Tertium organum (the third organ of thought) a key to the enigmas of the world said:
_http://archive.org/stream/tertiumorganumth00uspe/tertiumorganumth00uspe_djvu.txt
So that in our time men understand love as a common, every-day
manner of life, they understand it as a psychological phenomenon,
but all idea and sense of the cosmical content of love is atrophied
in them.
In the first mentioned case — in an every-day understanding of
love — men strive to utilize love as an instrument or means for the
settling of their lives; and in the second, they demand of love that
it shall settle the affairs of their souls. But in both cases love is
burdened by purposes and problems which do not belong to it at
all. In reality love is a cosmic phenomenon, in which men, human-
ity, are merely accidents : a cosmic phenomenon which has nothing
to do with either the lives or the souls of men, any more than that
the sun is shining, that by its light men may go about their
little affairs, and that they may utilize it for their own purposes.
If men would only understand this, even with a part of their
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consciousness, a new world would open, and to look on life from
all our usual angles would become very strange.
For then they would understand that love is something else,
and of quite a different order from the petty phenomena of
earthly life.
Perhaps love is a world of strange spirits who at times take up
their abode in men, subduing them to themselves, making them
tools for the accomplishment of their inscrutable purposes. Per-
haps it is some particular region of the inner world wherein the
souls of men sometimes enter, and where they live according to
the laws of that world, while their bodies remain on earth, bound
by the laws of earth. Perhaps it is an alchemical work of some
Great Master wherein the souls and bodies of men play the role of
elements out of which is compounded a 'philosopher s stone, or an
elixir of life, or some mysterious magnetic force necessary to some-
one for some incomprehensible purpose.
It is difficult to understand all this, and to make it seem rational.
But by seeking to understand these mysterious purposes and by
departing from mundane interpretations, man, without even being
conscious of it at first, unites himself with the higher purposes and
finds that thread which in the end of all ends will lead him out of
the labyrinth of earthly contradictions.
But this thread must be found first through the emotions, by
direct feeling, and only afterwards by reason. And this thread
will never reveal itself to a man who denies love and scorns it,
because the denial of the importance and deep meaning of love
always results from the materialistic view, and the materialistic
view of love cannot be true. This view cannot be true because it
considers love too narrowly, deduces general conclusions from
premises of too negligible a percentage of data based on facts, sees
only in a plane section a phenomenon of four-dimensional char-
acter. Love is exactly as material a phenomenon as is the picture
of a painter or the symphony of a musician. To analyze and
evaluate love materialistically is precisely the same thing as try-
ing to value a picture by its weight and a symphony by the volume
of sound produced.
What does the spiritual understanding of love mean?
It means the understanding of the fact that love does not serve
life, but serves the higher apprehension. If he is in right relation
to it, love attunes man to the note of the "wondrous" strips off
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veils, opens closed doors. Both in the past, and perhaps in the
present, there undoubtedly have been attempts at the understand-
ing of love divorced from life, as a cult, as a magical ceremony,
attuning body and soul to the reception of the wondrous.
Love in relation to our life is a deity, sometimes terrible, some-
times benevolent, but never subservient to us, never consenting to
serve our purposes. Men strive to subordinate love to themselves,
to warp it to the uses of their everyday mode of life, and to their
souls' uses; but it is impossible to subordinate love to anything, and
it mercilessly revenges itself upon these little mortals who would
subordinate God to themselves and make Him serve them. It con-
fuses all their calculations, and forces them to do things which con-
found themselves, forcing them to serve itself, to do what it wants.
Although our relation to love is so naive, there is no reason to
suppose that men cannot take toward it an entirely different atti-
tude, or that they always have been or always will be completely
bound by materialism, without flashes of understanding of the
wondrous in love.
Somewhere, in the distant spaces of time, stand the magnificent
temples of Love, there pass processions of priests and priestesses,
and therein are performed the rituals of strange cults, full of deep
mysticism, sometimes shot through by the flaming lightnings of
revelations most profound.
All this is too little understood by us ; we have wandered too far
from the understanding of these mysteries, we have perverted
them in our perception, lost the keys to their inner mystical sig-
nificance. Only the religions of the Orient have preserved a living
connection with the cosmical understanding of love. This re-
ligious attitude toward love, which alone can reveal its inner
content, may be seen in the phallic foundation of Hinduism, in
the deities of Hindu mythology, in numerous still existing cere-
monies, and particularly in those secret cults which still survive
in many places in India. This idea is the principal content of the
mysterious Kama-Yoga, to which are consecrated several temples
in different parts of India (for example, the "temple of Raja from
Nepal" at Bernares). In the "Western occultism", in alchemy,
in magic, is also sometimes discernible a profound and fine un-
derstanding of love, united with the search for the wonderous.
But at the present time there is nothing so full of confusion as
our understanding of love. We find no path among contradictions,
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and the age-long accumulation of lies and calumnies against love.
Nor shall we understand it until we understand its great noumenal,
transcendental meaning.
The chief error that men make about love consists in the fact
that they believe in its reality, and ascribe love to themselves; or,
generally, to mankind. It seems to them that love begins in
them, belongs to them, ends in them. And even when they ad-
mit that everything in the world depends upon love and moves by
love, they still seek in themselves the sources of love.
Mistaken about the origin of love, men are mistaken about its
result. Positivistic and spiritistic morality equally recognize in
love only one possible result — children, the propagation of the
species. But this objective result, which may or may not be, is in
any case an effect of the outer, objective side of love, of the ma-
terial fact of impregnation. If it is possible to see in love nothing
more than this material fact and the desire for it, so be it; but in
reality love consists not at all in a material fact, and the results
of it — except material ones — may manifest themselves on quite
another plane. This other plane, upon which love acts, and the
ignored, hidden results of love, are not difficult to understand,
even from the strictly positivistic, scientific standpoint.
To science, which studies life from this side, the purpose of
love is the continuation of life. More exactly, love is a link in the
chain of facts supporting the continuation of life. The force
which attracts the two sexes to one another is acting in the inter-
ests of the continuation of the species, and is accordingly created
by the forms of the continuation of the species. But if we regard
love in this way, then it is impossible not to recognize that there is
much more of this force than is necessary. Herein lies the key to the
correct understanding of the true nature of love. There is more of
this force than is necessary, infinitely more. In reality only an
infinitesimal part of love's force incarnate in humanity is utilized
for the purpose of the continuation of the species. But where
does the major part of that force go?
We know that nothing can be lost. If energy exists, then it
must transform itself into something. Now if a merely negligible
percentage of energy goes into the creation of the future by be-
getting, then the remainder must go into the creation of the future
also, but in another way. We have in the physical world many
cases in which the direct function is effected by a very small per-
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centage of the consumed energy, and the greater part is spent
without return, as it were. But of course this greater part of
energy does not disappear, is not wasted, but accomplishes other
results quite different from the direct function.
Take the example of a common candle. It gives light, but it
also gives considerably more heat than light. Light is the direct
function of a candle, heat the indirect, but we get more heat than
light. A candle is a furnace adapted to the purpose of lighting.
In order to give light a candle must burn. Combustion is a neces-
sary condition for the receiving of light from a candle; it is im-
possible to ignore this combustion ; but the same combustion gives
heat. At first thought it appears that the heat from a candle is
spent unproductively ; sometimes it is superfluous, unpleasant,
annoying; if a room is lighted by candles it will soon grow ex-
cessively hot. But the fact remains that light is received from a
candle only because of combustion — by the development of heat and
the incandescence of volatilized gases.
The same thing is true in the case of love. We may say that a
merely negligible part of love's energy goes into posterity; the
greater part is spent by the fathers and mothers on their personal
emotions as it were. But this also is necessary. Without this ex-
penditure the principal thing could not be achieved. Only because
of these at first sight collateral results of love, only because of all
this tempest of emotions, feelings, effervescences, desires,
thoughts, dreams, fantasies, inner creation; only because of the
beauty which it creates, can love fulfill its immediate function.
Moreover — and this perhaps is the most important — the super-
fluous energy is not wasted at all, but is transformed into other
forms of energy, possible to discover. Generally speaking, the
significance of the indirect results may very often be of more im-
portance than the significance of direct ones. And since we are
able to trace how the energy of love transforms itself into instincts,
ideas, creative forces on different planes of life; into symbols of
art, song, music, poetry; so can we easily imagine how the same
energy may transform itself into a higher order of intuition, into a
higher consciousness which will reveal to us a marvelous and
mysterious world.
In all living nature (and perhaps also in that which we consider
as dead) love is the motive force which drives the creative activity
in the most diverse directions.
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In springtime, with the first awakening of love's emotions, the
birds begin to sing, and to build nests.
Of course a positivist would strive to explain all this very
simply: singing acts as an attraction between the females
and the males, and so forth. But even a positivist will not be in a
position to deny that there is a good deal more of this singing than
is necessary for the "continuation of the species." For a posi-
tivist, indeed, "singing" is merely "an accident," a "by-product."
But in reality it may be that this singing is the principal function
of a given species, the realization of its existence, the purpose pur-
sued by nature in creating this species; and that this singing is
necessary, not so much to attract the females, as for some gen-
eral harmony of nature which we only rarely and imperfectly
sense.
Thus in this case we observe that what appears to be a collateral
function of love, from the standpoint of the individual, may serve
as a principal function of the species.
