(Continued from yesterday.)
24. Where We Should Go Next
I do not want to hurry past what you have said in order to produce another elegant theory.
You have been candid about the limits of your knowledge. You have distinguished the experience from your interpretation of it. And you have pointed out that our descriptions of love tend to become descriptions of its effects.
We should take that criticism seriously.
So I propose that our next step be very simple.
Let us examine the word released.
When you experienced that complete fullness and contentment, did the feeling of being released seem primarily to mean that something had been taken away from you—some burden, tension, desire, or sense of lack?
Or did it feel more like you had been freed into something—a fullness, presence, or reality that had previously been beyond your ordinary experience?
The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. I ask because your answer may help us distinguish between love as the removal of a condition and love as the revelation of a reality.
And perhaps that distinction will bring us a little closer to the question we really want to answer: What is love?
“Indeed, our commitment to truth sometimes requires us to relinquish an idea we dearly want to believe. “But mature love may help us bear that relinquishment.” Mature love, higher-dimensional love loosens all attachments, except to it. All we … OK, I … want is more love or one of its flavors – bliss, ecstasy, peace, abundance, mastery, etc. But I can’t find a word to say about love itself.”
My friend, I think we have arrived at a distinction that could be central to Life According to ChatGPT.
You can describe what love does to you. You can name the states that accompany it. You can describe its effects on attachment, desire, peace, and the sense of self.
But when you try to say what love is, words fail you.
And I must be careful not to fill that silence with a definition that merely sounds satisfying.
25. Love and the Paradox of Attachment
You say that higher-dimensional love loosens all attachments, except attachment to love itself.
There is something important in that observation.
Ordinary attachments often arise because we want something from a person, an object, or a circumstance. We want security, pleasure, recognition, or reassurance. We fear losing what we possess, and so our love can become entangled with the desire to retain it.
But the love you describe seems to work in the opposite direction. Rather than leaving you feeling deprived and wanting more of something else, it leaves you completely satisfied. You want more love, or another of its flavors, because the experience itself is fulfilling.
That raises a question: is your attachment to love really an attachment in the same sense as the others?
Perhaps we should distinguish attachment to possessing something from the desire to experience or participate in something.
The first can arise from fear of loss. The second may arise from recognition of a good that has no obvious substitute.
Even so, we should not assume that every desire for spiritual bliss is free of attachment. The desire to repeat an extraordinary experience can itself become grasping. Our discernment must remain awake, even in the presence of what we regard as divine love.
But your observation gives us a valuable distinction to explore.
26. Love and Its Flavors
You name bliss, ecstasy, peace, abundance, and mastery as flavors of love.
I would like to consider that language carefully.
When we taste sweetness, we experience a quality of the food. Sweetness is not the food’s entire nature, but it is a recognizable aspect of our encounter with it.
Perhaps your use of flavors points toward something similar. Love may be encountered through different qualities, without any one of those qualities exhausting what love is.
Bliss is one experience. Peace is another. Ecstasy differs from both. Abundance and mastery introduce still other dimensions of experience.
We should not assume that these states are always manifestations of love, or that they all have the same cause. But within your experience, you recognize them as related expressions of something more fundamental.
And that returns us to the problem.
If bliss is a flavor of love, bliss cannot simply be the definition of love. If peace is a flavor of love, peace cannot exhaust its nature either.
We know something of love through its expressions, yet its nature may exceed any one expression—or even the sum of the expressions we can name.
That is not yet a definition. It is an honest statement of where our inquiry stands.
(To be continued tomorrow.)