The Reality of the Other

Yesterday I offered words from the Catholic deacon, Eliphas Lévi in 1868 about the nature of love, which touch me deeply.

Among these, was a simple trinity of sentences, which just-in-themselves I feel, say so very much:

“To live in others, with others and for others is the secret of love … To love is to live in those whom one loves. It is to think their thoughts, fathom their desires, share their affections.”

Love then, is to take the REALITY of the Other seriously … and ever more seriously.

Now these words on taking seriously the Reality of the Other, find a tremendous amplification in the thought of the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot (who much later in the twentieth century, would embrace the deceased Hermetic deacon of Paris, with profound love).

This amplification has tremendous personal meaning for myself. (So much so, that I feel like adding very personally, that it was read at my wedding to Kim in 1999 ... ). Here it is:

“We are surrounded by innumerable living and conscious beings-visible and invisible. But rather than knowing that they really exist and that they are as much alive as we ourselves, it nevertheless appears to us that they have a ***less real existence*** and that they are ***less living*** than we ourselves.

For us it is WE who experience the full measure of the intensity of reality, whilst other beings seem, in comparison with ourselves, to be less real; their existence seems to be more of the nature of a shadow than full reality.

Our thoughts tell us that this is an illusion, that beings around us are as real as we ourselves are, and that they live just as intensely as we do.

Yet fine as it is to say these things, all the same we feel ourselves at the centre of reality, and we feel other beings to be removed from this centre.

That one qualifies this illusion as "egocentricity", or "egoism", or "ahamkara" (the illusion of self), or the "effect of the primordial Fall", does not matter; it does not alter the fact that we feel ourselves to be more real than others.

Now, to feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love.

It is love, which awakens us to the reality of ourselves, to the reality of others, to the reality of the world and to the reality of God.

In so far as we love ourselves, we feel real. And we do not love - or we do not love as much as ourselves - other beings, who seem to us to be less real.

Now, two ways, two quite different methods exist which can free us from the illusion "me, living-you, shadow", and we have a choice.

The one is to extinguish love of oneself and to become a "shadow amongst shadows". This is the equality of indifference. India offers us this method of liberation from ahamkara, the illusion of self. This illusion is destroyed ****by extending the indifference that one has for other beings to oneself****.

Here one reduces oneself to the state of a shadow equal to the other surrounding shadows. Maya, the great illusion, is to believe that individual beings, me and you, should be something more than shadows - appearances without reality. The formula for realising this is therefore: "me, shadow-you, shadow".

The other way or method is that ****of extending the love that one has for oneself to other beings****, in order to arrive at the realisation of the formula: "me, living you, living".

Here it is a matter of rendering other beings as real as oneself, i.e. of loving them as oneself.”