Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber: What Is Love?

I have a question about love and one of the experiences that I have in connection when I feel like I'm in an alignment with what you're calling the evolutionary impulse is this amazing love and sense of connection to my world that encourages me it takes up the space in between things and encourages me when I get frustrated or scared and I just wondered if you could speak about love you spoke of peace and this ecstasy and this urgency and I'm wondering about love love is remember we talked about those qualities that when spirit manifests the different and template radition z-- give it like being consciousness bliss joy happiness love love is one of the biggies that is a quality of manifest spirit sphere entering the world of space time spirit in action and you can experience love in as you be as you wake up as you establish a relationship your own higher self your own self liberating awareness young spiritual awareness you can start to feel loved and many many people do feel an enormous amount of love emerging from their heart and they feel gratitude and they feel gratefulness and it's these are all emotions in a sense that you can describe as coming to the ego on its way out but nonetheless something that can feel as it's going bye-bye thank you thank you but these are emotions it can be felt as the self contraction the separate self set sense the ego is released into his own fuller self which is a manifestation of spirit itself and spirit in action and eros manifesting in your own awareness and I think it's it's sort of important to realize that arrows goes all the way back it's part of in the Aqua framework the four quadrants and levels line States types go all the way down meaning they were their present from the beginning and the drives that that each hole on has their four major draws on the same level that a whole ons on it has agency which is the DRI to its own autonomy and communion which is the drive to itself being part of a relationship and agape which is when it reaches down and embraces all of its lower levels so a cell embraces a molecule embraces an atom embraces acquired that's agape and then it reaches up to creating higher levels and that's arrows and agape it definitely can be felt as what we just generically call love but eros can be felt as what's generically called love as well and that drive towards greater union is one of the most astonishing things about arrows and actually one of the most astonishing things about the universe itself I mean you think about it there at one point in history there was nothing but atoms wandering around and one day several atoms got together and they're just kind of sitting there you know having like a little party that and all of a sudden a single membrane drops around them and they form a single molecule all of these atoms become one molecule now that's really astonishing that the universe would do this the notion that this is some sort of chance and random mutation it that's the fact of what it isn't it's exactly the opposite of chance or randomness it's something occurring that's pushing against randomness in the universe and then if that's not astonishing enough the real kicker is dozens of these types of molecules each a different type you should playing a different role got together for the next tea party and they're hanging out I'm going to kind of book in a dancing and like that all of a sudden a membrane drops around them and a single cell emerges I'm more than that it's a lot it can reproduce the fact that that can happen is a miracle it's just unbelievable that that can happen cells wandered around for a long time they got together Wow another single boundary dropped around them single-cell organisms and plant life emerges and then on and on and on with extra editions being added as you move from plant life into locomotive life and the emergence of animals and then animals get more and more complex as a neural net drops down and emerges and then reptilian brain stem and then a limbic system and Anna paleo mammalian brain stem than a cortex and there's something new with humans i neocortex all this driven by love and the philosophers out history have referred to by many names eros is one of the most common this is a extraordinarily driven process Erik Yantz referred to evolution as self-organization through self transcendence which is as good as any to think about it because when it shows up in human beings arrow shows up in increasingly higher levels of unity in consciousness in other words consciousness goes from just being egocentric and caring only about itself that moves the ethnocentric care because in noticing somebody outside of your own egocentric self you can start to care for them then worldcentric move from care to universal care and that means that you then care about human beings all human beings regardless of race color sex or creed so you can start to feel a love for Humanity a love for your identity with all human beings and then to move into cosmos centric is to is to find an identity with and the love with all sentient beings and so love is this embracing emotion of reaching out and finding wider and wider and wider and greater and greater and greater unities where you are transcending yourself more and more and more and more and more and there is more authentic self less ego or Athenee self less ego until there's a dramatic self liberation and self-realization where you realize the supreme identity as the Sufis collar which is this radical oneness with non duality itself the world of such nasai spectrum of love and so that love of all manifestation is a love that reaches all the way back to the Big Bend it's that drive that goes all the way back that far and was pulling things together into higher and higher Unity's fourteen billion years ago and never gave up and the thing that andrew and i are most kind of astonished by is that this evolutionary impulse this arrows is still operating I'm still driving us towards these greater realizations and so to actual feel arrows to become one with that urge an innovative creative drive that Andrew talks about is an intrinsic part of the spiritual process of a true non dual evolutionary integral spiritual process I just wanted that was beautiful I wanted to just add a few things to that which is more with looking at what this actually means for us what it actually means for us so I think the implications of the experience of love are very profound they're very profound and especially in an Enlightenment context the awakening to what we could call spiritual love actually does threaten the status quo the status quo of our personal separate cell and also our cultural shared status quo and this so so I think that often where people in spiritual context use love in a way that makes everybody feel warm and fuzzy in a little bit and and and I actually think my experience is that authentic spiritual love which is the awakening to the which is which is a part of the process of awakening to that which is absolute or non relative absolutely threatens the status quo of ourselves so real love is and is is and always will be an ecstatic u4e an ecstatic experience of euphoria but if it's a bit if it's if it's but if it's real spiritual love it will it will compel us and challenge us to take a big step forward and upward and that is threatening that is a bull whip in the temple oh absolutely yeah and so often when this word comes up I mean Ken was speaking of allegiance being agape and arrows and I wanted to just describe a little bit about how what I understand the difference between those between those two to be but even before that you know just just as often people say well you know I love spaghetti I we start talking okay that's one kind of love I love my dog I really love my dog so I did it right it's an authentic experience of love I love my wife or my husband my daughter my child right I love my wife and husband romantic and sexual love I love my child these are these are actual emotional experiences they have different qualities I love my friends I love my community I love my etc Kazan but when we awaken to this this deeper dimensions of these these non relative or absolute manifestations of love we begin to feel there's a there's a quality of feeling or emotion that's of a different order that transcends radically all of our lesser experiences of love now the lesser experiences of love you know I love I love my dog I love my husband went away with my children my community also have part and parcel with them forms of attachment based upon usually less enlightened perspectives about Who I am what life is where I am has to do with my identity so the thing is when we awaken to spiritual love authentically and awaken to a deeper and more profound sense of self-identity it actually will begin to affect in very direct powerful poignant and sometimes shocking and even frightening ways many of the many of the kinds of experiences or loves or notions of love that we had before before we became enlightened by just by this deeper experience of love which might mean we begin to see through and no longer no longer feel so at one with the other the others in the way that we did before because now we're seeing them from a higher perspective and now we're experiencing a different kind of love it's a kind of love that's not based upon attachment it's not based upon historical experience it's not based upon personal history and suddenly we find that this this kind of love begins to include more of the world more of the universe more of the cosmos and it's a less exclusive kind of love it's more inclusive and so then the individuals maybe to whom we had these these experiences of love and attachment earlier might feel that we don't love them anymore when in fact we don't love them any less we've just found the deeper source of love that it's including a lot more of the universe of the cosmos the interior the goals of the world and we now we find that we're maybe not loving individuals as much as we're loving consciousness and when that begins to happen to us this change is the way we relate to the world it changes the quality of our relationship it changes the way we think about what that word means in a way that it really has changed the status quo and compels us to really think about what it means to be a human being in a very different way that challenges all of our historical experience and all the historical imprints on the self up until that moment so real spiritual that really does challenge the status quo of ourself whatever it may have been up until the present and very profound and dramatic and ways that are really evolutionary and inspiring and deeply inspiring but the point is if we really want to know what love is and we really want to be intoxicated with real spiritual love we are going to have to be willing to relinquish our attachment so the way things have been things may change very dramatically maybe things won't change that much but we have to be ready for the earth to shake for there an earthquake to happen because real love does create earthquakes and what's happened afterwards is very different so so often the way we think about love is is not that way the other just distinction between eros and a gap I think is important and so it's a min I thought quite a lot about this especially relationship to more the traditional firms forms of enlightenment versus the new evolutionary enlightenment so what we'll find in the traditional notions of enlightenment whether it's in the east and the west great you know we can see this in in Hinduism and Buddhism Buddhism and great Christian saints and aesthetics that there's usually two dimensions one is the individual seeks for his or her own salvation through the practice of prayer identification with the Godhead and or awakening to to non-dual singularity or emptiness and one way the other win there when the individual wins his or her own liberation from from ignorance and suffering and unenlightened and awakens to to radical non duality but what we notice is that in more of the traditional versions of this in the East and the West the expression the the outward manifestation expression that enlightenment has to usually it has to do with healing healing the suffering that exists in the world and their many great there have been many great teachers and realizers historically and there many today deeply powerfully profoundly enlightened deeply realized individuals who who express their awakening their enlightenment through doing heroic work to feel the very real suffering that exists in the world and so the so the expression of a gabay has been a very traditional expression of enlightenment historically and still is today but I think that when a one awakens two arrows to this aspiration to give rise to that which is new there's a shift and now we become less concerned with healing and more concerned with giving rise to creation giving rise to that which is new and wonderful and my written one of the times I originally understood or recognized this was was when I heard the story about Jesus when and I the story goes something like that he was with his followers on the road and I might be getting this wrong so because I'm but and I think there was a body that needs to be buried in a Jewish context law you have to bury the dead it's and he basically said let the beg bury the dead this is what we're doing is more important but he was but you see when we become when we awaken to the potential of up to two new emergent potentials that can and will happen if we keep going and we don't stop and we keep going we don't stop we we become more concerned and more compelled with giving rise to the possible than we do with with with the process of healing the very real suffering that existence so the experience of love as agape and the experience of love as arrows and least in my experience and understanding is a different experience and expression a manifestation of what love is and it's just very interesting this is something just to keep in mind there's a love there's a love for emergence which is kind of which is as we're speaking before which is this very inspired reaching forth to give rise to to allow something new to enter into the world and there's another expression of word of love which is which you know with which deeply enlightened people are able to express in ways that most of us can't which is which is a which is unbelievable a shocking degree of care for another's pain that unless someone was a deeply enlightened or spiritually awakened person one would simply would not be capable of but I think it's just important to understand that spiritual love being either agape and our arrows not the same thing and it's weak and with what it's the experience of that kind of love is different and it's just so important to be aware of that so in your own experience we can make these distinctions when you become overwhelmed by the euphoria of love to realize that it's not all the same you