In any kind of love, there is a mysterious element of “return to the Universal,” which is the creative ocean of life; love is by its very nature creative - it is Eros, not just libido. And in this “creative love” lies the secret of the joy that always accompanies life. Life, in plenitude, is exuberant joy.
What happens at the level of erotic love, which aims at the immortality of the species, also happens, much more intensely, at the level of the mystique, which produces the immortality of the individual.
The mystique is the erotic of the spirit - just as erotic is the mystique of the flesh.
The Universal is the Cosmic Whole, so the return to the Universal — whether in erotic or mystique — is something like drunkenness, ecstasy, rapture, death of the conscious and tyrannical ego, and the birth of the all-conscious Self.
What erotica tries and achieves for a moment, the mystique accomplishes permanently. The mystical nuptial of the soul with God is the return of the individual to the Universal, partially conscious and reaching the great Universal whole - and this is indescribable bliss...
There is a close affinity between selfishness and separation on the one hand and love and identification on the other. When the lover reaches the climax of love, it no longer wants to exist as an individual life; it wants to be integrated into a Universal Life. Who does not want to die does not love. There is no love without death. The mistake of lovers is that they confuse physical death with metaphysical death. They vaguely feel that the barrier of bodies seals off the desired fusion of both, and if this barrier fell, the path would be open for the complete merger of the lovers into each other.
Fusion, of course, must take place, but not in this way.
In the field of the mystique, this death also occurs, not in the form of physical death, but in the form of metaphysical or mystical euthanasia. The true mystic knows and feels that the separatist mask of its ego prevents realizing this fusion of the loving soul with the beloved God, as so beautifully described by the erotic-mystic romance of the Song of Songs, allegedly by Solomon, the son of King David.
Therefore, the mystic is the most radical anti-egoist and antiseparatist. It seeks, however, to kill the ego - and finds in the Sermon on the Mount the most violent poison for the plan; eagerly sips this deadly venom of the “Eight Beatitudes", the highest document of ego mystical liberation, and enters the indescribable drunkenness of its union with God ...
When, then, a mystic return among men, the echoes of its experience with God will never die in the soul; this experience envelops life with a halo of sacredness and permeates with poetry all the profane things of earthly existence...
The mystical experience is the supreme alchemy that overestimates all values.
Through the experience of love, the man who has returned to the Universal becomes intensely individual through the charity of spontaneous service to his fellows. And comprehend what these words mean: “Only God will you worship, and you will serve Him”!
The service this man renders to his fellows is an irresistible overflow from the worship he renders to God. Worshipping and serving are not for him two different things - it is the same thing seen from different perspectives...
To worship, to pray, to act - action is contained in prayer, and it is in worship. Man, of mystical experience, is a man of action, for he is a man of prayer and worship. But these three activities are not three, nor are they juxtaposed - they are the same thing seen from many angles.
It is the birth of the cosmic man...
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