The Reality of the Other, Part II

Yesterday, we spoke about the Path of taking the Reality of the Other as SERIOUSLY as possible.

And we quoted Anonymous d’Outre Tombe to the effect that this spiritual path differs from an approach associated with the East, where the way is NOT to the take the Reality of the Other – or the Self - seriously at all. In this way one seeks, in fact, to negate the Reality of Personality.

Now the more one studies the thought of Anonymous d’Outre Tombe in his magnum opus, Meditations on the Tarot, the more one sees that the entire book appears to be focussed on distinguishing between these very different paths:

The First a path of Monism where the Reality of Personality is suppressed, with the result that one weeps no more … (cf. 35-38).

The First a path of liberation through the crown chakra, rather than a transformation of all the chakras into heart (cf. 227-229).

The First a path of power and superhumanness and transcendence … (So many references - direct and indirect - throughout the book, including, but hardly limited to 151-152, 450-452, 157-159, 82, etc).

And the Second, a path of love incarnated fully into the world through Our Lord … A path of tears and of PERSONALITY.

In the time ahead, I hope to explore this theme further, and why I think it is **vital** to distinguish different spiritual paths, within the vast milieu of modern spirituality.

However today, I just wish to continue directly from the quote from yesterday, where having indicated the Christian Path of taking seriously the Reality of Personality - the author begins to speak of how **practically** this path is to be achieved, how one becomes able then, to attain the Great Work of Love:

“To be able to attain this, one has first to love one's neighbour as oneself. For love is not an abstract programme but, rather, it is **substance** and **intensity**.

It is necessary therefore that one radiates the substance and intensity of love with regard to one individual being, in order that one can begin to ray it out in all directions.

‘To be able to make gold one has to have gold’ say the alchemists. The spiritual counterpart of this maxim is, that in order to be able to love everyone, one has to love or to have loved someone. This someone is one's ‘neighbour’.

Who is one's neighbour, understood in the Hermetic sense, i.e. meaning at one and the same time in a mystical, gnostic, magical and metaphysical sense? It is the being nearest to one at or since the beginning; this is the sister-soul for all eternity; this is one's twin-soul, the soul together with whom one beheld the dawn of mankind.

The dawn of mankind: it is this, which the Bible describes as paradise. Now, this was at the stage of existence that God said: "It is not good that Adam should be alone" (Genesis ii, 18).

To be: this is to love. To be alone: this is to love oneself. Now, "it is not good (tov) that Adam should be alone" means to say: it is not good that man loves nobody but himself.

This is why YHVH-Elohim said: I will make him a helper similar (corresponding) to him. And as Eve was part of Adam himself, he loved her as himself. Eve was therefore the "neighbour", the being nearest to Adam ("bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh"- Genesis ii, 23).

This is the origin of love, and it is common both to love which unites man and woman and to love of one's neighbour. In the beginning there was only one love and its source was one, since its principle was one.

All forms of love (charity, friendship, paternal love, maternal love, filial love, brotherly love) derive from the same unique primordial root of the fact of the couple Adam-Eve. For it is then that love - the ***reality*** of the other - issued forth and could subsequently branch out and diversify.

It is the warmth of love of the first couple (and it does not matter if there was only one couple or if there were thousands of them - it is a question of the fact of the first qualitative issuing forth and not of the number of simultaneous or successive cases of this issuing forth) which is reflected in the love of parents for their children, reflected in turn in the love of children for their parents, reflected again in the love of children amongst themselves, reflected lastly in the love for all kinship of human beings beyond immediate kinship, by analogy, for all that lives and breathes.

Love once born as substance and intensity, tends to spread, ramify and diversify according to the forms of human relationships into which it enters. It is a cascading current, which tends to fill and inundate all.

This is why when there is true love between parents, the children love their parents, by analogy, and love each other; they love, by analogy- as their brothers and sisters by "psychological adoption" friends in school and in the neighbourhood; they love (always by analogy) their teachers, tutors, priests, etc., through reflection of the love that they have for their parents; and later they love their husbands and wives, as their parents once loved one another.”