On Love

Awareness is love. A love that is not possessed by an owner that stands autonomous and alone. Rather, love is a flow, a dance with no centre or periphery, yet is personally and particularly responsive in the non-prejudicial space of shared awareness. When the owner and the owned collapse into the ground of awareness, there opens up the possibility of true connection. For this is a ground all individual persons share, regardless of the content and trajectory of lived experience. This sharing, mingling, connecting on the ground is love.

Personal Love?
Love is often regarded as possible only between persons, not impersonal objects. Persons are generally conceived as autonomous beings with unique personal attributes and histories that set one substantially apart from another. There is thus no love to speak of between impersonal things or events. Love is only possible between substantially existing, autonomous persons. Is this assumption correct? Is it possible for love to exist between persons but of a different kind - the non-substantial, non-autonomous kind?

When I speak of awareness as love, I am speaking precisely of this kind of love. This is love between non-substantial, contingent, non-autonomous persons who are real but merely in a relative sense. On a relative level where conventional language operates, a person does indeed exist. Such a person exists but never apart from context or independent of conceptual imputation. For such a person, his/her context would comprise material, spatial, temporal, cultural, linguistic, social, historical, and ecological environments that condition the person. Furthermore, this person cannot exist divorced from the conceptual and linguistic imputation applied to the totality of conditioned psychophysical processes that together constitute the basis of that person. Concept and name co-create the identity of the person on the basis of the totality of conditioned psychophysical processes in context. In other words, the person is a contingently and nominally existing one. This is true on the level of relativity and conventionality. Ultimately though, the person cannot exist in any inherent or autonomous way. The person's relative identity concocted by language, conception, and a basis of conditioned psychophysical processes embedded in context is therefore ultimately empty of any inherency and isolated autonomy. It is precisely because a person’s identity is constructed from multiple factors (especially the factor of imputation by language and conception) that it is ultimately devoid of substantial, autonomous, inherent essence. Rather the person's ultimate identity is spontaneously free from or empty of any inherent essence. The person is primordially pure, not in a moral but ontological sense—that is, the person is unstained by any trace of inherent existence from the primal beginning. In a nutshell, therefore, the person is ultimately and primordially empty of inherency while relatively and temporally distinct as a nominally-designated person.

Between such ultimately empty and relatively unique persons, there can be possibility of genuine contact and connection. Such contact and connection is not barred by the walls of substantial difference or inherent separation. Rather, there can be mutual openness and permeability between contingent persons in resonance with one another. Metaphorically put, we can see persons as distinctive wave-like streams that can interact freely and resonate deeply one with another. Such resonance beyond borders is love.

Triune Love Beyond Measure
In the dissolution of inherent subject and object into the ocean of blissful, empty, luminous, open awareness - a microcosmic reflection of the great "I am" - there comes the actuality of non-egocentric, self-emptying, other-filling love unbound by the constricted calculus of self and self-based agendas. In the absence of grasping at inherent self and other, real contact between two persons is possible. On the contrary, an inherent self and inherent other will have no basis for genuine contact given the impermeability of two concrete isolated identities. Hence, love is only possible in this ground of empty open awareness where nominally real persons flow and resonate with one another unobstructedly. In a sense, this is the love that is shared between the three Persons of the Godhead - Father, Son, and Spirit. In this communion dance of love in the Triune, there is no inherent One to defend or inherent Other to subordinate under - only a free unimpeded flow of outpouring energy that is giving, caring, sharing, participating, and accommodating without measure. For there to be such outpouring love, no frozen isolates of consciousness is required, only nominal Father-Son-Spirit deriving the identity of One from the Other in a beginningless and unending spiral of love. Even so, such description fails in the final analysis to capture all there is to know of the Triune Mystery who is irrevocably and ontologically Other than creation.

As fallen humanity, we are able to experience this relational participation and intimacy of the Triune only because of Jesus who lived and died for us. By assuming and redeeming our fallen human nature in His very nature, Christ drew us into the very love that He embodied so perfectly. By absorbing upon Himself all the judicial punishment of Father that we deserve, Christ Himself became the Door through which we can enter into this amazing immaculate love of the Trinity. Awakened to this incomparable divine love; tasting and relishing this supreme sweetness and delight; and being filled to the brim and beyond into overflowing, we can be living vessels of the same love pouring out to all. We can love one another but not with a self-generated love we each possess. Rather, we love from the very ultimate ground of Being in the Triune Life who is profoundly personal, inexhaustibly full, and inconceivably empty all at once. Awareness is. Love is. Christ is. In Christ we live and love and share our being.