Love
article copyright 2024, Stanton Stevens

Questions about love come up often. Why is there so much suffering over something so beautiful? Why doesn't love last? Is there true love? Is love something that is limited, and we must struggle for or hold on to? Why do we want love so much? Is it the answer to the world's problems? 

As we each try to answer these questions, we can benefit from the information offered teachers of Esoterics such as Henry T. Laurency and Alice A. Bailey. I encourage you to read their books for yourself, especially Laurency's, who is little-known but a goldmine of esoteric facts. I included a long quote from him at the end of this article. I also offer some ideas from those books, colored by my own experience.

Love is found on every plane of existence, including those far beyond human which we are as yet unaware of. It bridges the worlds. It is only in the realm of human life-ignorance that love is doubted and misunderstood. In the human worlds of physical, emotional, and mental consciousness, we experience and develop our individuality through separation and a lonely quest for unity. Unity is reached in the next kingdom after human, where we live in collective consciousness, no longer alone. The purpose of life is the evolution of consciousness. And progress toward this goal can be measured by our increasing recognition of the unity underlying everything. When we sense this unity, we call it love. 

All the higher worlds and their inhabitants support your effort to love. It is one of the best efforts that you can make. To quote Laurency, "Even physical life will finally become a paradise once mankind has acquired common sense, uprightness, a sense of unity, and the insight that what is not love is hatred." Humanity is in danger from the very active forces of hatred. We need to make the shift to the higher levels of emotionality, where affection, admiration, gratitude, compassion, and similar qualities manifest. Too many people are still at the lower levels of emotionality, ruled by fear, anger, greed, etc. Their lower emotions are exploited by powerful people who seek to divide and control humanity for their own gain. Once humanity advances to higher emotionality, those people will lose their power. So the problem of leadership will be fixed when people abandon hate for love. 

I saw George Harrison on TV a few years before he died. In an interview, he said, "Back in the '60s, we believed that love could fix everything." He paused for a second and said, "I still do." He was a beautiful soul. I think he was right.

Why is there so much suffering over love, with broken hearts and loss? Most of us deal with love on this individual basis. Some people have hearts that are like stone, unmoved by compassion or higher emotions. But then they fall in love, glimpse another world, and have their first encounter with the beauty of unity. If their heart is broken, it is at least softened, and they have something new to strive for in their development. And love is never wasted, it plants seeds that will be harvested in some future life, if not in this one. All the pain of loss and unrequited love is well compensated, eventually. 

It is possible to love in a way which doesn't end in loss. Look for the Soul in others, draw it out. If you love the person as a Soul, you will always find them, in life or between lives. All Souls know their unity. At a deep level, we are indestructible beings, and our deepest relationships transcend death, and have to the potential to outlast the Earth itself. 

To love is to recognize unity, to recognize unity is to know that we are one. To know this evokes responsibility, care and compassion for another person. It must be strong enough to bring about action. Love that is just a pleasant daydream has not matured into something meaningful. 

Most people have a complicated mix of negative patterns of thought and behavior tempered by whatever of their higher nature they have cultivated. For two such people to love each other takes work, dedication, patience, forgiveness, and affection that sees past human failings again and again. With loving understanding, the negative patterns are gradually eliminated. A committed relationship is very helpful in this process.  

From "Knowledge of Reality" by Henry Laurency
Yoga in the Light of Esoterics, Bhakti Yoga
"6 ... The 'love divine' is the experience of all life's inseparable unity that can never be lost. Anyone who has perceived unity has experienced a kind of happiness different to the human kind: to be able to give and only to give and to forget oneself in giving and serving. After that he cannot do anything else. He wants to, has to love. He lives to love.
7 Love knows no limitation. He needs no motive for loving. It finds love revealed everywhere. The power of inexhaustible love fills the mind that is willing to let itself be filled. Love needs no proof of god's existence, for it sees the godhead of love in everything. How could god be anything but love? Anything that were not love would be incompatible with his nature.
8 Love knows no bargaining. It does not desire, does not envy, is not angered, does not seek its own ends. It is not repelled by anything. It is attracted to everything and itself attracts everything. Love never ceases.
9 Anyone who has experienced this love, does not love for his own or someone else's sake, but because everything is included in unity, everything is unity. In everything that arouses our yearning and in which we delight, unity is revealed. In everything that we feel drawn to - whether things, animals, or men - it is unity that was the real cause of the attraction, acting in us and in everything, so that we become able to love and be loved."

With these powerful words, Laurency makes it clear that love is an essential part of awakening, that human progress toward unity includes an ever-greater capacity for love.