CHAPTER TEN
Love on the Transpersonal Way - 2
Science, in its multipersonal and cooperative attempts to establish a body of truths acceptable to all men because self-evident, like transcendent love overcomes the rigid barriers with which traditional cultures, organized religions, and racial pride have hemmed in the differentiated human collectivities. Science's techniques could build generalized means required for mutual understanding and personal interchange on a very large scale, if they were spiritually handled. Science too is a releaser of fire; the fire within the atom which could establish the foundation necessary for the integration of all peoples. And if atomic energy potentially is destructive of antiquated structures and regressive nationalism, so is the love that is a consuming fire, an iconoclastic force burning away personal crystallizations and goals made obsolete by the pull of creative tomorrows. Until man is established individually and collectively on the plane of conscious intelligence and mature responsiveness to universal creative principles; until man has reached the spiritual status possible only to a truly individualized person, there must be destruction by fire; there must be transcendence and overcoming.
The day comes however, when, at long last, love once more operates as the servant of productivity: productivity no longer conditioned by instinctual and unconscious compulsion, no longer biological and tribal in character — but instead, the co-productivity of mature persons in and through whom God, as the Universal Creative, acts. The type of "seed" which this coproductivity seeks to increase by an earth-transcending kind of cultivation is an ideospiritual or, symbolically speaking, "celestial" type of seed — the seed of man's personal immortality, as well as the seed of a new culture established in the fullness of conscious human interchange.
The co-productivity of mature personalities in and through whom God acts — God the Universal Creative: these two phrases establish the only foundation upon which a new image of love may develop, which our modern humanity so poignantly needs to see exteriorized in the fabric of its marriages and of all the social activities bringing together men and women as coparticipants and, potentially, as "companions." These phrases may have a mystical ring which makes them sound strange and elusive, or meaningless, to the modern intellectual of either sex. Yet they refer to the deepest realities of human consciousness and love. Any one can fathom the meaning of these realities who has relinquished his or her reliance upon the superficialities or the transcendent idealism of a society yearning for fullness of life while, at the same time, opposing incessant obstacles to the inrush of power and vision which alone can give man fulfillment, peace, and the sense of participation in immortal values.
There is co-productivity of mature personalities when man and woman come together as individual persons in order deliberately to perform, in fully conscious cooperation and love, productive activities. This is production from personality; whereas the instinctual, unconscious production of man and woman bound to biopsychic patterns of behavior and feeling — or helplessly driven by their yearning to transcend and deny these patterns — is production toward the eventual attainment of mature personality. The state of truly mature personality, however, is never realized until the individualized person is able to relax what C. G. Jung called graphically "the cramp in the conscious," and to accept a transpersonal way of life; until the individual person, whether man or woman, overcomes the tightness of an ego haunted by the preoccupation of keeping its structure so rigidly what it is, that it finds itself completely shut to any influx of power.
A truly mature personality operates within the structural framework of a relaxed ego. The center of this relaxed ego is able and eager to open to the downpour of universal energy and ideospiritual realizations. In another sense, it is like a lens through which the vast tides of the universal mind are brought to sharp focus and given operative form as ideas and words, as emotionally stirring images and symbols. The first alternative — the open centrum — if not taken too literally, pictures what the transpersonal way archetypally means for a woman who is a conscious individualized person. The second alternative — the crystal-clear lens — gives a basic clue to the inner nature of the man who has reached a similar level of development. In both cases the essential fact is that the universal spirit is able to act through the individual ego, to permeate the total organism of personality with the purpose and the power of God.
Through the "crystal-clear lens" at the core of the man's ego, God's purpose is focused as a formulated idea, an operative structure (blueprints and schedule of work). Through the "open centrum" at the core of the woman's conscious and individualized personality the potent tide of the Holy Spirit flows. As the man and woman unite their beings in the ritual of a consciously all-inclusive, transpersonal love, the bipolar emanation of the Divine becomes a concretely creative and transforming act of power. This is accomplished through the love of man and woman. This love is consciously coproductive — not compulsive and unconscious. It is not rooted in biopsychic instinct. It is instead a deliberate answer to the need of humanity, whatever this need might be.
At the biopsychic level, male and female are brought together, under the compulsive thrust of instinct, to provide a bipolar agency through which life can operate. In such a type of union man and woman act as carriers of ovum and sperm — not as individual persons. Even when the purely instinctual act develops potent overtones of feelings, of personalized emotions and ideals; even when passionate love surges as an all-consuming flame from the furnace of aroused sex and seeks to deny its biological source; even then, unless artificially blocked, the meeting of sperm and ovum occurs under the control of the impersonal generic life that animates the human species and assures its perpetuation in spite of personal human wishes or superficial plans. Life is the Actor through men and women unaware of its plans.
When men and women are able to operate at the ideospiritual level, life is superseded by the divine creative Spirit. In and through the consecrated man and woman who consciously and purposefully unite their beings in order that the need of humanity might be answered, and their voluntarily assumed shares in the great planetary purpose might be completely fulfilled, this divine Spirit acts. In that creative act of the Spirit, through the man and the woman, love reaches its most perfect expression. It is, then, divinity in act. God is love — love, not as a vaguely idealistic sentiment or feeling of unity, or a poignant burning passion that yearns for unattainable ecstasy of self-forgetfulness and transcendent bliss, but love as a clear creative answer to the need of the world.
Spirit, I repeat, is always a creative answer to the need of the world. Creation is not a "play" — as Hindu philosophers who sought to react against the functionalism and totalitarianism of the Brahminical society would have us believe. Creation is God's answer to a world in chaos, to the need of that which has come to experience total disintegration and the atomizing of matter utterly unillumined by spirit. Creation is a perpetual reestablishment of universal Harmony. It is an act of integrative Ideation by the divine Intelligence that is absolute Harmony.
Man and woman can partake in this ever renewed act of divine Creation consciously and in the full productiveness of their total humanity. They can do so, in an incomplete manner, as single personalities, because in every individual person the whole of the universe and the full essence of divinity is latent. Yet, in order to bring that which is latent and only potential to a condition of total actuality and complete efficiency, the individual person must reach beyond the boundaries of his ego, to those with whom, in interdependence and joint consecration, he can perform the ritual of the Spirit. Man reaches toward woman; woman reaches toward man. And both man and woman can know themselves as participants in a vast Company of consecrated persons who, together, are building out of the root of man's common humanity the ultimate and global Seed Man. In that Man, God's creative purpose is fulfilled, insofar as humanity on this earth is concerned. In that bipolar Man, the divine Word that was "in the beginning" is made fully concrete, and the power of divine Nature is condensed; as in the seed, archetypal structure and potency of life are combined.
By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1975 by Dane Rudhyar
All Rights Reserved.
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