Philosophy And Society II - Spectrum Of Love (Part 1 Of 2)

I'm going to talk to you this evening on the subject of the spectrum of love.

We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude

love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

We would like to be like that, and by and large man's religions are attempts to cultivate

that same power in ordinary people.

But unfortunately they normally go about this task as one would attempt to make the tail

wag the dog.

I remember when I was a small boy in school, I was enormously interested in being able

to do my schoolwork properly.

And everybody told me that I didn't work hard enough and that I ought to work.

I had an intense desire to do this, but when I asked "how do you work?"

everybody shut up like a clam.

So I was extremely puzzled, but there were teachers who apparently knew how to work and

had attained considerable heights of scholarship, and I admired them very much for their attainments.

And so I thought that maybe I could learn the secret by copying their mannerisms.

I would imitate the style of handwriting that they used.

I would use the same kind of pen.

I would affect the same mannerisms of speech and gesture and insofar as I could get around

the school uniform, even of clothing.

I must assure you this of course was a private school in England, not a public school in

America.

But none of this revealed the secret, because I was, as it were, copying the outward symptoms

and knew nothing of the inner fountain of being able to work.

And exactly the same thing is true in the case of people who love.

When we study the behaviour of people who have the power of love within them, we can

catalogue how they behave in various situations and out of this catalogue formulate some rules.

One of the peculiar things we notice about people who have this astonishing universal

love is that they are apt, but not always so, but they are apt very often to play it

rather cool on sexual love.

The reason for this is, generally speaking, unknown to preachers, but it is because an

erotic relationship with the external world operates, so far as they are concerned, between

that world and every single nerve ending.

Their whole organism, in all its aspects, physical, psychological and spiritual, is

an erogenous zone and therefore their flow of love is not specialised or canalised so

exclusively in the genital system as it is with most other people, especially in a culture

such as ours, where for so many centuries that particular expression of erotic love

has been so marvellously repressed as to make it seem the most desirable kind of love that

there is and so we have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the

brain.

It isn't always the right place for it.

Of course also, people who exude love are apt to give things away.

They are in every way like rivers, they stream, and so when they collect possessions and things

that they like, they are apt to give them to other people because, have you ever noticed

that when you start giving things away you keep getting more?

The same way as you create a vacuum, nature abhors a vacuum and more flows in.

So noticing this, the codifiers of loving behaviour write down that you should give

so much money to tax-deductible institutions and to the poor, and that you should be nice

to people, that you should act towards your relatives and your friends and indeed even

your enemies as if you love them, even if you don't.

And of course for Christians and Jews and believers in God there is a peculiarly difficult

task enjoined upon us, namely that thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and not only here going

through the motions of it externally, but with all your heart, with all your soul and

with all your mind.

And that is of course very demanding indeed.

But you see what is happening, it is as if for example we admire the music of a certain

composer and having studied his style very thoroughly we draw up rules of musical composition

based on the behaviour of this composer.

We then go to send our children to music school where they learn these rules in the hope that

if they apply them they also will turn into first class musicians, which they usually

fail to do.

Because what might be called the technique of music, as well as the technique of morals,

as well as say the technique of speech, of language, is very valuable because it gives

you something to express if, and I repeat if, you have anything to express.

But if you don't, if you don't have anything to say, not even the greatest mastery of English

will stand you in good stead unless you can manage to fool your listeners by talking beautiful

nonsense and make it sound profound.

So the question and the puzzle remains.

You cannot imitate this thing, there is no way of getting it, and yet it is absolutely

essential that we have it, because obviously the human race is not going to flourish harmoniously

unless we are enabled to love each other.

But the question is how do you get it?

Is it something you simply have to contract like measles?

Or as theologians say, is it a gift of divine grace which somehow is dished out to some

but not to others, and if there is no way of getting divine grace by anything you do

as the Calvinists aver, then we'd better just sit around and wait until something happens.

Although Calvinists never did that.

They were almost depressingly energetic.

But surely we can't be left in that kind of a hopeless situation.

There must be some way of getting the grace or getting divine charity or love, some sort

of wangle, some sort of way in which we can, as it were, open ourselves so as to become

conduit pipes for the flow.

And so the more subtle preachers try to see if we can open ourselves and teach methods

of meditation and spiritual discipline in the hope that we can contact this power, the

less subtle preachers simply say, "You don't have enough faith, you don't have enough guts,

you don't have enough willpower.

If you only put your shoulder to the wheel and shoved, you would be, of course, an exemplar

and a saint.

Actually you will only be an extremely clever hypocrite."

The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching.

Preaching is moral violence.

If you, you know, when you deal with the so-called practical world and people don't behave as

you would wish they would, you get out the army or the police force or the big stick,

and if those strike you as somewhat crude, you resort to giving lectures.

And I mean lectures in the sense of a pie-jaw, a solemn adoration and exhortation to behave

better next time.

Now let us look at some of the practical consequences of adjuring people and commanding people to

love.

When a parent says to the child, "Nice children love their mothers."

And of course, I'm sure you're a nice child, you ought to love your mother, but not because

I, your mother, say so, but because you really want to do so.

Because one of the difficulties is none of us in our heart of hearts respect love which

is not freely given.

If for example you are an ailing parent and you need to be looked after and you have a

son or daughter who feels dutifully that they should look after you because after all you've

done so much for them, but this somehow your living with your father or mother prevents

you from having a home and a life of your own, naturally you resent this duty and your

parent is well aware that you resent it even if they pretend to ignore it.

They therefore feel guilty that they have imposed upon your loyalty and you in turn

can't really disclose from yourself the fact that you hate them for getting sick even though

they couldn't help it.

And therefore nobody enjoys the relationship.

It is a painful duty carried out and the same thing would naturally happen if after a number

of years having at the altar made a solemn and terrible promise that you would love your

wife and husband come what may forever and ever till death do you part and then suddenly

you find you really haven't the heart in you to do it anymore, then you feel guilty and

that you ought to love your wife, family or whatever and naturally this is a sort of fiasco

as would be obvious if you were to ask your wife do you really love me and she were to

reply I'm trying very hard to do so.

You see the difficulty of it is this, you cannot teach a selfish person to be unselfish

by any means.

That is to say whatever a selfish person does whether it be giving his body to be burned

or giving all that he possesses to the poor he will still do it in a selfish way of feeling

and he will be able to do this with extreme cunning and marvellous self-deception and

deception of others besides.

But the consequences of fake love are almost invariably destructive because they build

up resentment on the part of the person who does the fake loving as well as on the part

of those who are its recipients.

This is why the foreign aid program has been such a dismal failure.

Now of course you may say that I'm talking in a very impractical way because you would

say well do we just have to sit around and wait until we become inwardly converted and

learn through the grace of God or some sort of magic how to love and in the meantime do

nothing about it and conduct ourselves as selfishly as we feel.

There is as a matter of fact something to be said for that because the first problem

in the whole of this is honesty and the reason why the Lord God says at the beginning of

things "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and

with all thy mind" is not because the Lord God is stupid but because he's very clever.

That which appears to be a commandment is actually a challenge or what in Zen Buddhism

would be called a koan, a spiritual problem because if you exercise yourself resolutely

in trying to love God and/or your neighbor you will find that you get more and more tangled

up.

You will realize increasingly that the reason why you are attempting to obey this as a commandment

is that you want to be the right kind of person and obviously you want to be the right kind

of person for your own reasons.

And so if you do in the first place feel selfish and come to the conclusion as a result of

trying various experiments with love that you love yourself more than anybody else.

The proper thing to do is to investigate your self-love, to find out why you love yourself

and what you mean by yourself when you say you love yourself.

For the reason is this, love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity.

Everybody has it.

Existence is love.

But it's like water flowing through a hose.

It depends in which direction you point it.

So everybody has the force running and maybe the way in which you find the force of love

operating in you is that you have a passionate like of booze or ice cream or automobiles

or good-looking members of the opposite sex or even the same sex.

But there is love operating and people of course tend to distinguish between the various

kinds of love.

There are good kinds such as divine charity and allegedly bad kinds such as in quotes

animal lust.

But it should be understood I think that they are all forms of the same thing.

But they differ in rather the same way that the colors of light, of white light, divide

into the spectrum when passed through a prism.

So we might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr. Freud's libido and the violet

end of the spectrum of love is agape, what is called divine love or divine charity.

And that in the middle the various yellows, blues and greens are friendship, human endearment,

consideration and all that sort of fellow feeling.

But it's all the same thing.

And so the thing is first of all to get it moving, to follow whatever kind of love you

have in the first place.

Because you cannot control love until you have some to control, until you have it running.

You've got to get your car running before you can learn how to drive it.

You will not become a skillful driver by sitting at a still car in a garage any more than you

will become a skilled dancer if you simply never move your arms and legs.

And so the first thing then is to discover what indeed you do love, if anything, and

you will find there is something.

And then go into the nature of that.

Now it's said that selfish people love themselves.

I would say that that is really a misunderstanding of the whole thing, because yourself is something

that is really impossible to love.

There are various reasons for this, but one obvious reason is that loving oneself is as

difficult as kissing your own lips.

Love when you try to focus on it, to love it or to know it, is oddly elusive.

It always slips away like the pursued tail of a dog who is trying to get hold of his

own tail.

So to pursue your own end has some difficulties about it.

If you explore what you love when you say you love yourself, you will make the startling

discovery that everything you love is something which you thought was other than yourself.

Even if it be very ordinary things such as ice cream or booze, in the conventional sense

booze is not you, nor is ice cream.

It turns into you in a manner of speaking when you consume it, but then you don't have

it any more.

And so you look around for more in order to love it once again.

But so long as you love it, you see, it's never you.

When you love people, however selfishly you love them, because of the pleasant sensations

they give to you, still it is somebody else that you love.

And as you inquire into this, as you follow honestly your own selfishness, many interesting

transformations begin to come about in you.

One of the most interesting transformations of being directly and honestly selfish in

the same way that, for example, cats are, is that you stop deceiving people.

A great deal of damage is done in practical human relations by saying that you love people

when what you mean is that you ought to.

And you don't really.

You give the wrong impression and people begin to expect things of you which you are never

going to come through with.

We've been taught, for example, that we ought to love our enemies.

Now we don't really understand what it means to love our enemies.

We think it means to be charitable towards them in the hope that we will convert them

and so that they will cease.

The real reason for loving enemies is that one needs enemies.

They're terribly important to you.

For example, I think that some of you here feel that you belong to a nice set of people.

It may be an ordinary kind of bourgeois coterie of peasant squares, or it may be a church

group of some kind, a club, or a special cult, or just a group of friendly drinkers.

But at any rate, you feel that by virtue of membership in this society, you belong to

a special in-group of nice or saved people.

Now when you consider what nice people talk about when they sit around the dinner table

and have an opportunity to nurture their collective ego, you will find that the most fascinating

topic of conversation is the nasty people.

How awful they are, what dreadful things they do, and what is it all coming to.

And this very, very satisfactory, condemnatory conversation nurtures your ego.

But people who do that don't seem to realize that they thereby depend on the nasty people

in order to know that they're nice.

They are, as a matter of fact, highly indebted to them.

On the other side of the picture, the nasty people, it may be say beatniks opposite the

squares or some kind of repressed group, it might be a group of negroes or of Jews or

of Irish Catholics or Italian Catholics or anybody who generally gets regarded as being

not quite nice.

They on their side consider that they really are the best people and nurture their collective

ego by blasting the bourgeoisie, the squares, the wasps, the know-nothings or whoever they

may be.

And so for the collective ego of the non-squares, the squares are extremely necessary.

If they were to disappear tomorrow, many of us would lose a cause.

Now the minute you begin to become aware of this, it's rather embarrassing.

It's of course humorous, and I'm glad that you see this.

Because at once you begin to realize how much you depend on an enemy or an outsider or a

group of damned people as distinct from your own group of saved people.

And so you begin to realize that if your collective ego or yourself depends on your being on the

in, but you can only be on the in with relation to something that is out.

And since the in and the out are inseparable if there is to be any in or any out, you suddenly

discover that your self is bigger than you thought it was.

It includes the other, and you can't do without it.

This brings about a fundamental change in the understanding of the meaning and nature

of self.

And thereupon there become a change of attitude to other people, even if you continue with

some formal opposition to them and disapproval of them.

When then you are honestly clear with yourself what you like and what you dislike, and then

at the same time you conclude things that were hitherto defined as being not yourself,

your love, which is what you are, begins to express itself quite naturally and unaffectedly

in a wider way.

Now to trust oneself to be capable of love, to bring up love, in other words to function

in a sociable way and in a creative way, is to take a risk.

It's a gamble.

Because you may not come through with it.

And in the same way when you fall in love with somebody else, or you form an association

with somebody else, and you trust them, they may as a matter of fact not fulfill your expectations.

But that risk has to be taken.

The alternative to taking that risk is much worse than trusting and being deceived.

When you say I will not trust other people and I will not trust myself, what do you have

to do?

You have to resort to force.

You have to employ stacks of policemen to protect you, and God only knows what makes

you think you can trust them.

And you have to hold a club over yourself all the time and say no, no, my nature is

wayward, animal, perverse, fallen, grounded in sin.

So that as a matter of fact what happens, when you refuse to take the gamble of trusting

yourself to be capable of love, you become like a person, if you will excuse this extremely

graphic but nevertheless relevant simile, who cannot trust themselves to have bowel

movements.

Many children learn this from parents who do not trust them and think that they ought

to have these movements in rhythm with the clock, which is a different kind of rhythm

than the rhythm of the organism.

So people who cannot trust themselves to do this endlessly take laxatives, as a result

of which their whole elimination system gets fouled up, needing more laxatives and so on

and so forth.

So exactly the same thing happens with people who can't trust themselves to go to sleep

and have to take all kinds of pills.

And so also with people who can't trust themselves to love and have to take all sorts of artificial

and surgical measures to produce the effect of love for saving face.

They get more progressively incapable of loving at all and they create turmoil and misunderstanding

and chaos in human society.

In other words, to live together you have to take risks.

There will be disappointments and failures and disasters as a result of taking these

risks, but in the long run it will work out.

My point is that if you don't take them, the results will be so much worse than any

kind of wild anarchy that could be conceived.

You see, here we are now as a highly disciplined human race, with all kinds of rules and religions,

and what are we about to do?

Blow ourselves completely to pieces.

Was this all a good gamble?

Because you see, in tying up love in knots and becoming incapable of it, you can't destroy

this energy.

You turn it, when you won't love and you won't let it out, the thing comes out in the form

of self-destruction.

The alternative to self-love, in other words, is self-destruction.

Because you won't take the risk of loving yourself properly, you will be compelled instead

to destroy yourself.

So which would you rather have?

Would you rather have a human race which isn't always very well controlled, and sometimes

runs amok a little bit, but on the whole continues to exist, with a good deal of honesty and

delight when delight is available, or would you rather have the whole human race blown

to pieces and cleaned off the planet, reducing the whole thing to a nice scoured rock with

with no dirty disease on it called life.