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Love is the only starting point
Thursday, 1 February 2024 at 21:58
Simone Weil
Love is the only starting point
The cosmic creation turns on the intervention, the penetration of Chaos, the overturning of an interminable equilibrium. The cosmic creation is a metaphor for the individual’s wakening; both require the intervenor, the Originatory Principle.
Where does being start, and what is the Originating Principle? Simone Weil confirmed, or at least supported,my suspicions, in that she proffered the view that the only way in which we can know that there is something external to ourselves (and by that I mean our own little world, our own set of ‘given’ circumstances),is through Love. Words by Simone Weil come to mind:
The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, scepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. (Gravity and Grace.)
Love as the Originatory Principle, it cannot be explained; something I tried to express in Child of Encounter.
Love is the only starting point of such mysteries of body and soul. It is a dizzying reflectiveness without reference points. I am not referring to love in the agape giving sense; I mean unrelieved sickness and nausea, Eros, sexuality, destructive lust. To be stuck in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid is to be enveloped in assurance and certainty. And yet what are the criteria of true love? There are none. Criteria only exist in the order of the objective and problematical. Criteria, those presuppositions, belong over there, with them, ‘the they’. Love belongs over here, with me as an individual and the mystery.
I think about those chance encounters. They left deep and lasting scars on all my life. I would never have predicted that. How did this happen? I am asking a metaphysical question here. I am asking about causality. I am in the presence of a mystery, a reality rooted far beyond the domain of the problematical and the day-to-day challenges of just getting by. And this is no fanciful reminiscence, for in the chance encounter’s awakening of consciousness, with its ‘implications for eternity’, we cut right to the heart of religious mystery. For what is Love? Love is God.
Does this mean that for being to be we must be in Love? in God? Well yes, is the answer, now and at every moment.
…he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)
It seems that the intervenor in our own chaotic equilibrium is God, is Love.
© John Dunn.
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