LOVE AND WISDOM
By loving and becoming wise I may mean something different from what we are perhaps accustomed to hearing. My focus is on the dynamics of love and wisdom as natural processes, rather than to the finished products, to the adaptive, unfolding, physiological realities, to the movements, to the phases and stages of change. Looked at this way, the actual experience of love and wisdom is not of state we either have or lack. It's one of specific changes that move along two axes. Two basic rhythms inherent in life shape love and wisdom. I call the rhythm underlying love, approach and separation (a-s); the rhythm underlying wisdom, I call (from Toynbee) withdrawal and return (w-r.)
LOVE
The basic movements of love as approach-and-separation are worked out in the bonding between the infant and the mother, and then continue in all interpersonal processes. The birth trauma itself is a separation, followed by reunion with the mother at the breast, which is an approach. The love rhythm puts in an early appearance in two areas: 1) feeding arrangements, with a natural systole and diastole of approach and separation based on body hunger and satiation; 2) safety/security needs, with the infant moving toward the protective presence of the mother in the face of danger and outward in exploration when feeling safe.
Each day these cycles repeat and are fortified in our experience. Shot through them all is a dance-like rhythm of coming close, separating and coming close again. This is the basic social dynamic of life, the animating force behind desire and love. Behind nurture at the breast runs A-S. Behind initiation rites at puberty runs A-S. Behind death of a spouse runs A-S. Through this rhythm all relationships are shaped and given meaning.
WISDOM
To the rhythm of approach and separation that shapes love there is a counterpart, a rhythm, a primordial action pattern that shapes the solitary life. It too has polar movements, reaching an extreme then reversing, but whereas the engine of love is alternating distance and closeness from others, the shaping of the solitary life depends on degrees of inwardness, indwelling, introspection, sustained inwardly directed attention, a varying distance from outward interest. The basic movements of wisdom as withdrawal-and-return take us away from the surface of the world into ourselves and then away from the inner depths back to the world again. Withdrawal and return is the reflective act, the memory retrieval act, the consultation we make with ourselves to see whether the present particular fits the general pattern. Many such acts of short and long duration underlay wisdom.
Inventions, religions, social institutions, the arts and sciences are developed in processes involving going in and coming back out. The whole panoply of culture originates with the growth and inner transformation of individuals. The pressures of the times may predispose us to go inward in quest of certain solutions, and many persons may be driven to do so independently, but what happens in the depths in the phase singularity of the turning point is always a discovery, always an individual realization, unpredictable and free.
The sleep/waking cycle is perhaps the earliest natural manifestation of W-R. We withdraw into sleep, then the return upon awakening. This inwardness/outwardness rhythm of the sleep/waking cycle is very likely tied to planetary movements of day and night through the biological clocks we have evolved to keep us functioning. W-R works in solitude, no more observable to others than our dreams and includes but is not limited to our dreams.
THE FOUR KINDS OF WISDOM AND LOVE
There are four kinds of wisdom journeys, four roads to wisdom. Four great projects of the human soul follow the withdrawal-return pattern.
In Love and Will, (1969,) Rollo May distinguishes four kinds of love. Each of them works with the polar rhythm of approach and separation, which is itself an expression of the ubiquitous underlying oscillatory rhythms:
"There are four kinds of love in the Western tradition. One is sex, or what we call lust, libido. The second is eros, the drive of love to procreate or create -- the urge, as the Greeks put it, toward higher forms of being and relationship. A third is philia, or friendship, brotherly love. The fourth is agape or caritas as the Latins called it, the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the prototype of which is the love of God for man."
Both philia and agape reach out to embrace larger groups of humans and the world and nature and God itself. In doing so they soften and humanize our territorial and social dominance relationships, with some effect over time. I do believe there has been some progress in spreading civility. But it is nearly effaced by periods of great regression and perversion.
However many kinds of love and wisdom there are, and whether the shadings of one into another are part of one or parts of many kinds of love and wisdom, they all run on polar rhythms: approach and separation always undergirds love, and withdrawal and return always undergirds wisdom, living pulses, systoles and diastoles coextensive with life itself, oscillating in nature, sometimes hidden but always discernible. In the heart of each of the extremes in the two primordial oscillations, turning points happen.
I mean by this that life is such that at the highest moment there is already the shifting toward a lower state. Nothing stays still. The moment of achievement is the very moment when loss begins. The moment when the loss is fully realized is the moment when the achievement begins. Without reversal there is no drama, no change, no intensifications, no reversals.
The turning point is a deflection of the life line generated in turbulent conditions. In these situations small internal forces can shift the world line. Consciousness is one of those small internal forces that emerges into prepotency at moments of near chaos that inform the turning points in love and wisdom.
These are experienced in one's psycho-mental life, but only if one is alert to them. We can and often do miss our turning points in love and wisdom. More the pity, since they are the landmarks on our quests. In the turning points the meaning of life resides. Our turning points are the defining moments in our process of growth and change. They define our lifeline. Our story can only be told from them.
This means we have to fully engage with our major life turnings because love and wisdom are at stake in them. They are what we really care about, the terrible and the wonderful equally. Our turning points make for the big shifts that unalterably shape our destiny path. The authenticity of our lives comes from our expression of love and wisdom in turning points. A culture or society thrives or atrophies to the extent it encourages or inhibits our turning points in love and wisdom, and we thrive or die to the extent we can realize our turning points with the help of or in spite of our cultural surroundings. The full story of the place of love and wisdom in the human experience can only be told when we account for their interplay with social dominance and territorial drives, with their deep roots going back into mammalian evolution.
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Copyright 1999 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 07/31/99 (rge)