Being love as basic state
The ocean at rest, immeasurably deep and vast, is a good metaphor for the “state” of being love. The word “state” I put in quotation marks because in this context this word is misleading. The basic homeostatic state of being love is not static. “Process of being” would be more correct, but it seems too factual, it does not capture the emotional meaning.
Observations by infant researchers have shown that the normal infant spends 98 – 99.5 percent of the twenty-four-hour day calm and content. During the first three months of life, periods of strong, negative emotional tension, such as during vigorous crying, are limited to 7 – 29 minutes a day.
This basic state of being love also corresponds to what BALINT called the harmonious entanglement of primary love. Its existence is perceived, but the infant does only respond to it when it is absent.
Being able to love oneself
It is very likely that GERDA BOYESEN, when she speaks of libido flow, refers to the same phenomenon:
“The free libido flow presupposes that the person is able to love him/herself and to feel the love in him/herself at every moment and not only outside of him/herself….. Every living being, down to the single-celled organism, is born with its autonomous libido flow, and the main goal of my therapy is to bring the patient back into contact with it, that is, to help him find his own inner happiness.”
Being love: the basic state of the infant
WINNICOTT also points out the necessity of the “continuity of being feeling” which is central to the healthy development of the infant. This “good” basic state probably triggers the smile in the newborn.
For me, this is the state of the primary self: The good basic state corresponds to self-love, the smile is an expression of excited love – I will discuss this in more depth later.
Even as adults we can enter the state of the primary self. It is very different from our everyday experience; there are close relations to trance, dream and other altered states of consciousness.
From the natural to the divine child
The natural child is to be considered as the seed and potential of every human child. As the alpha and omega of human incarnation, as a divine child it has become the symbol and protagonist of countless myths: abandoned on a river or on the sea and miraculously cared for like Moses, looked after in a manger like the infant Jesus; born with full consciousness like Buddha.
Those who find their way back to being love and the openness of the natural child on the level of Zen reality are called twice-born.
To what extent the natural child in the state of the primary self actually exists and does not simply correspond to a wishful image of early paradise remains unresolved. However, in my opinion, modern infant research allows hypotheses in this direction.
Being love – a heavenly state or a naive fantasy?
In the controversy on the subject we find on one hand conservative scientists who possibly put this idea into the category of “naive fantasies of neoromantic world improvers”.
The opposite pole is occupied by the followers of the reincarnation doctrine, who still consider a phase with these glimpses of heavenly states, in which a being – between the individual incarnations – persists in homeostatic suspension.
Every human seeks for the state of being love
Personally I am convinced that the natural child in the state of being love does not belong for all people to the unclouded early life experience, because for some the circumstances were already too threatening and conflicted in the fetal stage or in the early childhood, but that a longing for this state is – consciously or unconsciously – present in every human being, which I understand as an expression of a sensed reality.
Without this thirst of the soul, without this central psychic need, neither the history of spiritual nor that of cultural-aesthetic development of mankind can be understood.
Unconscious and Conscious Being love as a Basic Theoretical Question
Behind the question of whether there can be a conscious being love at all lies a major problem of this script. On one hand, most evidence suggests that being love of the primary self corresponds to an early, subcortical state; on the other hand, consciousness in the scientific world is clearly linked to the cortex, i.e., to activities that take place primarily in the cortex of the neobrain and that largely characterize our secondary self; being love and consciousness seem incompatible.
In other words, the question is: besides our everyday consciousness – on which scientific investigations are based – is there a form of consciousness that includes altered states of consciousness?
Being love is not related to ‘the I’
I consider the hypothesis of an aperspectival consciousness, not related to the ‘I’ is a fruitful approach, which can be experienced especially in the state of Zen reality. It underlies my model of feeling.
Without getting into an ideological discussion, I hold a view that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that there is this second form of consciousness that is not directly related to the scientifically recognized cortical processes. It is related to the concept of the soul, which is repeatedly considered to be dead.
Being love and meditation
If the term meditation is paraphrased in the “Duden” with those different keywords as pondering, brooding contemplation and religious immersion, the word obviously contains different aspects of meaning. In particular, from an Eastern point of view, contemplation is exactly what meditation is not, namely a matter of thinking, of occupying oneself with thoughts.
Since we, as people raised in Western culture, are hardly able to imagine, let alone experience, meditation in the sense of Eastern traditions, a fundamental problem emerges – in trying to explain meditation. I will therefore first address the more familiar form of religious immersion as well as a related act of will, contemplation and will control.
Can being love be achieved by mental effort?
Through a conscious effort of will in the context of practices/exercises such as contemplative concentration on a narrowly circumscribed subject or in terms of mental training directed toward an athletic goal, one succeeds, more or less successfully, in specifically restricting physical-psychic energy to a desired area and thus maximizing its effect. The willpower required for this, however, in turn requires intense mental energy with which “natural balancing systems” are kept in check.
Often it becomes necessary to increasingly use psychic energy for the resistance against the spontaneously arising excited love or for its sublimation for the process of not wanting to be true. This applies less to athletic goals – because there energies again and again are released with physical expression – but above all in the inner struggle against negative or even as evil evaluated ideas and desires.
Thus despite grim resistance, the danger of failure becomes even greater: how easy it is for the “inner tempter” to recall himself in nightly dreams! By merciless self-flagellation the undevout have tried again and again to get rid of the uncalled shadowy figures.
