Like self-preservation, love is a psychological programme. A programme controls. The ‘love’ programme controls human behaviour. 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, thus 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 realisation 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-centred love is the cause of the terrible suffering on earth. That is the reason why all wisdom teachings without exception emphasise love of one’s enemy (classic example: Gandhi), because only in this way is the preservation of humanity possible. By contrast, self-love leads to its destruction, as we can see impressively every day through hatred, jealousy, deceit, rape, manslaughter, massacre, environmental destruction, as well as wars and their catastrophic consequences.
El camino consciente hacia la intuición es intensificar la receptividad al influjo del alma. El propósito es dejar pasar sus poderes creativos, que durante tanto tiempo han sido tapados por el ego desde abajo. En ese sentido somos marionetas, pero con los hilos en nuestras propias manos.
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Si permitimos el influjo desde «arriba», es decir, desde dentro, entonces reconocemos el control hasta ahora dominante del ego. Entonces podremos practicar el amor al enemigo (véase el capítulo 7), reconocer nuestra unidad espiritual entre nosotros como la unidad de los dedos de una misma mano.
Sin embargo, esta percepción sería un veneno mortal para el ego, porque entonces fluiría más y más perfección y armonía en nuestra vida personal y los correspondientes menús de enemigos y odio se desactivarían automáticamente. Los protagonistas Estelle, Inés y Garcin de «La sociedad cerrada» no son conscientes de la existencia del programa del ego que los rige. Y si lo fueran, seguirían sin saber si hay una solución y dónde está. Así que no es de extrañar que no vean una salida. Esto también debería ser cierto para más del 90% de las personas.
Pero existe, esta salida, que todos los escritores sabios sin excepción conocen desde tiempos inmemoriales, describen y recomiendan a la gente. Sólo que casi nadie lo sigue, lo que se debe a la ofuscación por el instinto de conservación. Lo poderoso y sutil que es este poder al mismo tiempo, se puede juzgar fácilmente por lo absurdo que le parece a la gente el mandamiento del amor a los enemigos, enfatizado por Krishna, Jesús, Lao Tse, Buda, Nanak y muchos otros. Esto puede verse en la relación entre palestinos y judíos, suníes y chiíes, blancos y negros, armenios y turcos, derechistas e izquierdistas, empresarios y empleados,
Sin embargo, los maestros espirituales han omitido en la mayoría de los casos explicar qué condiciones deben cumplirse y cómo funciona concretamente el amor a los enemigos. Incluso en el cuento de hadas «La Bella y la Bestia» (véase más adelante) este poder que todo lo salva sólo se muestra, pero no se explica.
El amor es el programa básico superior en el hombre, en contraste con el inferior de autoconservación en los animales. El amor es, en general, la energía de la superación de la separación, de la superación de los opuestos, es decir, de la abolición del trazado de las fronteras; es, pues, la energía del establecimiento de la unidad, y eso con todo y con todos, que son, al fin y al cabo, todos los componentes de la Creación.
El egoísmo también es amor, pero en la dirección equivocada, es decir, sólo hacia uno mismo. La falsedad de este amor es denunciada por la Regla de Oro, que apela a comportarse con los demás como uno quiere que se comporten con uno mismo.
El verdadero amor no viene de abajo, del alma pulsional, del amor exclusivo al yo, sino de arriba, es decir, provocado por el alma espiritual.
Supera la autopreservación y se centra en la preservación de los demás, como se muestra en la parábola del buen samaritano.
Se basa en el reconocimiento intelectual de la misma fuerza anímica en el otro, mirar a través de la superficie (budismo: „visión profunda“) , de la máscara de la superficie, de la persona física.
El verdadero amor es el programa que va más allá de la necesaria autoconservación para la preservación de los demás. Es el sacrificio, la devoción, el servicio, el dejar de lado parcialmente los propios intereses en beneficio de los demás. Este amor se basa en el principio de la abolición de las fronteras entre el hombre y sus semejantes. No tiene nada que ver con la relación de persona a persona y es, en la medida de lo posible, de naturaleza superior. Sólo por eso Jesús puede llamar a «amar a sus enemigos».
El malentendido es evidente: la persona corriente entiende todo lo que tiene que ver, aunque sea remotamente, con el término «amor» como una cuestión emocional. El amor espiritual no tiene inicialmente nada que ver con los sentimientos terrenales, es puramente intelectual y un acto de conocimiento. Sólo en este contexto pudo Jesús expresar el perdón en la cruz a los soldados que le habían torturado y clavado en el madero de la ejecución.
El concepto de «amar al prójimo» es engañoso hasta el punto de serlo. Parece obvio que se refiere al amor de los seres queridos, la pareja, los hijos, los amigos, etc. Sin embargo, es exactamente lo contrario: la palabra «prójimo» significa todos los demás, porque estamos más que fraternalmente cerca unos de otros, como dos órganos de un mismo organismo, debido a la cualidad común de la semejanza. La sabiduría judía lo demuestra en Lev. 19, 34, la sabiduría cristiana en Lc. 10 («¿Quién es el prójimo?») respondiendo a la pregunta con la parábola del samaritano y en la medida en que aclara que el «amor al prójimo» se refiere precisamente no sólo al prójimo afectivo, sino sobre todo a todos y por tanto también a los enemigos.
Que el amor terrenal -es decir, excluyente- a uno mismo, a la pareja, a los hijos, a los padres, a los amigos, etc. no tiene ningún valor para el desarrollo superior lo describe Mateo en 10,37. Es tomar, mientras que el verdadero amor es dar.
Cada persona vive una mezcla individual de ego y amor. En el programa masculino, la parte del ego de toma predomina claramente y suele ser total. En el programa femenino, la parte del ego se reduce más bien a la mitad, por así decirlo. Todo el mundo ve el dar a primera vista, no sólo en las enfermeras y las madres. Por cierto, este es también el trasfondo de la expresión «compañera» en el relato cristiano de la creación, que ha sido concebida erróneamente, sobre todo por las feministas, como una sirvienta, una criada o una especie de esclava. Se trata más bien de responder a la pregunta obvia: «¿Ayuda para qué?». Por supuesto, ayuda en el aprendizaje del amor a través de su parte de empatía, que es al mismo tiempo «muerte diaria» del ego. Sin este «ayudante» que le muestre y modele el amor, el hombre estaría perdido. Goethe sabía que «el eterno femenino nos eleva». (Fausto II, verso final)
(Por lo femenino no se entiende la mujer, sino las cualidades de lo femenino que están presentes en toda mujer y en todo hombre, a saber, la empatía, la capacidad de dar amor y la receptividad, aunque mucho más en la mujer. Sin embargo, no se trata principalmente de la receptividad en sí, sino de lo «eterno», la receptividad para los impulsos del alma, para la intuición).
Hay mucho negro y poco blanco en la mezcla de amor y ego en el ser humano, y muchos matices de gris. La mayoría de ellos se encuentran en el lado oscuro, de lo contrario tendríamos un mundo diferente.
The antidote to hatred
The only antidote to these egocentric manoeuvres is knowledge and understanding of the person’s drive control, who actually does not know what he is doing. The application of this understanding is true love for one’s neighbour:
«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 fulfil 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, overcome evil with good… Because hatred is not destroyed by hatred, hatred is only destroyed by love.’
But that does not 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, 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. …You don’t love your father or mother, nor your wife or child, but the pleasant sensations they give us…’
(Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: On External Objects)
True love knows that one’s own fulfilment 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 the human being, to his (and also my) essence, the spiritual soul. The pure ego, however, can’t refrain from its exclusive interest in itself. In its self-understanding, tax increases, for example, 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 rather, 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 behaviour. Bartsch was a sadistic paedophile 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 realised 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, who focus on the hand instead of broadening their perspective to include the force behind it 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, looking through the surface like an X-ray, and recognising 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 appears 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 beyond 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 the beauty (La Belle) does not orientate herself towards the repulsive outward appearance of the monster (La Bète), but recognises more and more its radiant core. She intuitively knows that behind the surface hides a jewel, the spiritual soul, symbolised in the film by the ‘prince’, that is, the king’s son. In doing so, she frees the other and also herself. This is symbolically expressed in the film by the fact that she kisses (loves) the monster (enemy), thus transforming it back into a prince and elevating herself to the level of the king’s daughter. Significantly, this ability quickly diminishes in the case of normal lovers due to the pressure of the ego. But it is an experience that allows us to see through to the spiritual dimension.
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 use it to chop off their left? Certainly no one, and yet this is exactly what people do every day because they have lost sight of the connection between the two hands.
Overcoming hatred of others (including myself) is only possible through the spiritual view of others, through the realisation of their spiritual identity. If I then discover my own hatred, the 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 almost no real love in the world, because it cannot be deterred by superficialities, but always recognises the inner substance of a person.
The same theme can be found in the libretto of ‘Swan Lake’. The animalistic surface of the swan, which is in fact the princess, is seen through.
Only the heart can see well
In the Gospel of John, Jesus does not condemn the adulteress because he sees through the surface, called the person, and looks at her spiritual core. This is a refraining from the outer man and the view of his spiritual identity, the penetration of the mask, a de-personalisation, 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 realising 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 superficial in the form of 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 recognise 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 recognised 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 interpersonal maturing and ‘becoming’ of the person takes place. The poet laureate calls on them to change their animalistic behaviour (‘more animalistic than any animal’: Faust I, Auerbachs Keller), and to change from this animal to a Samaritan human being, to ‘become’ one. The characteristics of this human being are described in all (!) wisdom texts, such as 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 exposure 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 offence as to whether they should do it or not. But 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 off the hook. After all, in the ego-dominated world, the ego generality must be protected from the ego-perpetrators of violence.) The ego software seduces us into superficially identifying the perpetrators as people without a spiritual core.
Insight is needed to free ourselves from the unholiness of our planet. This is because we are not switching 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 mind realises all the inputs we make. We live in the vale of tears because we are out for discord out of self-protection, we have switched the lever down and left it there.
Insight and deep understanding, seeing only with the heart: that sounds plausible and also hits the core of the problem, but nobody realises it, on the contrary. That is why practising implementation is the central point of spiritual work on oneself. Anyone can try this out on themselves when dealing (initially in thought) with right-wing extremists, criminals, angry citizens, nasty neighbours, refugees, motorway hooligans, enemies and other opponents. This is difficult because, as the wisdom scriptures unanimously recognise, 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?’ then the enormous hurdle that has to be overcome to do what Jesus demonstrated by the example of the adulteress becomes clear, namely to look behind the mask of the person (Latin: per-sonare = to sound through!). 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 overtaking, threatens and clearly curses. 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 the Tao in your neighbour.’ (Tao Te Ching II, 54)