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The writer of I John says to us: "and we--we have known and believed [trusted] the love, that God has in us; God is love, and the person who is remaining in the love, in God the one does remain, and God in the same one" (I John 4.16, YLT). Therefore, experiential oneness--God wholly in you, you wholly in God--is a union with this Love-that-is-God, and this spiritual conjugality is beyond all thoughts about love or Love. This is beyond religion and what we call spirituality. The Light of Love, so Divine and impenetrable, casts a veil over all religion and spirituality. I must die to my love, for this Love to live in and move through me as God God's Self as Love into the world.
Origen (c. 185-254), in Commentary on the Song of Songs, a student of Greek philosophy and one of the most eminent Christian theologians of all-time, wrote of Greek philosophers emphasis on love: They have tried to show that the power of love is no other than the power that leads the soul from earth to the lofty heights of heaven [in this life] and that we cannot arrive [in this life] at the highest blessedness unless the ardent desire of love impels us.
Indeed, we can enjoy heaven in this life and a clear semblance of all heaven implies, through the ascendancy of Love and only thereby, and this ascendancy is, at the same time, a passing into the darkness of our own self-will and self-knowlege. We can pass back through the dualism of subject and object, the opposite of Union imaged in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and return to Paradise, before even shame evidenced estrangement from Love, and we hid cut off from original innocence in Indivisible Union with the Divine Element (be careful not to attach historical fact to the story; or if you do, realize the inner meaning, then you will see the Garden of Eden story is the story of everyperson: you.
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To say "God" is to say "Love," to say "Love" is to say "God." Or, as Levine says, "Love is the only rational act." Apart from Love life is senseless and meaningless.
Sooner are later, to be fully human and vitally alive, each of us must descend from the head into the heart. I myself was trained well in the head: and lost touch with the heart. I learned many theories and studied languages. I made the perfect GPA in PhD. studies. I read with a frenzy books by universally esteemed writers.
I do not esteem rational knowledge with the same ardor as I once did. It is important, but I came to realize my very heart could be closed to what is most needed, even while I accumulated more knowledge. I could make a perfect GPA and read the greatest writers and, yet, not know how to relate joyfully with others and celebrate my own life, also.
A preoccupation with accumulation of things or knowledge, even religious knowledge, can provide an apparently safe route to avoid descending into the heart. It is true, it seems especially for many males, there is a sense of fear of being overwhelmed if reason gives way to com-passion: lit., shared passion. Therefore, we seek a sense of control through mentalism: and, in this, faith often becomes a set of propositions we can affirm. This cool approach protects from what we perceive to be the wildness and passion of the heart.
There's a Room
Where God makes wild Love with true Lovers
Outside sits those who
kiss their pious thoughts
If you are not ready to be stripped naked--
as we all once lived before loss of innocence--
don't come in Here.
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