Love Fearlessly

To love a human being in the deepest sense, to love before you ascertain the qualities of his or her character, to transcend the shabby preferences of adoration, to love without preference, to love in such a way where appreciation blooms as an aftereffect rather than a limitation before the involuntary binge -- this love is missing. Love without a will -- that is missing. Involuntary love -- this is why marriages break down, friendships crumble, old affections consistently precipitate in clashes.

The deepest of love is so remarkable a thing that it gives rise to multiple responses. Try it. Go into the world and love a human being before you grasp any of his "hard-earned" particulars, and admit to him that you loved him in this sense, unconditionally. If he is fit for this world, he will reciprocate with a dark stare; if he is attached to this world, he could very well hate you. Thus the test of love in relation to the world is its negative response. Love for this world means the confusion of nonbeing for being. Nonbeing, that is, the particulars that constitute the person, not the ineffable heart that holds this constitution together. Only the person who loves the eternal secret of the other can have his love resonate to the other's whole being. For the deepest love is a secret too secret for itself. It flies from the heart of the lover and plants a seed whose results the lover does not know. He only intends the goodness of the seed. Blooming in different ways, for some it is an added wonder to a perspective flooded by the celestial adoration of life; for others it is a mysteriously iridescent reason to keep on living -- if only for now. Human love is the birthing God in the soul, and what blossoms is God's enterprise.

Can love give rise to ill-temperment, brooding, even hatred? Yes -- but only the highest sort of love, unconditional love, that loves not on the basis of contingencies of personality (for all personalities, whether or not one would like to admit it, are contingent), but on essence -- on the realization of the divine "I" that is shared by all. Men prefer to be loved on the basis of their perceived excellencies, though these excellencies are often nothing more than qualities accepted and molded without effort by those who have them. Love thus understood is a transmission of mutual factual admiration. Individuals who demand to be loved in this sense, in this inferior sense, seek such because their ambition prevents a cleansed perception into the simplicity of living: that is, loving, unconditionally, perpetually, everyone and everything, for to love beyond qualities is precisely to love everyone -- and everything. Love of life, too, is a great leap before perception settles itself.

Unconditional love is fearless love. We must love fearlessly. Virtually all human beings have relational difficulties that cause them to perceive something that isn't there: a fairly conspicuous smile falsely perceived to be made in derision, a shake of the hand too strong, a look in the eyes that resembles unappreciation. What we must seek is to outrule these unintentional relational obscurities, and we can accomplish this only by loving fearlessly. Imagine a man filled to the brim with the hardness of life to such a degree where he no longer sees hardness juxtaposed with life, but only hardness. On his last transitory relation with another human being, who he may or may not know, he perceives a sense of estrangement or neglect that isn't there, and he ends up killing himself, simply because this perceived exclusion from love was the final shot that knocked down his already trembling house of cards he knew to be his general sense of hope in this world. Who is the guilty one? I say, there are many culprits, not one, though the sufficient one was that of timidity, emitted by the man who wasn't big enough to love magnanimously.