Rupert Spira

[Guest guest]

Dear Toombaru,

 

Toombaru: I attended the meeting in Marin in which you responded to a

question from the audience with: " Because there is love " ...But it seems that

the consensus concept of 'love " falls short in its description. Do you think

that " love " has any reality outside of the conceptual arena?

 

Rupert: The answer, " Because there is love, " was given to the question " How

do we know that Consciousness is impersonal? "

 

The implicit understanding in this answer is that the word 'love' is used to

point towards the experiential understanding that there is only one

Consciousness.

 

If a number of people were asked if they knew or felt that the Consciousness

with which they were hearing this very question was unlimited and

impersonal, most would answer 'No.' However, if one asked those same people

if they felt or knew that love existed, most, if not all, would answer

'Yes.'

 

In other words, few people doubt the experience of love, but most of us

misinterpret it.

 

The mind in fact knows nothing of love, precisely because it is not present

during the experience. That is why we like it so much!

 

Love could be said to be the dissolution of those boundaries or borders

which seem to separate us one from another. In other words it is the

dissolution of the dualising mind.

 

When the mind returns and tries to describe the non-objective experience of

love in which it was not present and about which therefore it knows nothing,

it misinterprets the experience.

 

The mind returns saturated, as it were, with the taste of love out of which

it has arisen. It retains, so to speak, the perfume of this non-objective

experience.

 

Not knowing where this perfume comes from, the mind manufactures a story to

account for the new and happy state in which it finds itself. Out of the

seamlessness of experience it imagines two entities, in this case a loving

subject, 'I,' and a loved object, the other, 'you,' which are supposedly

connected together by an activity of loving.

 

As the shine wears off the mind, it seems that the experience of love is

lost. Bewildered as a result of this apparently lost love, the separate

entity goes out into the world again in search of a relationship that will

recover the experience of love, not realising that it is its own presence,

the apparent presence of the separate entity and its counterpart the

separate other, that veils the love for which it is searching, and that in

fact lies at the heart of all experience.

 

So off we go again until we meet a face that reminds us of the true Beloved,

at which moment the separate self plunges again into non-existence and love

tastes itself anew.

 

So, in answer to your question, 'Do you think that " love " has any reality

outside of the conceptual arena?' I would say that love's ONLY reality is

outside the conceptual arena.

 

Our attempts to conceptualize love (such as I have done here) are feeble

attempts, using the abstract symbols of the mind, to point towards the

reality of our experience, which is intimately and directly experienced and

known by everyone, and yet which is completely beyond the capacity of the

mind to know, grasp or understand.

 

In fact the mind does not even know how to think of love, let alone to know

or define it. If we try to think of love........we do not even know where to

start looking - it is closer than close and yet in an unknown direction.

Love only knows itself.

 

 

With warmest regards,

 

Rupert

 

 

 

 

 

Rupert,

 

I attended the meeting in Marin in which you responded to a question from the

audience with:

 

" Because there is love " .

 

There comes a generalized quietude when the essential emptiness of the self is

apperceived....a strangely familiar open indifference.

 

Here it is experienced as an artesian warmth that seems to spread out wherever

awareness is focused.....with no one in the center wishing to restrain or retain

it.

 

But it seems that the consensus concept of 'love " falls terribly short in its

attempt to describe the feeling tone that occurs within this thought bubble.

 

Do you think that " love " has any reality outside of the conceptual arena?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

toombaru

 

 

 

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