Portland, OR
Spring, 1994
These are musings.
I am linking loyalty and commitment to levels of transpersonal psychology. I am thinking this link is somewhat valid, but these concepts play different roles in different levels of development. It puts me in a headspace that is exciting, I can feel my brain working. "Thinking is a pleasure" Trevor is fond of saying.
This joy of thinking / joy of life / and so forth is a rush and makes all things easier. The interworkings of the regional planning issues I deal with at work are crystal clear, when weeks ago they were muddy and daunting. This is not to say that I have the universe in line and all is figured out, it means that I am rolling on this mental / emotional / spiritual peak experience that opens up the brain (perhaps) a bit past that 10% usage limit we seem to set for ourselves.
So I am thinking that love is a base. Love
is a surface. Love is a state of mind. Love is a heightened state of mind. Love is a state
of mind that rolls the thoughts along, greases the wheels, as it were. And currently my
wheels are greased. Although there is no physical person that manifests in this love
relationship.
But interpersonal love, interpersonal relationships, interpersonal loyalty and commitment -- I've been puzzling for years. Working, thinking, making progress and losing ground, and it most likely is the endless quest. My own personal boulder to roll.
But I feel I hit some breakthrough, or am in the process of so doing.
And it goes beyond Portland. It goes beyond this loyalty and commitment dynamic. The thought that love is a state of mind, not a state of being, that is triggered by various people or events is truly awe-inspiring. And people will say, "Yeah, sure, that's obvious." --But obviously it isn't!
My whole bent on so-called (misrepresented)
bisexuality is that love is too important a force in ones life to be limited by something
as arbitrary as gender. That has been my position for as long as I can remember. For me it
is a logical choice and not some genotype mishap. It has nothing to do with the size of my
hypothalamus or parental errors in childrearing.
The whole point of the whole thing is that LOVE is not some sexual urge designed by the GOD to keep us up to our eyeballs in diapers -- it is a level of brain activity engendered by the exchange of information -- mental, spiritual, physical, and social -- between people. Through this information we learn, we live, and we grow. This transfer of information is a gift, it is a sacrament in the truest sense of the word.
The other night I wrote this thing:
I believe now that
Love Comes with no strings
and
I believe now that
love is amoral
Love is a heightened state
an hallucinogen
not in that it clouds one's judgement
though it certainly can
But that it amplifies
what one is
and
what one is doing.
So we return to the truism
that before you can love someone
you must first love yourself
Which is another way of saying
before you can need people
in a healthy way
you must first achieve a state
where you need no-one.
And this is the paradox of love.
----------------
Tonight I sat down and listed the
attributes of loyalty and commitment. They came out like this:
Loyalty Commitment
----------- ------------------
Instinctual Institutional
Eternal Temporal
Elusive Highly Defined
Irrational Rational
Base of Desire Base of Security
Id Centered Superego Centered
Spiritual Economic
Intangible Tangible
Qualitative Quantitative
Unstructured Structured
Immutable Finite
Trust-based Obligation-based
Flexible Rigid
Accepting Demanding
Vulnerable Reassuring
Adaptive Responsive
Now, one of the main things about this is that I cannot just sit down and neatly file Loyalty and Commitment into pre-existing Transpersonal Psychological terms. By and large these terms and the bases behind Trans. Psych. are the collision (or fusion) of humanistic psychology and various spiritual psychologies from around the globe, but eastern religious terms seem to best fit the stages of development past the western Humanistic levels.
At any rate, Loyalty and Commitment, two
very necessary components of the daily construct of what is popularly referred to as love,
but what I now think of as the after effects of love -- or the progression of the two
people experiencing love -- fall in many many many, okay _all_ of the segments of personal
development.
This is largely due to the fact that people need other people in order to advance from level to level -- to some extent. Some people seem to be predisposed to advance faster or advance without any contact with those who could or would teach them.
However, these people aside, the progression of our learning is contingent upon building on someone else's knowledge and then, if we should choose, augmenting that with our own abilities to think, design, and love.
After taking pen to paper and writing out
the above list, I then wrote the following:
And if love is a state of mind
and not an attribute
then love is no longer prey
to preconception or stereotype
Love is independent --
a peak experience --
independent of physicality
or sexuality
Love is a spiritual link
the first apprehensive footfalls
of Loyalty.
Love is a spiritual link
that provides a vital nutrient
the provision of which
we seek to guaranty
through commitment.
It is therefore more correct to say
I FELT LOVE
when I was with that person
than
I love that person & that person only.
And this is the structure of the Paradox of Love.
----------------------------------
Under this construct, the role of sex takes
on whatever importance an individual or a society chooses to give to it. It can be
recreation or a manifestation of love or loyalty or commitment or whatever. The provision
of or denial of physical intimacy no longer is a bellwether activity by which we gauge the
efficacy of the love-state.
This is not to say, suggest, or even quietly imply that the realization of love as independent of sex is going to suddenly make all who would subscribe to the notion free of all previous entanglements on the subject. Nor should it seem to suggest that sex-free love is preferable or that sex is in some way a despicable act. Nor do I mean to imply that if I were to experience love with someone I wouldn't want to have lots of sex with them.
I can, however, say that a recent strong love interest of mine was mostly sex free, but not in any stretch of the imagination intimacy-free. Indeed, this relationship was most illustrative of differences between personally defined intimacy and socially defined intimacy.
In the evolution of a relationship, I am currently seeing a process starting with love, the recognition of the feelings of love, and reaction to those feelings. The amount to which the person experiencing love is comfortable with themselves bares a direct relationship to the reaction that person will have finding themselves in the love state. If that person is unsure of themselves, predisposed to feelings of inadequacy or failure, then those dangerous feelings in the Loyalty / Commitment matrix will be the first to grow in the mind. These feelings would be based in the fear of vulnerability and the irrational. If a person is comfortable with themselves, or, as stated in the love paradox, able to live without people and so is able to live with them, then the promise of the exchange (intellectual, spiritual, sexual, etc.) with the person with whom love is felt is of primary importance.
Of course, in reality, most people are
going to fall somewhere in between. No one is totally comfortable or uncomfortable with
themselves. This discrepancy is where the formalization of relationships comes from. Human
beings aren't perfect and the Loyalty / Commitment construct bares this out. The lists are
written (or are meant to be written) to give neither a clear advantage -- but I will
acknowledge that the words to describe Loyalty are more =FUN=!
And thus the evolution of a relationship, moving from the recognition of love, to the formation of loyalty, to the bonds of commitment. Because these areas are grey, there are many aspects of Commitment that, while primarily an economic transaction, are spiritual. The act of making the commitment with another person is a strong statement of value to that other person. Commitment also does not necessarily preclude other love to be experienced, but such is often part of the commitment structure.
I also assume that beyond loyalty and
commitment there are subsequent developments in relationships along the love continuum,
perhaps communion would be the next most accessible level. This would be different from
commitment in that communion would be, perhaps, reached at that point where two people had
shared all they were capable of at the time and had such reached a point of mutual
understanding. But this may take another few lifetimes to work out...
At any rate, this is the basic superstructure I am working on. I would appreciate any comments you may have on this. Thanks...
BVI
Our Founder