Love, revisited
Several people have asked me more about The Six Archetypes of Love, due out in a few weeks. Yahoo lost my first series of replies, so I’ll try again, and if the original responses re-appear then… we’ll get twice as much, won’t we?
What I suggest in the book is that we are born with considerable skills, namely the ability to love unconditionally and to trust entirely. These are the attributes of the Innocent. We will, perhaps, never again be able to live as wholehearted with these life skills as we are when we’re infants. Pretty soon we discover the world isn’t always friendly and we bury our loving natures.
We then are faced with a life-time of having to deal with people. We can’t avoid it, no matter how much we might prefer TV or the Xbox or video games. And we have to learn to get on with them. Our loving generous nature is then in conflict with our desire to protect ourselves. It will take most people a lifetime to learn how to get back to the Innocent loving self while not being a victim; and when that happens we can become Magicians.
Take the Dalai Lama as an example. He continues to love and act lovingly, even though he’s been forced from Tibet and many of his followers have been slaughtered. (By the Chinese. Those people whose games we are presently enjoying). He loves his enemies, but he is not stupid, so he has removed himself from their grasp. In doing so he is able to continue to be loving to his supporters, to insist in a loving way on human rights, and by avoiding his enemies, who would certainly torture and kill him if they could, he gives them a chance not to take the unloving way. That is the purity of love used intelligently. It’s the way of the Magician.
Most of us will not find ourselves in anything approaching the Dalai Lama’s plight, so our situations may need some careful thought before we can decide what the loving way forward may be. Sometimes it is loving to contain an aggressor and demand accountability from that person. That takes courage.
Courage and Love are key here, and they’re not what Hollywood wants to show us as their version - which is more correctly defined as Romance and Aggression, perhaps, or even more simply as sex and violence. So let’s leave behind what can mislead us.
Almost every night on the TV news we see scenes of death as yet another bomber strikes. We could choose to focus on the destruction. That’s what news agencies seem to want to do. Or we could note that every time a bomb goes off people, all kinds of people, run forward to help. They are being instinctively loving and compassionate. Animals tend not to do that, although there are exceptions. The antelope herd flees and leaves the slower animals for the lions. Humans don’t seem to function that way.
Love has a way of bubbling up when we expect it least. Like grass finding its way up through the cracks in paving slabs, it can’t be kept down. Once you start paying attention you’ll see it everywhere.
