little white and many different shades of grey. Most of these 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)