First of all, let’s talk about what we could consider The Seven Levels of Love. I don’t know, Swati, if you feel like writing them on the board. What’s important is to understand where you are on this map and what the obstacles are to reaching the next levels.
The first level of love is that of an infantile helpless being who is in a state of demand for gratification. It’s a state of love, but it’s a demanding state because it’s based on need. It’s not a higher level of love, but this is actually the level that many egos stay in even when they’re biological adults. So the first question is: is there still any demandingness in your nature for gratification of any kind? Or is there an ability to accept, to delay gratification—to share, to give, to generously pass up something that would be gratifying and not be gluttonous, let’s say, or overreaching or in some way taking what is not yours—coveting something, etc. All of those old commandments are basically about not being in that state in order to create a harmonious group dynamic or family system or community.
I’m sure no one here has any traces of that, so we’ll go on to the next one, which is the love of being loved. OK? If you love being loved more than you love loving, then you’re in kind of a state of dependency because you’re always looking for the gaze of the other’s approval or desire or mimetic rivalry or envy or jealousy, or any of those things that will prove to you that you are in fact a desirable object. So you must get out of the object mode in order to be able to develop the fullness of the power of love. OK?
So the third level would be conditional love of limited scope. The love is conditional because it depends on how others treat you. You can love someone one day, then they say something you don’t like, and love is gone the next day. And the love may be for only a particular person or family system or group or religious or ethnic culture, or some other limited scope of love. This kind of love is really a desire to get something back from those beings. It’s not an altruistic love. (I used to think altruistic came from all-truism. It comes actually from the French autrui, “the other.”) It is giving to the other rather than taking from the other and wanting for oneself. But it is a way of being “all true” in one’s way of relating to the other.
The fourth level is, we could say, love of commonwealth. It’s still love of wealth, but it’s commonwealth and the well-being and virtue of one’s group or community. So it’s a love that wants to raise consciousness and bring good things to one’s community. But there’s always in it the desire for profit, right? Someone who is a merchant wants to bring beautiful objects for the community to enjoy. But there’s a certain profit margin that’s involved in that trade, based on the energy required to acquire that object and whatever other expenses were had. There tends to be a kind of a quid pro quo at that level of love, so it’s still not altruistic in the full sense.
Then you get, in the fifth level, those who have love of the whole world—love of nature, love of harmony, love of sustainability—love that is in favor of supporting the future continuity of the well-being of one’s race, one’s species, one’s community, one’s world—one’s loved ones of whatever nature they are, including those of other species and beings of every sort. So there’s a universalization of love at this level, but it’s still a love in duality. And when one finally sees the hopelessness of sustaining life in a dying culture where nature itself is dying because of having been poisoned with chemicals and geoengineering, etc., then one can tend to lose one’s love and become depressed or despairing. So this is still not the total victorious love.
Then at the sixth level we have the love of God—or, if you are not in a theistic mode, the love of Ultimate Reality, whatever that might be for you—but that love which would generally include Sat Chit Ananda (meaning the love of being, intelligence, joy, goodness, truth, light) and love of a capacity for purification that can heal those who have been wounded. The love of God is a very high and saintly approach to life, but it’s still an approach that’s in duality because God or whatever (Buddha Nature, the Dao, your Ultimate Reality) is still separate—it still involves an act of devotion to an Other.
And then the final, seventh, level of love is what we can call simply infinite love; it’s love without an object. There isn’t some God you believe in but don’t really know, or love of some external thing or being or power; it’s love without an object and love without even a subject. It’s just love in its pure essence, which is the essence of life itself and of light and of energy. That infinite love is what is required to overcome the fluctuations of this omni-triangularity because it is completely unaffected by any reactivity in the dualistic frame of reference. One is no longer in that frame of reference, having realized the nonduality that love is because love itself is perceived as all that is.
So those would be the seven stages that one would tend to pass through in the gradualist mode of spiritual development, which I think is also fairly widespread if not universally established in different dharmic traditions. Does that make sense to people? Can you get a sense of where your own heart might be located (in which level) and what it would take to get to the next? What you want to do is to keep moving into higher levels of love until everything that is non-love has fallen away, including the lover and the Beloved.
Q&A
OK, so let’s go on to the next module, for which I’ll have to call on Swati to write again. We’ll call this one The Pilgrim’s Progress in Seven Phases. In a way we’re all pilgrims, but the question is: what pilgrimage are you on? What is the destination, the purpose, the ideal that you want to attain?
So the first phase is to become a sincere devotee. And that’s not so easy because it’s very easy to be an insincere devotee and enjoy all the trappings, the rituals, the music, the costumes, all the things that go with religion, but without truly being devoted to the essence of what that religion is really about at its most esoteric and mature level. Being a sincere devotee is a phase in which your entire value system shifts from, let’s say, a capitalist system that valorizes greed (which is now the dominant orientation that people are indoctrinated into) or any other kind of cultural ideal that is short of the ultimate reality and salvation of one’s soul—so whatever you do that is an act of devotion to that highest potentiality of your consciousness that would make you enter this phase of sincere devotion. But you have to realize the value of what it is that you are seeking and that it overrides any other value so that there is no conflict such as: “Well, OK, I’d like to go to church this morning, but there’s a sale on at this store, and I’ve got to make sure I get there in time for that,” etc. So your values will be tested. The sincerity of your devotion will always have to undergo rites of passage. But that’s the first phase.
Then, as I just mentioned, you will begin to have tests. So the second phase is that you become a steadfast warrior/lover of God, who successfully wards off distractions and deviations. The point is that you will recognize that there are temptations to deviate from your path—to take a holiday from devotion and just go and get drunk or, you know, go to some party that will lower your level of consciousness three assemblage points, but what the hell? The question is, are you willing and able to overcome deviations and distractions and stay the course? So that’s the next phase, and that will have to be proven in one’s practice.
Then the third is when your soul has actually awakened, and you realize you’re not the ego character—you realize that you’re not the ego. You’ve made a dialectical shift, and now you are, for the first time, sincerely asking the question. Soul awakens with inner focus and with ego narrative dropping off—hose are the main achievements of this phase. You realize that your ego’s narrative was a dead end. It won’t get you to the successful culmination of your pilgrimage, and you can no longer buy into your ego’s dearest beliefs and desires. You’re willing to let all of that go—not just because you should, but because you’ve already realized an essence within you that has much more value than anything that your ego could produce for you. Your heart is now open, so you feel love within for God that is willing to override other tendencies; and you are able to perceive that you are receiving grace for that sacrifice. So the principle of sacrifice becomes activated in this phase. (The ego generally isn’t willing to sacrifice. It wants others to sacrifice, but it wants to get what it wants. Or, if it sacrifices, it will be only for a limited other—for one’s grandchild or for a particular object—but it’s not altruistic in the true sense and it’s not devotion to God.) So that’s the third phase.
Now we go to the fourth phase, which is when your awakening to the presence of God gives you such strength that you lose all interest in worldly things (vairagya, “dispassion”). There’s no more investment in worldly things. You’ve invested everything in reaching God and sacrificed everything else. This leads to having an indifference to the conditions of your life, so there is no longer any need for excess comfort or security or for the trappings of culture or anything that would be ostentatious or impress others or have some effect in the world. Your interest is entirely internalized in attaining the presence of God to never leave your heart and to bring you that state of fulfillment that nothing else could. So that’s the state of vairagya, and it’s such a purification that there’s hardly any ego left. The character is becoming purified, and the soul is able to bring so much shakti into the character’s existence that its attitudes have become already divinized. It has become altruistic in this phase; but you’re no longer identified with it, so there’s no pride about it or superiority. There’s a humility, but an absence of any egoic interest in how you are perceived by the other.
