Why should M@L = God be loving?

[dachmidt]

Hi all,

picking up what I read in several other threads on this forum, I have a question that keeps nagging me.

BK states in a lot of his books, that he very much appreciates and values the work of mythology and religion.
However, I have problems bringing those spheres together and this is why:

For almost every religion "Love" is of most significance.
For example in Buddhism Love represents a higher form of conciousness, in Christianity Love is the most important commandment from God.
And of course, that very much resonates with me as well.

However thinking of M@L as a purely instinctively, impersonal being, with no real intention (blind will as Schopenhauer says), I don't see any reason at all why Love should have that value. Love to me is definetly not instinctively but spiritual, not impersonal but personal, not blind but intentionally. So everything M@L is not according to BK (if I get him correctly).

If at all, love is reduced to self-love within M@L, as M@L is everything that is.

So is Love in all its different facets an emergence of dissociated personalities (=humans)?
Is it a development of higher consciousness during the evolutionary process?
Or may it be an intrinsic value of M@L. And if so, how?

As BK mentions in his book "Decoding Jungs Metaphysics", the meaning of us humans might be, to self-reflect M@L = God, so that he gets to know himself. So do we have to see M@L as a chaotic state of conciousness, that needs to be ordered by us? In this case Love would be a human invention based on that kind of self-reflection and preferences. If M@L lacks self-reflection, desires or intention, it wouldn't have the possibility to "review" the results of human self-reflection. Thinking it through, love does not represent an objective value, as almost all religions claim.

I think it comes down to my unease with thinking of M@L=God as a purely instinctively, impersonal being, with no real intention...
... and all its consequences.

Of course, I think BK has the evolutionary process on his side, as evolution of life started instinctively, impersonal and without self-reflection at all.
However, at the same time, BK tries to tell a modern myth in "More than allegory", where the protagonist interacts with M@L in form of a question-answer play. Here he suggests a form of divine guidance by M@L, something that does also occur in many religions as Christianity.
But for M@L to be able to "answer", or "guide", it needs advanced cognitive, self-reflective, intentional skills, or do I miss something?.

I would very much appreciate your opinions on that topic, although I know that you might repeat yourself.

[Hedge90]

Love is not intentional. Love is unconditional acceptance of the world. In my opinion, love is to be thought of similarly to a fundamental force, like gravity. It is not something that emerges or is created by events. It just is. It's merely a part of the human condition that our brains block us from experiencing it all the time to its full extent, since that would remove our drives for effective self-preservation and self-advancement, which were evolutionarily useful. But love is not a feeling you achieve, it's something you feel when everything else blocking it is removed.
If you read the texts of any ancient or middle-age mystic, they always state this in some form or another: everyone is looking for love (/God) outside themselves, when it is within, always waiting for you to just let it through and embrace it.

[Soul_of_Shu]

'Love is blind' is an interesting expression/metaphor. Most who've fallen deeply, 'madly' in love, would grok this metaphor. As such, it might apply to Divine Mind, which in conceiving all ideations is 'blind' to considerations of what should or should not be made manifest, as all are allowed their unique and integral expression/exploration, however suffering prone they may be—or as Blake put it 'Eternity is in love with the productions of time', whereby considerations such as 'this should not exist', it would seem, are only of metacognitive, relativistic concern. So perhaps this is the Divine Love so often spoken of in mystical revelations, when it is said one knows beyond any doubt whatsoever that we are unconditionally embraced by that Love.

[Ben Iscatus]

In addition to the two excellent replies above, I'd add that Love is what you get when you "join up". At present, we are dissociated (separated); "joining up" (re-associating) is experienced as Love.

[AshvinP]

Hi all,

picking up what I read in several other threads on this forum, I have a question that keeps nagging me.

BK states in a lot of his books, that he very much appreciates and values the work of mythology and religion.
However, I have problems bringing those spheres together and this is why:

For almost every religion "Love" is of most significance.
For example in Buddhism Love represents a higher form of conciousness, in Christianity Love is the most important commandment from God.
And of course, that very much resonates with me as well.

However thinking of M@L as a purely instinctively, impersonal being, with no real intention (blind will as Schopenhauer says), I don't see any reason at all why Love should have that value. Love to me is definetly not instinctively but spiritual, not impersonal but personal, not blind but intentionally. So everything M@L is not according to BK (if I get him correctly).

If at all, love is reduced to self-love within M@L, as M@L is everything that is.

So is Love in all its different facets an emergence of dissociated personalities (=humans)?
Is it a development of higher consciousness during the evolutionary process?
Or may it be an intrinsic value of M@L. And if so, how?

As BK mentions in his book "Decoding Jungs Metaphysics", the meaning of us humans might be, to self-reflect M@L = God, so that he gets to know himself. So do we have to see M@L as a chaotic state of conciousness, that needs to be ordered by us? In this case Love would be a human invention based on that kind of self-reflection and preferences. If M@L lacks self-reflection, desires or intention, it wouldn't have the possibility to "review" the results of human self-reflection. Thinking it through, love does not represent an objective value, as almost all religions claim.

I think it comes down to my unease with thinking of M@L=God as a purely instinctively, impersonal being, with no real intention...
... and all its consequences.

Of course, I think BK has the evolutionary process on his side, as evolution of life started instinctively, impersonal and without self-reflection at all.
However, at the same time, BK tries to tell a modern myth in "More than allegory", where the protagonist interacts with M@L in form of a question-answer play. Here he suggests a form of divine guidance by M@L, something that does also occur in many religions as Christianity.
But for M@L to be able to "answer", or "guide", it needs advanced cognitive, self-reflective, intentional skills, or do I miss something?.

I would very much appreciate your opinions on that topic, although I know that you might repeat yourself.

I agree with you that BK's flat MAL perspective does not adequately account for deep emotional experience at all. To be fair, it is not really attempting to account for those things. Except with More than Allegory - I think that is fair game because it does try to explain the existence of spiritual mythology in terms of MAL-alter ontology, as you say above. It is accurate in the most trivial sense - a sort of accuracy which ends up being misleading and counter-productive. From our current perspective, MAL (what I call the "Spirit") began as more instinctive and impersonal. All of these characterizations are simply a way of describing a set of relations between perspectives in Time which, in essence, are eternal (timeless or time-free) and unified. I can expand on that more later. The fullness of feelings such as love, which is no doubt eternal in its essence, are found in their meanings, and meaning never comes from purely instinctive behavior. For now, this from Steiner may be helpful:

But the moment our action lifts itself up out of the area of the satisfaction of purely animal desires, what moves us to act is always intermixed with thoughts. Love, compassion, patriotism are mainsprings of action which do not let themselves be reduced into cold concepts of the intellect. One says: The heart, the Gemüt* come here into their own. Without a doubt. But the heart and the Gemüt do not create what it is that moves us to act. They presuppose it and take it into their domain. Within my heart compassion appears when, in my consciousness, the mental picture arises of a person who arouses compassion. The way to the heart is through the head. Even love is no exception to this. When it is not the mere expression of the sex drive, it is then based upon the mental pictures which we make for ourselves of the loved one. And the more idealistic these mental pictures are, the more blissful is the love. Here also the thought is father to the feeling. One says: Love makes us blind to the weaknesses of the loved one. The matter can also be grasped the other way round and it can be maintained that love opens the eye in fact for precisely the good qualities of the loved one. Many pass these good qualities by without an inkling, without noticing them. One person sees them, and just because he does, love awakens in his soul. What has he done other than make for himself a mental picture of something of which a hundred others have none. They do not have the love because they lack the mental picture.

[Marco Masi]

I think you have made very good points. That's why I also never embraced the idea of an "instinctual" and "blind" M@L. Too many inconsistencies, too many explanatory gaps and also contradicting the mystic experience throughout time and cultures.

Of course, I think BK has the evolutionary process on his side, as evolution of life started instinctively, impersonal and without self-reflection at all.

Curiously my main divergence with BK's instinctual M@L resides precisely in the fact that it does not fit into evolution. True that love may not have played an evolutionary role but how can something purely blind and instinctual be so amazingly creative and create such huge complexity without having some higher form of cognition? If one adds gazillions of instincts you won't get a less instinctual mind, let alone love, but only yet another super blind instinct. The only way out is that to fall back to physicalism and believe that it is all explained away by natural selection and random mutations. But, apart from the fact that also modern evolutionary biology begins to recognize how this was a much too simplistic understanding of evolution, one then wonders why we should embrace idealism in the first place? While idealism is certainly a step forwards compared to physicalism it still lacks the fundamental ingredient of a coherent evolutionary theoretical framework.

[dachmidt]

Love is not intentional. Love is unconditional acceptance of the world. In my opinion, love is to be thought of similarly to a fundamental force, like gravity. It is not something that emerges or is created by events. It just is. It's merely a part of the human condition that our brains block us from experiencing it all the time to its full extent, since that would remove our drives for effective self-preservation and self-advancement, which were evolutionarily useful. But love is not a feeling you achieve, it's something you feel when everything else blocking it is removed.
If you read the texts of any ancient or middle-age mystic, they always state this in some form or another: everyone is looking for love (/God) outside themselves, when it is within, always waiting for you to just let it through and embrace it.

Beautiful said. And I am sure you made a point here.

However I think unconditional acceptance is only one aspect of love.
Within christian tradition, this unconditional acceptance of God is often refered to as "agape"-love.

But there is another kind of love, eros, that describes that kind of love that moves and transforms.
It is full of passion and intention.

You will hear parents often say: "you are loved, no matter what happens or what you do" -> agape
But also: "I wish that you will be able to live your life to the fullest and to unfold all of your potential" -> eros

In greek, there is even a third kind of love, mentioned in the bible.

I would argue that love is more than unconditional acceptance, although agape should definetly be the starting point.

[Eugene I]

Interesting, it looks like the majority of BK readers that subscribe to idealism still reject the BK's view that M@L is instinctive and not meta-cognitive (me included).

[dachmidt]

I think you have made very good points. That's why I also never embraced the idea of an "instinctual" and "blind" M@L. Too many inconsistencies, too many explanatory gaps and also contradicting the mystic experience throughout time and cultures.

Curiously my main divergence with BK's instinctual M@L resides precisely in the fact that it does not fit into evolution. True that love may not have played an evolutionary role but how can something purely blind and instinctual be so amazingly creative and create such huge complexity without having some higher form of cognition? If one adds gazillions of instincts you won't get a less instinctual mind, let alone love, but only yet another super blind instinct. The only way out is that to fall back to physicalism and believe that it is all explained away by natural selection and random mutations. But, apart from the fact that also modern evolutionary biology begins to recognize how this was a much too simplistic understanding of evolution, one then wonders why we should embrace idealism in the first place? While idealism is certainly a step forwards compared to physicalism it still lacks the fundamental ingredient of a coherent evolutionary theoretical framework.

I agree with you that BK's flat MAL perspective does not adequately account for deep emotional experience at all. To be fair, it is not really attempting to account for those things. Except with More than Allegory - I think that is fair game because it does try to explain the existence of spiritual mythology in terms of MAL-alter ontology, as you say above. It is accurate in the most trivial sense - a sort of accuracy which ends up being misleading and counter-productive. From our current perspective, MAL (what I call the "Spirit") began as more instinctive and impersonal. All of these characterizations are simply a way of describing a set of relations between perspectives in Time which, in essence, are eternal (timeless or time-free) and unified. I can expand on that more later. The fullness of feelings such as love, which is no doubt eternal in its essence, are found in their meanings, and meaning never comes from purely instinctive behavior.

In modern christianity, there is a kind of theology called "process theology".
As far as I know it is based on the idea of panpsychism and has its roots in the philosophy of Whitehead.

Process theology - in alignment with C.G. Jung - also claim that God gets to know himself through us humans.
God is therefore not thought as omniscience in the traditional christian sense, but more as the sum of all understanding and experience.
We humans, by our self-reflection, experiences, knowledge, do have direct impact on the development of God.

However, God, or MAL, does not stay in his static, instinctive state, but he grows and develops with us within that theology.
Maybe he started instinctively, however I see no reason why that should still be the case after billions of evolutionary process.
And I agree with you Marco, evolutionary complexity increases during the process, which maybe gives a hint that not only MAL's potentiality, but also its guidance/intention/creativity/spirituality increases to the same degree.

[AshvinP]

I think you have made very good points. That's why I also never embraced the idea of an "instinctual" and "blind" M@L. Too many inconsistencies, too many explanatory gaps and also contradicting the mystic experience throughout time and cultures.

Curiously my main divergence with BK's instinctual M@L resides precisely in the fact that it does not fit into evolution. True that love may not have played an evolutionary role but how can something purely blind and instinctual be so amazingly creative and create such huge complexity without having some higher form of cognition? If one adds gazillions of instincts you won't get a less instinctual mind, let alone love, but only yet another super blind instinct. The only way out is that to fall back to physicalism and believe that it is all explained away by natural selection and random mutations. But, apart from the fact that also modern evolutionary biology begins to recognize how this was a much too simplistic understanding of evolution, one then wonders why we should embrace idealism in the first place? While idealism is certainly a step forwards compared to physicalism it still lacks the fundamental ingredient of a coherent evolutionary theoretical framework.

I agree with you that BK's flat MAL perspective does not adequately account for deep emotional experience at all. To be fair, it is not really attempting to account for those things. Except with More than Allegory - I think that is fair game because it does try to explain the existence of spiritual mythology in terms of MAL-alter ontology, as you say above. It is accurate in the most trivial sense - a sort of accuracy which ends up being misleading and counter-productive. From our current perspective, MAL (what I call the "Spirit") began as more instinctive and impersonal. All of these characterizations are simply a way of describing a set of relations between perspectives in Time which, in essence, are eternal (timeless or time-free) and unified. I can expand on that more later. The fullness of feelings such as love, which is no doubt eternal in its essence, are found in their meanings, and meaning never comes from purely instinctive behavior.

In modern christianity, there is a kind of theology called "process theology".
As far as I know it is based on the idea of panpsychism and has its roots in the philosophy of Whitehead.

Process theology - in alignment with C.G. Jung - also claim that God gets to know himself through us humans.
God is therefore not thought as omniscience in the traditional christian sense, but more as the sum of all understanding and experience.
We humans, by our self-reflection, experiences, knowledge, do have direct impact on the development of God.

However, God, or MAL, does not stay in his static, instinctive state, but he grows and develops with us within that theology.
Maybe he started instinctively, however I see no reason why that should still be the case after billions of evolutionary process.
And I agree with you Marco, evolutionary complexity increases during the process, which maybe gives a hint that not only MAL's potentiality, but also its guidance/intention/creativity/spirituality increases to the same degree.

If we are going to start with theology, which generally I don't think is a great way to approach these issues, then I think we need to consider carefully what the relevant scripture teaches. I hold that Christianity clearly teaches Unity of all Being and theosis - man is in the process of becoming God. St. Paul says, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, master nor servant, male nor female... for we are all One in Christ Jesus." He also says, "it is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me". There are many similar verses from Jesus and Paul. These should not be taken as mere metaphors, but essential spiritual truths. From the relational perspective, I think it is accurate to say the Spirit is awakening within man who will bring the value of corporeal life (including enriched Love) back to the Spirit (which aligns with Jung's view as well). Yet we should not anthropomorphize that process or treat it as a process unfolding in strictly linear time. I think Cleric may be in the process of posting an essay on that issue of Time soon. That is a very difficult but necessary issue for modern intellect to sort out when discussing these essential questions.