THE MYSTERY OF INTEGRAL LOVE

Since Jesus centres the whole problem of man's realization on Integral Love — soul, mind, heart, and body forces — from living the mystics of the first commandment with the practice of the ethics of the second, the question arises: How can man realize in himself this integral love, which embraces the total nature of man?

Many devoted people think and claim that they love God in this way, and prayer books speak every moment of that love.

However, is it possible that someone really loves something or someone? Can a man really love an object, a person, or an entity foreign to himself? Or is this “love” just an attraction?

Further investigation says that this is impossible since love is a self-affirmation, not to say self-love, that many confuse with selfishness.

Sacred books are right to say that “God loves itself with Infinite love.” And if God loves its creatures, as the sacred books claim, it only loves them because they are essentially identical with itself, though existentially different, and if there were no essential identity between the Creator and the creature, in spite of all existential differences, it would be absolutely impossible for the Creator to love its creatures because love is self-affirmation, not an external statement.

Loving your fellow human is based on self-love, love for your fellow is consolidated or established in the love with which the Creator sustains itself. If God did not love itself, it could not love its Creatures, which are finite manifestations of the Infinite Essence.

Self-affirmation or self-love is not selfishness, it is holiness, it is an affirmation of the highest metaphysical reality and nature of the being of Divinity. Self-love would be selfish only if the Divine Lover excluded the beloved creatures from its love. But in this case, the creatures would not exist; God's love is what makes them exist by overflowing with its own self-love. Selfishness is an exclusive self-love, but when self-love is all-embracing, it is truth and holiness. Therefore, we must love our neighbour as ourselves.

One cannot conceive of a non-Creator God, a God of pure isolated and sterile identity without the other creatures, a self-loving God without the creatures it loves.

All beloved creatures consolidate and converge in the self-loving Creator; all finite beings are focused on the Infinite Essence.

From the Infinite Essence, everything comes.

In the Infinite Essence, everything is.

To the Infinite Essence, everything comes back.

The Divine Cause produces all effects, and all finite effects move toward the Infinite Cause. Existentially, the creatures appear to be external to the Creator - essentially, they are always within it.

No creature should be loved because of its existence, but only because it is a projection of Divinity. Man, who tries to love his fellow man as himself without loving God, who does not love his fellow man via God, loves his fellowman wrongly. No creature should be loved from creature to creature, but from creature to creature via the Creator. Human love may be altruism or moralism, but it is not true metaphysical and mystical ethics, as is love through God.

Jesus demanded that man love God with all his soul, with all his mind, with all his heart and with all the strength of his body. And he can love God in this way only if he has experienced experimentally that there is between man and God an essential identity; that the creature is not a new reality separate from God, but is a manifestation emanating from the one and only Divine Reality.

Integral Love presupposes an intimate experience of creature-Creator unity and identity. Man must exercise to feel and achieve unity between himself and God, an essential unity in the midst of all existential diversities. He must at least glimpse and feel that “I and the Father are one.” Without this fundamental experience, more felt and tasted than properly thought and known, it is not possible to love God fully, as the first and greatest of all commandments requires. The metaphysical-mystical experience that “I and the Father are one,” the experience of this identity I-God, Creature-Creator, Finite-Infinite is the indispensable basis for the experience of which Jesus speaks.

This message is consolidated or established in the deepest and highest metaphysics of the nature of being that can be conceived or imagined. Anyone who has never entered this dimension of consciousness will never understand the Gospel.

Entering this supreme dimension of consciousness requires prolonged loneliness and deep silence, silence-presence, silence-fullness, and this is the only reason why all true initiates lived and lived long periods of solitude and silence.

This is the mystery of Integral Love rooted in the anonymous and silent experience of central unity in all peripheral diversities, which is why Jesus said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God ... Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."

The point of reference of both the vertical love of divine mystic as the horizontal love of human ethics is invariably God, the God in me, my God, the Father in me. Without this point of reference of the divine Self in man, there is neither the first nor the second commandment, nor the divine mystics, nor human ethics.

The basis of all this, "in which all the law and the prophets consist," is the vision of unity and identity between man and God, between the finite and the Infinite.

All the greatness of Jesus consists that he has reached the heights of this vision of the essential identity between himself and the Divinity. Hence his message infinitely surpasses all altruism and moralism, all virtuosity and godliness, and culminates in the most exalted metaphysics of the nature of being, of Unity in all Diversities, of Absolute Essence in all Relative Existences.

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Considering that the vast majority of humans live their ephemeral loves, the affinity of egos, based on the exploitation of their fellowmen, the selfish way in which they relate, including themselves, the tragedy of the external circumstances that enslave them, and all other human mediocrities which contribute to diverting the real objective crystallized, but dormant in the soul, of being Christlike by their own very natures. Some men dedicate themselves with extreme love to God and their fellow men, in spiritual affinity, and it is precisely these who set the example of how to live the mystique of the first commandment in the practice of the ethics of the second because they see in themselves and their peers, the mirror of Divinity.