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"Love in the Age of the Consciousness Soul"
This month's eletter is Robert Sardello's introduction to the remarkable
book "Conversations Amoureuse" -- Conversations about Love -- by Jacaques
Lusseyran. This book may well be one of the most significant writings on
love of our time. The begiining of the introduction tells a little of the
biographical details of Lusseryan, who was blind and was leader of the
underground resistance in France. His full biography, another remarkable
book, is "And There Was Light", published by Parabola Press.
An Introduction by Robert Sardello to As you begin reading this remarkable book, it may be helpful to know that Jacques Lusseyran, born in Paris in 1924, became blind at the age of seven, the result of a piercing of one eye and the tearing of the retina of the other eye in an accident. He nevertheless developed unparalleled capacities of 'inner seeing', which he described as an inner light that allowed him to see things in the outer world, though in a manner quite different from the rest of us. He was, under certain explicit circumstances, able to experience inner images revelatory of the outer world. These images did not replicate the visual picture of the things and persons in his presence but were nonetheless distinctive colors and forms. For example, he describes meeting a girl when he was around eight years old, seeing her as a "bright and red" form. For these images to be present, and to convey aspects of the outer world and not just his own subjective images, two conditions were necessary; first, he had to be free of fear, anger, jealousy, impatience, and all disruptive emotions; and second, he had to cease living as if things and people were displayed in front of him and begin to live within them - a condition of living the reality of love fully consciously. The acuity of his senses of touch, hearing, smell also intensified, subject to the same conditions. The development of this discipline of love allowed him to come to understand that the way we typically divide the world into an inner world and an outer world is but a preconceived idea; things outside do not exist unless you go to meet them, and things inside cannot be clearly seen unless those outside are allowed to enter. There is only one world. A second fact of some importance in approaching the present book is that in 1941, at the age of seventeen, Jacques Lusseyran organized an important student resistance group during the Nazi occupation of Paris, a group that eventually numbered over 600. In 1943 this resistance group was betrayed by one of its members, and Lusseyran, along with many others, was captured and imprisoned at Buchenwald. The whole of this individual's life, it seems, was lived under the signature of courage. He wrote exquisitely of his love of life in a previous book, And There Was Light. Another significant work of his that has been translated from the French is Against the Pollution of the I, a paper that he was on the way to present at a congress on July 21, 1971 when he and his wife were killed in an automobile accident.
Love in the Age of the Consciousness Soul Living in the consciousness soul, as humanity for the most part now does, additionally means that we are aware of not only outer things but also inner experiences as if they existed independently of any source from which they arise. There is a certain naiveté to this kind of consciousness, but one that cannot be helped. We see the trees, the mountains, the plants, the animals, and other human beings. Perceived through the senses, all this reality seems simply to exist, to be there before us and around us, but it is not possible, through sensory experience, to see that this reality is connected to a source, an origin, an ongoing creative wellspring. We can imagine that behind all this reality we perceive through the senses there does exist a source. But we cannot perceive what is bringing reality into its visibility. Our perceptions of inner states are subjected to the same estrangement. With respect to the topic of this book, love, it too simply seems to be there, and we are unable to have an experience from whence it originates. We develop psychological, physiological, or neurological theories to explain its origins, but have no actual experience, no connection with its source. Lusseyran has gone a long way, however, toward showing us how to go through the limitations of spectator consciousness and begin the great restoration of love Lusseyran enters his meditations on love through the door of the particular mystery of the love of a man for a woman. He speaks intensely and deeply of his own experiences of love, not of love in general. This delineation does not count as a limitation, for where else is one to begin except with who one is? Of course, it is possible to imagine someone entering the great mystery in other ways, but for Lusseyran approaching the question of love in the manner he does came from a kind of necessity; he tells us that from at least age five he felt a deep attraction, a wonderment, in the presence of girls. His attraction consisted of far more than precocious sexuality, and is better described as an intense interest in that half of the world which remains closed to each of us, the world-experience of one's counter-gender; if a bridge cannot be found to this other half, then one is fated to remain forever incomplete. The whole of this book can be read as a search, an adventure to discover the half of the world that remains closed to us by virtue of being either man or woman. Love can certainly cross the boundary to the unknown half of the world; but, in this age of the consciousness soul, we are left completely to ourselves to find out what love may be. And, we find that it shows many faces. We may encounter the love that is infatuation, a kind of love that really does not so much concern another person as it does with meeting love itself. The early pages of this book describe the beauty and confusions of such an experience, met by Lusseyran when he was 16 years old. For a man, this experience is a meeting of the feminine of oneself for the first time, and for a woman it is a meeting of the masculine of herself. But, we need the other for this meeting with ourselves. A peculiar familiarity characterizes this meeting, and in it we learn something of the frailty, not only of love, but of our own soul. If one attempts to close the distance of the whole of one's future that this kind of love presents by testing to see whether this infatuation is returned, the future of love for one can be prematurely closed, the adventure ended too quickly. One lives with infatuation the only way possible - unanswered, and with great and deep pain. At age 25, Jacques touches love a second kind of love. This time it does have more to do with the other person, for now he meets the stranger, the woman, who lives an entirely different soul-body connection than perhaps a man is capable of truly understanding. He finds it rather impossible to determine when the woman whom he loves is present in body, when in soul, when in desire, in reasoning. His descriptions reveal how paltry, how shadowy are our thoughts, our theories, our psychologies of the feminine, of the masculine, and of relationships. He gives a much more vivid sense of relating with an actual person, in all her complexity, and shows us that we really can know very little of another person except through constant effort. Our ideas of how she should act, or how one should act toward her - all such notions bear little resemblance and relevance to the actual act of relating. The great lesson of this experience of love - to guard oneself against the hell of trying to change another. Now, suppose one finds oneself so fortunate as to at last find someone who wants you to be exactly who you are, who wishes you to change not in the least, who loves you for who you are. Ah, that would seem to be true happiness! And it is, but happiness, as Lusseyran found, is not the same as love. Remaining exactly what your partner wants, even when done with the noblest of intentions, constitutes a form of egoism, of self-centeredness that also blocks the other person from changing. Life itself, to be vital and exuberant, requires, demands, that one change, and thus life dictates that we can never remain the person our partner found to be exactly what she wished for. Is love, no matter how one approaches it, doomed to failure? None of these three intense instances, so poignantly described by Lusseyran in a far more living way than my reflections could ever hope to convey, can be considered failures. I do not think that Lusseyran ever, not once in his whole life, experienced failure in love. One experiences failure only if one knows what is supposed to happen. In the region of love, as it now exists, no one knows what is supposed to happen, how it is supposed to take place; no universal way exists that can be canonized as the right way of love. Certainly, human love does not exist as already formed, as if it were something to be found, whole and complete, just waiting for us to stumble upon it when the right person arrives. Central to the effort of making rather than seeking to find love fully formed is to be able to make room for the soul and the body to cohere in the same earthly dimensions. The awakening of sexuality in adolescence signals the arousal of the soul-body, an awakening that so frightens us that a kind of split immediately occurs, separating our form into two separate components - a soul component and a body component, dreams and desires. A man dreams, not so much of the perfect woman, but of the luminous feminine, a dream that, for the most part exists only partly consciously. He desires the flesh and blood woman. And a woman, does she not experience the same division in counter-fashion? Love has a hard time of it, however, as long as dream and desire live a separate existence.
The Domain of Desire We are bound to be totally refreshed in seeing someone take on the problem of desire in order to keep questions of love between a man and a woman located in the actual arena where they are lived, with our bodies. So much hinges on desire that seems like it should not; it verifies the actual physical presence of love, assures that we are not just living an abstract idea - ours, or those of the philosophers, the theologians, or the educators. How something so lofty as love chooses to announce itself as an urge, an impulse, an attraction - that forever remains a mystery. But, this enigma is what we are given to deal with. You may be shocked to see it in print, what Lusseyran says concerning sexual desire. He takes what others often present as disparaging concerning the way in which men live desire and verifies that it is all quite true, and it becomes problematic only if lived without sensitivity and reflection. It is quite true that men have a tendency to take desire to be love and when desire goes, love seems to have disappeared. Men are given the task of working through this confusion, not avoiding it or pretending it does not exist. It is also quite true that for men, the sense of self, of identity as a man, is tied into feeling the potency of their sex organ. The tremendous challenge presented in love announcing itself in this way in the body of man is how to cross the boundary between desire, which is not about loving another but about loving oneself, to, through desire, discovering love for another. Lusseryan does not say that the only way for man to come to love is through desire. We must remain clear about the terrain he has chosen to consider so that we will not feel scandalized. He chooses to speak of sexual love, and he is doing so spiritually and with intense depth of soul. He is no spiritual prude, thinking that it is possible to confine love to the planes where the messiness of bodily life does not interfere. No, he chooses to seek love, in its body, soul, and spirit dimensions right in the midst of the sights and smells and touches and sounds of sensory life. He spent his whole life here, developing the capacity to experience soul and spirit through the senses. He gives us all hope in something that we all know - that spirit is not somewhere where body is not; but he is also aware that not only can spirit be found there, it can also be overwhelmed in the presence of bodily desire. The way through this dilemma of love and desire that is lived and struggled with by so very many of us, can only be found in developing acute capacities of observing our own engagement with desire, carefully noting its every turn, its every nuance, its every flicker and glow. Not an easy task, and in fact it may be far more difficult to develop this kind of observation than it to learn the highest and most subtle kind of meditative practice. However, to develop such capacities belongs to the true spiritual work of the age of the consciousness soul. This is the time in the evolution of consciousness when we are given the strongest experience of the physical and thus the sensory realms. Our spiritual work consists of finding, through these realms, the experience of soul and of spirit.
Sexual Love Often, with this work, sentences are themselves worthy of meditation. I hardly need to point them out, though I am remembering some...."In love we are seeking, that's all we are doing."..... "At the moment of orgasm a man has never been so great. Nor so alone. It would be so good for you to know this. But you should also know that he does not want this solitude, that he came to you in order to get rid of it." While we are often taken aback, astounded by such sentences, more important than experiencing admiration for things so well said is getting a feeling for the creating source entered into from such expressions derive. Only by getting a glimpse, a little flicker of this source, will the potential criticisms of what is being said be deflated. To do so, one must take this book in hand as a work that asks for full and active engagement. Of all the significant insights in this work, it is in the sixth chapter that I believe we come to the most astounding achievement. Try to imagine what purity of soul would be required to be able to so closely describe the actual experience of the love act between a man and a woman in such a manner that the true wonder of it breaks forth in all its splendor. Imagine how difficult it would be to search for the splendor of love right in the midst of the sexual act and not fall either into the titillation of it or to recoil in horror that one was approaching the pornographic. The reader, following the example of the writer, must approach this reality with purity of intent. A most astounding flowering of the careful discipline of observing the course of sexual desire the way it is actually lived comes in this work with the discovery that, in the love act, it is the moment after the act itself that bears the most significance. Through the act of making sexual love, both the man and the woman intensify the sense of who they each are as man and as woman. What looks like an act of union, up to a certain point, is actually a deepening of separation. Because of this intrinsic component, sexual love can easily turn into a kind of struggle for power, each individual attempting to verify their own existence; that happens when making love is not experienced in its spiritual dimensions. One side of desire seeks this enhancement of the ego. Another side, however, seeks to break through to the I. This possibility occurs because even while the enhancement of oneself goes on, it is at the same time its own dissolution. It is perhaps not the ecstasy of orgasm that counts as a quasi spiritual experience, but that the moment of ecstasy announces the possibility of something more. To take sexual ecstasy in itself as something spiritual only falsely elevates the ego. The penetration of the woman by the man and the enfolding of the man in the woman already crosses the border dividing one from the other - and, in fact, for a few moments, each becomes the other. One does not just intimately experience the other, but a kind of exchange occurs, an exchange that can be experienced to the extent that love is not an assault. Lusseyran says: "If a man were always a man until the end of lovemaking and if he were only that, and if the woman would remain woman eternally, there would be no love...Instead there would be this irritable, impoverished substitute: desire." It is when desire is completed that the moment of union occurs, for then there is a true resting with each other without any longer a seeking, without the element of want. Desire then hovers around the couple in its true spiritual nature, blessing this unutterable moment of engagement.
Knowing Love The same time that we hold to a belief in love existing as an object, there is another, paradoxical side to living in the consciousness soul. We are now freed from the external constraint of trying to love the way someone, some institution, or society itself tells us to love. So, here is the paradox - love seems to be something objective and simultaneously love is completely ours, to be created out of our own inner solitude, and no one can tell us what it is or means, for it will be and mean something quite different for different people. Lusseyran's answer to this terribly difficult dilemma needs a good deal of contemplation: "Love has not been made for the community. And to look at it doesn't mean look at others doing it, but to look at oneself doing it."(pg. 128, manuscript) He is saying that society, organized religion, education, family, tradition - these forms can no longer tell us how to live the reality of love. In this sense, love does not belong to the community. And, if we are in this position of consciousness that looks, then the way through it is to stop looking at others and begin looking at ourselves. Brilliant! We cannot sidestep the consciousness soul without inadvertently stepping into atavistic versions of love from the past. We have to go through this kind of consciousness. Our desire to love is now more like a kind of empty intention; we do not and cannot know what love is except by doing it. By doing what we do not know we are doing, but have the intention to do, that is the course love must now take, the course of adventure, filled with doubt, apprehension, very little happiness, a great deal of emptiness, but the joy that comes with re-invention. The condition under which this new approach to love opens up a new horizon for humanity is that both soul and body have equal value, one is never, not for an instant, lived as having more worth than the other. We must become observers of our body and of our soul life, both together. Lusseyran's observations here form the basis for a true spiritual psychology of body, soul, and spirit, one which does not divide and separate and which nevertheless clearly understands their differences and relation. Even the sexual organs are taken into this understanding, which must be the case if one is to avoid speaking of body, soul, and spirit abstractly. Once one has stepped, in a fully conscious way, into the consciousness soul, not only love but everything surrounding love between a man and a woman has to be considered anew. Everything concerning love has to be re-invented, which does not mean made up, but, rather, re-visioned in light of this kind of consciousness. The question of faithfulness in love arises. As with love itself, one must tread the perilous line - faithfulness is not like a thing that can be possessed. One can no longer really say " I will be forever faithful." At best, one can say, " I want that to happen." And marriage no longer takes care of the problem, seeming to insure that faithfulness will take place and if it does not the marriage is broken. Indeed, in a certain way, marriage no longer exists, at least not in the way that it used to; it too has to be re-invented by each individual, each couple, daily. Please understand; there is not an option. The alternative is to love without living love, to enact patterns that no longer give life and, more importantly, do not bring anything creative into the world. For love to try to exist as it did in the past turns it now into a commodity, a commodity filled with emptiness that only drains the world and does not renew it. When Claude Juilien, the editor of Rudolf Steiner Press wrote me, giving me the assignment of writing an introduction to this book, he lightly suggested that a warning blurb ought to be written for the cover of the book. This blurb would say: "Do not read unless, you are determined to confront the true nature of your own being." He is quite right.
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