Life and Love

by Eugene Halliday

 

What is the purpose of life – the true purpose? Goethe has defined the truth as “that which is fruitful.” Let us reframe our question; What is the most fruitful purpose of life? What is a fruit? It is the end result of a growth process which contains in itself the potentiality of further growth and further fruiting to infinity.

What is life? Life is a function of love, an activity in which the potentialities of being are actualised, sustained, developed and transcended to infinity.

Life involves sentience and power incarnating, self-embodying, self-objectifying. Life implies love, and praise and bodily existence, of whatever substance the body may prove to be. Life is Love embodied and praising all things worthy of actualisation.

What is love?

Two pairs of eyes look into each other’s depths. Two mouths frame the words, “I love you”. A little girl croons, “I love my dolly”. A paper-boy rolls his eyes and shouts “I love muffins”. A sad eyed bachelor-man whose mother died when he was forty sits up to the table loving his silver cutlery. A preacher cants from his pulpit, “God is love”.

Here are many loves hard to harmonise, or one love disguising itself in many forms, many activities.

When a boy and girl say to each other “I love you”, what do they mean? One of the things they mean is that they want to be together. They want to protect each other from harm, to help each other, to please each other, to possess each other. “The Lord thy God is a jealous God.” The Lord thy Lover is a jealous Lover. The Lady thy Lover is a jealous Lover. “Thou shalt have none other Gods but me.” Thou shalt have no other lover but me. Why?

Behind all the forms of love there is one supreme love. Behind love of the body, love of the mind, love of the soul, and all other particular loves, there is the love of the spirit which speaks in the great imperative, “Develop thyself and all beings”. This love of the spirit may be defined as a “will to work for the development of the potentialities of all beings”.

The love of bodies aims to develop the potentialities of the relation of bodies. The love of the mind aims to develop the potentialities of all mental things, ideas, philosophies, sciences. The love of the soul aims to develop the soul’s power to feel, to relate itself to other souls in universal compassion. The love of the spirit aims to develop all things as expressions of the creative power of the source of all.

When a man loves a woman, when he says, “Thou shalt have no other man but me”, what is he aiming at? He is aiming at the projection into being of the potentialities of himself and the woman. He is willing the perpetuation of certain characters, certain qualities of body, mind, soul and spirit he sees as potentialities in himself and in the woman. He and she may develop these characters and qualities in their own being, or they may develop them in their children, or they may do both.

 

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