The Lover and the Beloved
Speaking with a friend, it occurred to me that love is the riddle we live with and must solve.
Our dilemma is that love is one not two, and yet we live here apparently separate, many of us fiercely egoic, often swinging between the extremes of co-dependence and anti-dependence.
Many people now focus in on their own or another’s co-dependence often fuelled by an anti-dependence equally problematic but so far more veiled.
That points to an adolescent stage in evolution with our sense of ‘I’ dominant, the oneness which is our highest goal still out of reach.
It is significant the astrological wheel begins with the Aries ‘I’ and ends with the Pisces ‘We’, which can seem boundariless and frightening.
It is important to know that in that first archetype there is very little light and so we cannot see clearly. Our consciousness is blunted and so we make poor decisions, often totally self-centred, which drives away any form of nourishing relationship.
As the Indian sage Aurobindo said: ‘The supreme state of human love is the unity of one soul in two bodies.’
It seems to be ready for such a rare accomplishment we have to have gone a long way to Self-realisation.
In order to receive Aphrodite’s gift, we are challenged with and must move through our deepest fears of abandonment, betrayal and self loss.
But many of these remain out of sight, buried in our ancestry or own karmic history.
Then we meet that person who reminds us deeply of the oneness — our identity before our fall from Paradise (we can see that in soul terms or as the time before our awareness of separation from the mother) — who resonates with our essence most strongly.
Finally, we taste a primordial bliss. For a while it is wonderful — we have come home — but usually it isn’t long before we find ourselves alone again or making arrangements with our beloved to preserve both separateness and oneness.
Love is reality but we don’t live there. We live in the illusion, believe we are separate and fight to preserve a self from the collapse and unity we both fear and long for.
I wonder if it is a case of preserving our difference not out separateness and learning to straddle the conundrum of self and other.
Aurobindo is talking about a state where divine and human loves are one, which of course they are, only from our limited perspective we cannot see it.
The thorny problem of reconciling oneness with twoness is really the only game in town and seems to require the longest journey — from head to heart.
Thoughts on a Saturday morn…
‘In the whole of the universe there are only two, the lover and the Beloved.’ Bhai Sahib
