Defining Love

In its broadest dimension, we call Love the energy that created the universe and that keeps it working. It is that principle of cohesion which links and articulates everything that exists.

“I have seen the Love that moves the sun and the other stars…”, said Goethe. [Editor’s note: the line is Dante’s, the closing line of the Paradiso; the attribution to Goethe is the original author’s.]

From this point of view, God and Love are synonymous and, just as it is impossible to encompass all the attributes of God, it is impossible to define Love completely by means of concepts. What we shall do here, therefore, is to approach that quality of energy like the finger that points at the moon: it knows that it indicates the moon, but that it is not the moon.

With this reservation made, we may go on to say that, in order to approach Love in its cosmic dimension, it is perhaps enough to look one night at the immensity of the starry sky…

…And, in order to approach love in its human dimension, it is very good simply to observe our hands. The way in which they relate to one another while they carry out the tasks of the day: getting dressed, fastening a button, making a coffee, and so on. All the tasks. To watch them attentively and look at the relationship. It is truly marvellous. You will find there mutual help, continual adjustments, precise tunings, a sense of teamwork… What you will see between them is the cooperation of love.

At each level, love takes on the form that corresponds to that plane. At the personal level, it manifests itself fundamentally as respect, solidarity and care, and depending on the circumstances it will be passionate, fraternal or religious love, and so on. Whatever its form, the essential fabric of the experience of love is the one that arises from recognising oneself as two distinct parts of one and the same larger unity. Exactly what happens between the two hands.

In other words: Love is the memory that Unity has of itself in diversity.

Love between people

Obviously, between two people it is not so easy. The individual consciousness of each seems to erase the recognition of the fact that they are parts of one and the same unity, and most of the time they perceive themselves only as separate individuals, strangers, and sometimes even enemies. Within that frame, the flame of love is momentarily darkened, and it is there precisely that the human task lies: to live through a series of experiences which, by very diverse paths, help to recover consciously the same recognition that the hands have automatically as parts of one and the same body. That is to say that we human beings are also constituent cells, and moreover conscious ones, of the great universal organism.

Love and sacrifice: is there an essential relation between them?

To sacrifice is to deny a part in the name of an end considered more important.

Love does not seek sacrifice. It seeks the greatest possible well-being, for the greatest possible number of people, for the longest possible time.

In that search, situations may arise in which an individuality has to be denied; when it comes to that extremity – as, for example, in the case of someone who gives his life to save another –, the one who does it, if he does it out of love, does not feel that he is sacrificing himself, but that he is saving.

Self-regard

What we call “self-regard” or pride is an exaggerated and distorted way of trying to compensate for the lack of love towards oneself: if I disqualify myself and reproach myself excessively, that devalued part of me lives in a state of chronic mistreatment, as if it were “raw”, extremely hypersensitive. It therefore no longer has any reserve for absorbing everyday frustrations and it demands an external treatment that will compensate for that inner deficit. If, in these conditions, someone tells me for example that there is something about me he does not like, then “the cup overflows”: I feel very hurt, I take offence, I tense up and I close myself off. It is this attitude that we call pride.

Love, intelligence and wisdom

Intelligence is the capacity to solve problems. The kind of problems I am capable of solving will define which intelligence I possess: philosophical, mathematical, chemical, bodily, musical, and so on.

If I use my intelligence in chemistry to produce weapons that destroy many people, I shall have a chemical intelligence, but not an intelligence that understands the unitary quality underlying everything that is alive and the complementary role that all its components fulfil. Wisdom is precisely the lived and profound knowledge of that unity. In other words, wisdom is love become self-consciousness. It is the energy of love converted into concept, into knowledge, into teaching.

Wisdom in conflict

A conflict is a bond in which each party believes that the solution lies in the elimination of the other: “I shall only be well if I manage to defeat him or to push him aside”. Such is the essence of conflict, in the interpersonal universe as much as in the intrapersonal one.

A typical intrapersonal conflict is the one played out between the impulses and the mind.

The impulse says: “I want to express myself, to turn into action, and you, the mind, will not let me. You spend your time calculating and anticipating, and you do not let me live. I want to eliminate you so as to be able to be happy.”

The mind replies: “You go forward blindly and you bring more problems than anything else. I am tired of your being mistaken, of your deluding yourself, of your being taken in, and of having to spend my life trying to pick up the pieces. I am going to stop you at all costs, because you are a total danger.”

And this battle can go on for a long time, with all the damage and all the suffering it entails… until someone is able to restore harmony to that system.

Such is the task of wisdom.

It is wisdom that can recognise the part of truth and the part of error there is in each antagonist, and explain it to each of them in the way each is able to hear it. It thus contributes to rebuilding the lost bond of complementarity between the impulses and the mind, that bond in which both can once again recognise themselves as being as necessary to one another as the two hands are to each other.

The impulses and the mind might be compared to the accelerator and the brake. Seen in isolation, they seem pure opposites that cancel one another out. It is only when the image of the car in traffic is added that one verifies that they are complementary: I can accelerate because I have the brake at my disposal, and vice versa.

To connect with the larger unity that makes it possible to see what is complementary in what appears opposed — that is what the wisdom of love does…

Loving and giving

This is a traditional definition of loving, a partial one that produces confusion, because it associates loving with an action, whereas the quality of that energy is better understood when one understands that it is not a particular action, but a way of carrying out any action whatever. There is therefore a loving giving, and also a loving receiving and a loving asking. When I formulate my need and my request in a way that takes the other into account and that respectfully recognises his right to say no, that is a loving request.

This conceptual widening helps us to understand that the emitting attitude as well as the receptive attitude can be carried out lovingly. That is to say that love is the patrimony neither of the one nor of the other in particular.

The loving extended to the emotions

Let us think of anger, which seems one of the emotions furthest from love. Paradoxical as it may appear, there is a loving anger: the one that expresses itself as a clear self-affirmation which, without outraging, presents with all the necessary force what I propose or what I claim so that my anger may cease. Very succinctly: non-loving anger is the one that destroys a great deal and resolves little; conversely, loving anger is the one that directs its energy towards the effective resolution of what angers me, with the least possible damage to those involved in the situation.

What I am describing here for anger holds also for fear, envy, shame, and so on. Each of them has a more or less loving way of expressing itself. This is precisely the theme of my latest book: La sabiduría de las emociones.

All emotional states have their opposite… does love have one too?

As we said above, love is more than an emotion: it is a quality of energy, and the emotional plane is only one of its forms of manifestation. Within that form, at one level it does have an opposite, at another it does not. At a more restricted level, if love is what links and articulates, the opposites of love are all the forces that obstruct that process, and there is not just one of them, there are several: hatred, indifference, fear and domination.

This is the level of the duality of opposites, but it is not the only one. There is another, wider plane of consciousness, from which love and hatred are only apparently opposed, since both also turn out to be components of a larger unity that embraces and includes them equally. And that larger unity is Love, with a capital letter.

It may seem strange, and it often produces confusion, that, depending on the level one considers, love should be a pole and also the totality that includes it as such. It is for this reason that the term “love” is usually used with a capital or with a small letter, as a way of distinguishing the plane being described.

An idea that illustrates this kind of relation between two levels very well is the notion of “order” and “chaos”. On a restricted plane, both can function as opposites; but in a wider perspective, chaos also turns out to be one more moment of a larger order. That is to say that Order – the larger one – includes order – the more restricted one – and chaos as two moments of its becoming.

Another example of the same thing is present in the popular formula that says: God writes straight with crooked lines…

God writes straight… means: in contemplating the whole, the presence of harmony, of balance and of order becomes evident in the manifestation of what has been created.

…with crooked lines… refers to the temporary imbalances, to the circumstantial vicissitudes of processes under way.

This formula presents two scales of time: brief time and extended time. “The minute” and “the century”. And, through these two scales, it integrates the straight and the crooked. What appears as crooked on one plane also turns out to be straight at another, wider level.

This, moreover, is the essence of “giving meaning”: describing a wider universe in which what appeared as purely destructive takes on a significance and a reason for being within a broader evolutionary process.

I have dwelt on these examples because it seems to me important that we become familiar with the recognition of different levels and with the perception that arises from each of them.

Perceiving love and hatred as absolute opposites, and clinical psychology

When we adopt a dualist position, we see love and hatred as absolute opposites, as the expression of two principles irreducible to one another. On the psychological plane, the principles most familiar to us are those we have called eros and thanatos (life drive and death drive) or, in another facet of the same dualism: good and evil. In both examples, each of the antagonistic forces is granted the same ontological scope, that is to say that they represent “two columns” of equal presence and significance. If, for example, one encounters a feeling of hatred and goes deeply into it, according to this conception one will go on finding hatred all the way down, to the very roots, because that is “the column” to which it belongs.

Once this stance is established, it is inevitable that life should be conceived as an eternal struggle between the two forces. And it is eternal because each one constitutes “a factory” of feelings and attitudes that continually turns out its products. In this case: love and hatred, or good and evil.

The position one adopts on this matter radically determines the attitude with which one will approach psychological conflict and the explanation one will give of it.

If I believe in the ultimate dualism good-evil, love-hatred, eros-thanatos, and so on, I shall devote my attention to having the patient recognise the part of hatred he manifests in his life, so that he may take responsibility for it.

I shall tell him for example: “You do that as a consequence of the destructive drives you have…” In other words, primary destructiveness becomes “the ultimate explainer” of hatred or of destructive behaviour.

When I believe that the ultimate energy underlying psychic dynamics is Love, and when I can attune my personal consciousness to that wider dimension, then my attitude and my priorities in the face of conflict change profoundly.

When I understand that hatred is, in that dimension, a form of the loving impulse’s despair gone mad, my search turns towards discovering the way in which that loving impulse went mad to the point of turning into hatred.

In that case, faced with a behaviour of hatred, I know that if I manage to penetrate inside it, as I go deeper into the feelings that underlie it, there will appear, as in successive layers of an onion, frustration, confusion, despair, mistaken conclusions, which have progressively distorted the original loving impulse until it issued in the present feeling of destructive hatred. The curative task consists in retracing that path in the reverse direction until the person understands how her original loving impulse became distorted, in helping her to recover the connection with it and in collaborating with her so that she may discover the way of resolving lovingly, now, the conflict that disorganised her. It is worth recalling that “lovingly” means neither weakening nor amputation: it means effectiveness. In reality, there is no energy more effective than love for resolving a conflict. In my book El Asistente Interior, whose third edition is coming out precisely this month, I explain in detail what learning it is necessary to undertake in order to recover that energy of loving assistance, the very one that transforms antagonism and converts it into cooperation.

For example, a woman who complained of her loneliness receives, from a fellow student, an invitation to go for a walk. She says no. Quite evidently, her attitude turns out to be incoherent with her needs. If the hypothesis of the eternal struggle between eros and thanatos inside her is present in the therapist, he will orient the explanation of her behaviour by appealing to the influence of those forces. He may say for example: “You want company and, when you receive it, you say no because there is in you a self-destructive force, your internal saboteur, which attacks what could bring you well-being.”

If one relies on the world view in which ultimate reality is love, one first puts to oneself the following question: what must this person’s inner universe be like for this reaction, which appears so inadequate, to be the best possible one for her?

And perhaps one will discover that what she feels is that if she opens herself to that invitation there will be activated in her a set of expectations that will not be satisfied, that this will produce an infinitely greater pain, which she will not be able to absorb, and that, faced with this risk, it seems to her more careful of her integrity to say no from the outset.

One will then see, in a second stage, what she needs to learn in order to feel able to absorb that share of risk, and all the rest. But the essential part of this path is to discover the resolving intention that exists inside that attitude which appears to take her away from what she is seeking.

…To find love where it seems that love is not…

Love and power

It is worth distinguishing power as a noun from power as a verb: “being able to do”. In general, when we say “that person has power”, we are referring to power as a noun, that is to say to the capacity to influence the will of the other. When that capacity slides towards domination, it expresses the immature modality of power. Although it does indeed seem to be the one we most have in mind, it is not the only one. There also exists the mature form of power, which consists precisely in having the capacity, the power, to use my energy not in order to dominate, but in order to articulate my needs with those of the other and to generate a response that takes both of us into account and expresses us both. This is “the most powerful power”, even if we register it less consciously, and it is another facet of love. The I Ching describes this modality with brevity and beauty when it states: “To govern is to serve.”

The laws of love

One of the laws that love knows is that the part can only be well in a whole and lasting way to the extent that the whole to which it belongs is well too. A member of a couple can be well to the extent that the couple structure is well. The husband or the wife may feel good while subjecting the spouse, but that lasts only a brief moment. It is hard to imagine a being who would experience complete well-being surrounded by pain. That pain comes back. It is so because the fabric that links the destinies of the part and of the whole is very strong and because, in a system that functions at high speed, the strength of that fabric is seen immediately. When events occur at a lesser speed, the relation between the part and the whole does not become so evident.

To understand this better, let us imagine that I have an infection throughout my arm and that the fever appears only ten years after the beginning of the infection. It would be difficult for me to understand the link between the one thing and the other. The same holds for many human events: we harvest the results a very long time after having sown the seed, and this makes it difficult for us to understand the cause-and-effect relation. This is why some maintain – and I subscribe to this idea – that, on planet Earth, where events unfold at low speed, it is necessary to learn to recognise certain laws that have already been discovered by systems that functioned at high speed and that made it possible to see the natural links between the part and the whole. If it is true that there is a solar consciousness, and if it is true that there are forms of life where the same thing happens at high speed, it is very probable that these phenomena have already been discovered, understood and established as natural laws. This is why “Love your neighbour as yourself” is not “the most difficult of the commandments”, as is often said, but simply the expression of one of those laws.

Is love of oneself a form of selfishness?

Selfishness has to do with immature desire, the desire that feels itself at the centre of the stage and is satisfied exclusively by its own fulfilment, without taking anything else into account. Love of oneself transcends that plane. It loves what it likes in itself, and also what it does not like. My insecure part may not please me and I can love it all the same. To love it does not mean to consent to it in the sense of indulgence; it means to take it into account, to respect it and to assist it. It is only when I have learned to love what I do not like in myself that I can love what I do not like in others, that is to say everything that does not satisfy my immediate desires. So that love of myself not only does not exclude love of others, but is precisely what makes it possible.

Loving and desiring: the differences

Desire is a movement of attraction towards something, born of the perception or the memory of that something. If I desire “grapes”, everything that is “non-grape” will be rejected by me. Desire and rejection are simultaneous, they are the two sides of the same coin.

A famous Hollywood actress, on reading a script that had been sent to her, asked whom she had to kill in order to get that part. That sentence, very striking in other respects, then remained inscribed as a paradigm of enthusiasm, of an iron will to attain something, and almost as an indispensable condition for anyone wishing to advance in his career. In other words, it was socially glorified.

And that sentence is precisely the one that best reflects the essence of immature desire.

It is true that there are certain situations in which the desire for something meets an obstacle that it does indeed have to eliminate. In human life, the context of this kind of relation occurs when there is a scarce good and two people fighting to obtain it. The serious problem is that this frame, which arises in a few circumscribed situations, we have extended to everything else, and that we therefore live all of life as a permanent combat.

To return now to the heart of the question: one of the differences between loving and desiring is that desire is satisfied exclusively by obtaining what is desired, whereas love finds well-being in the well-being of all those involved.

Love grants the obstacle the same right to exist as the one it grants to the desire it obstructs. For example: “I desire to be with María, but she loves another man, and that decision of hers seems to me as worthy of being respected and taken into consideration as my own desire. Her decision is of the same rank as my desire, even if her decision hurts me.”

The desire that believes it must destroy the obstacle in order to connect with its goal is non-loving desire; that is the desire that kills. I desire to be with María and she desires to be with another man; that man is the obstacle, and so I kill him. It is for this reason that it is necessary to distinguish attraction from love.

The role of passion and types of desire

Passion is precisely an intense attraction. It can go towards a person, towards an activity, towards an object, and so on. It can be music just as well as stamps or football… What matters is not so much what inspires it as the intensity one feels in the face of what inspires it. And that impassioned attraction can be more or less loving. In passion, what we described above concerning desire is seen on a larger scale. If I feel a non-loving passion towards someone, I can kill the one I perceive as an obstacle, or else that person herself if she does not satisfy my demands. That is the typical crime of passion. It is sometimes said: “he killed out of love…”; this is a confusion, and it leads to still more confusion… The reality is that he killed under the effect of the intense frustration of unshared attraction, but not out of love.

Loving passion feels the same intense attraction, but it grants itself no place of privilege in its relation to the obstacle.

In the last instance, it is love that turns the relation between passion and obstacle into a dance.

When one speaks of desire generically and describes its characteristics, what one usually does is to speak of immature desire. I want to put forward here the proposal of establishing a conceptual distinction within desire itself and of differentiating immature desire from mature desire.

Immature desire is characterised by the fact that it perceives itself at the centre of the stage and places the rest of those involved in the position of “beings at its service”. This means that it does not recognise the life of its own of the three fundamental characters with which it is in relation:

Let us look at it through an example: Juan wants to meet María, and Manuel is the mutual friend who will introduce her to him. Manuel is thus the means by which Juan will get to María. If, on the agreed day, Manuel is tired or has flu, Juan’s immature desire will “get him out of bed and drag him” to the gathering where he will introduce María to him. For immature desire, the one who fulfils the function of means must be available – at all costs – to carry out his task. It will put on pressure and force things “one way or another” so that this may be so. If, on arriving at the gathering, he learns that María is together with Pedro, the latter will be, for Juan, the obstacle preventing him from being united with María. Consequently, Juan’s immature desire will try to exclude Pedro “at all costs” in order to eliminate that obstacle.

This developmental level of desire is the source of countless conflicts and countless sufferings.

Mature desire, by contrast, is characterised by the reverse of the preceding one: it does not place itself at the centre of the stage, nor does it inscribe the rest of those involved as “beings at its service”. If that attitude were put into a sentence, it would be: “I recognise my right to desire to be with María, and I also recognise that María may not desire to be with me. If that is so, it will be painful to me, but that does not give me the right to outrage her because she feels what she feels.

Even if it frustrates me that Manuel is tired, I recognise his right to feel a state that does not coincide with my expectations, and another meeting will have to be arranged.

And, even if it hurts me, I also recognise that Pedro has the same right as I do to feel attracted by María and to be, possibly, chosen by her.”

“At the very moment when I begin to desire, I begin to expose myself to frustration. I cannot guarantee my desire that it will succeed; at most I can guarantee it my best possible attempt.”

At this developmental level – which is possible and necessary –, desire ceases to be a source of conflict and becomes a conscious collaborator in the service of the fullness of development, of the individual as much as of the whole. This is also what the critique of idealised love says in another way: the bond does not hold by the guarantee, but by the renewed attempt.