Love is Oneness
L. Silverman in The Search for Oneness (1982. International University Press, Inc: New York) reports on numerous research studies from 1961 to 1982 in which he and other colleagues were testing a single premise: that unconscious oneness fantasies can enhance adaptation, if simultaneously a sense of self can be preserved.” The most successful oneness fantasy that they tested was “Mommy and I are one.” This message was fed subliminally to a wide range of subjects through a split second subliminal message that was not detected consciously by the viewer. Such subliminal treatments with this MOMMY message produced significant changes in schizophrenic pathology, obesity, phobias, alcoholism, smoking, reading ability, anxiety reduction, and learning ability. (pp. 100-113)
A sense of self as separate can only be achieved through a safe experience of oneness gratification. (p.128) From this extensive research we can extrapolate that love is a fundamental oneness experience which, paradoxically, can reenforce the sense of self, a stable entity. With a oneness experience, if the sense of self is protected or transformed, certain symptoms would be relieved and certain abilities enhanced.
Let us consider then the power of love to be the power of the transcendent or the search for oneness and unity. David Gordon in Self-Love (1968. Macmillan:New York)
argues that man’s basic drive is for unification, to be one in mind and body, to be one with the world, to be one with others, and to resolve the subject-object split that divides him from others since his birth. The drive for unification is the mainspring of man’s behavior, which is characterized by his search for happiness and ultimate reality. The person is not aware of the real object of his quest, except insofar as he feels incomplete, alienated, restless and unhappy. (p.49)
People daydream about vacations, about sex, about sports, about money, eating and drinking. But Gordon asks what does sex, climbing a mountain, running a race, watching a football game, having a few drinks before dinner, consummating a business deal, making money, and getting high on alcohol have in common? He points out that these are all activities in which one gets his kicks through peak experiences of unity. In many of these experiences there is a build-up of tension which is then lowered, relaxed or discharged with a feeling of unification, much as in orgasm. Gordon is saying that many ordinary experiences are similar to what Maslow calls the peak experience or moments of cosmic consciousness (Bucke) or a Zen satori.
There is a moment of joy when we see our team score a touchdown. A really good game is when there are more of these concentrated climactic, thoughtless, contentless moments when a person feels totally unified with himself and his environment. One professional gambler said that next to gambling and winning he liked gambling and losing, because what he savored was the orgasmic unification experience. The real goal of playing cards is not to win money, but to obtain and savor as many moments as one can when he is totally unified without thought. There is a climactic moment with each new card, a climactic possibility of winning. The chief characteristic of the mind during each such unification state is that it is thoughtless, contentless, no mind at all. The mind and the body have coalesced and man is one withself, even if only for a second. He is no longer divided, standing back and looking at himself as an object, nor his body as separate from his mind.
A person feels most alive when he is most passionate, enthusiastic, loving. Even in heightened times of crisis, passionate arguments and identification with some cause, we feel involved, identified with the activity, transcending our sense of separateness.
The mind is our chief source of unhappiness, always focused upon some problem, fragmenting us into many roles and feelings. There is no mind-body problem in these moments of unification. In the desire to win, to achieve, or to succeed, it is the desire for unification that is the underlying motivator. When we win, do we not feel one with ourselves and the world? We seek to be turned on, and this occurs when we can turn off our normal state of tension and worry. We are ordinarily under tension at all times, and people seek relief or highs from these tensions through narcotics, which amounts to a unification experience. Criminals experience a unified state during the heightened excitement of committing a crime. Crime is not committed for the spoils but for the experience of feeling totally involved, totally concentrated and one with himself. Man is never more unified than during orgasm. The mind is totally quiescent at the climax. For that brief moment in eternity, all of his earthly problems are solved. (65)
Love makes the world go round. Love is the healing power, the healing energy, which is required for our bodies, minds and souls to function optimally. Love keeps our immune system strong and vibrant; love is what our cells vibrate to, love is what our DNA is coded to. Love is what makes things beautiful. Love is what makes the birds sing. Love is the power of wisdom.
And yet, why is love what we avoid like the plague? Because we are committed to neither love nor to life, but to knowledge, the knowledge of the fruit of good and evil. Science bows before facts, statistics, sensory knowledge, and so does the human mind. Yet our DNA and our basic self cries out for love as much as for water and air. We just can’t hear those cries, or if we do, we perceive them to mean something else. Love is the most desired and yet the most resisted force in the universe. Our souls cry out for the power of love but we feed them all kinds of inferior energies and forces.
And so, pain is love’s strange teacher.
Look at your pains and hurts, your aches, your stresses. What is missing? What is lacking? What is being mis-qualified? Wht is being misinterpreted? What is being denied? What are we most afraid of? We say that we want security, knowledge, control, power, freedom, and ecstatic pleasure, but all of that is encompassed in love.
Every person has a bottom line, and if we analyze our motivations. People come to me for psychotherapy. Before they sit down to talk, I already know what is wrong and what is lacking. I already know that all symptoms point to the desire for love and the fear of love.
A man pursues freedom, his wife pursues romance, and they fight over it continually.
They are going to divorce because she demands something and he protects something else. She says she is starving for attention; he says that he is not going to lose his freedom to be himself. She imagines that love is absent; he imagines that love is suffocating. She imagines that she is alone; he imagines that he is bound. They each have a half truth that they will divorce for and even die for. Each has the missing half that the other needs.
We shall call this wholeness Love Power. She does not have love power, she has love deprivation, love weakness, love absence, love need. He does not have Love Power, he has love fear, love dread, love restriction, love constriction, love evasion. She believes that she could lose love; he believes that he could lose love power and love freedom. She thinks that if she had freedom, it would kill her. He believes that if he gave in to love, it would kill him. It would only kill their life strategies, not their self.
Love, freedom and power cannot be separated from our creativity. At every moment we are creating images of love and of love’s power. Since love’s individuality and love’s unification are at the heart of love power, we are in an endless search for love’s meaning and wholeness. Since this search is largely unconscious, we develop a whole language of evasion and denial. We develop a whole clinical casebook of symptoms which attempt to replace love’s centrality. These symptoms carry many messages which indirectly say that something is wrong or missing. Pain is love's strange teacher.
A sense of self as separate can only be achieved through a safe experience of oneness gratification. (p.128) From this extensive research we can extrapolate that love is a fundamental oneness experience which, paradoxically, can reenforce the sense of self, a stable entity. With a oneness experience, if the sense of self is protected or transformed, certain symptoms would be relieved and certain abilities enhanced.
Let us consider then the power of love to be the power of the transcendent or the search for oneness and unity. David Gordon in Self-Love (1968. Macmillan:New York)
argues that man’s basic drive is for unification, to be one in mind and body, to be one with the world, to be one with others, and to resolve the subject-object split that divides him from others since his birth. The drive for unification is the mainspring of man’s behavior, which is characterized by his search for happiness and ultimate reality. The person is not aware of the real object of his quest, except insofar as he feels incomplete, alienated, restless and unhappy. (p.49)
People daydream about vacations, about sex, about sports, about money, eating and drinking. But Gordon asks what does sex, climbing a mountain, running a race, watching a football game, having a few drinks before dinner, consummating a business deal, making money, and getting high on alcohol have in common? He points out that these are all activities in which one gets his kicks through peak experiences of unity. In many of these experiences there is a build-up of tension which is then lowered, relaxed or discharged with a feeling of unification, much as in orgasm. Gordon is saying that many ordinary experiences are similar to what Maslow calls the peak experience or moments of cosmic consciousness (Bucke) or a Zen satori.
There is a moment of joy when we see our team score a touchdown. A really good game is when there are more of these concentrated climactic, thoughtless, contentless moments when a person feels totally unified with himself and his environment. One professional gambler said that next to gambling and winning he liked gambling and losing, because what he savored was the orgasmic unification experience. The real goal of playing cards is not to win money, but to obtain and savor as many moments as one can when he is totally unified without thought. There is a climactic moment with each new card, a climactic possibility of winning. The chief characteristic of the mind during each such unification state is that it is thoughtless, contentless, no mind at all. The mind and the body have coalesced and man is one withself, even if only for a second. He is no longer divided, standing back and looking at himself as an object, nor his body as separate from his mind.
A person feels most alive when he is most passionate, enthusiastic, loving. Even in heightened times of crisis, passionate arguments and identification with some cause, we feel involved, identified with the activity, transcending our sense of separateness.
The mind is our chief source of unhappiness, always focused upon some problem, fragmenting us into many roles and feelings. There is no mind-body problem in these moments of unification. In the desire to win, to achieve, or to succeed, it is the desire for unification that is the underlying motivator. When we win, do we not feel one with ourselves and the world? We seek to be turned on, and this occurs when we can turn off our normal state of tension and worry. We are ordinarily under tension at all times, and people seek relief or highs from these tensions through narcotics, which amounts to a unification experience. Criminals experience a unified state during the heightened excitement of committing a crime. Crime is not committed for the spoils but for the experience of feeling totally involved, totally concentrated and one with himself. Man is never more unified than during orgasm. The mind is totally quiescent at the climax. For that brief moment in eternity, all of his earthly problems are solved. (65)
Love makes the world go round. Love is the healing power, the healing energy, which is required for our bodies, minds and souls to function optimally. Love keeps our immune system strong and vibrant; love is what our cells vibrate to, love is what our DNA is coded to. Love is what makes things beautiful. Love is what makes the birds sing. Love is the power of wisdom.
And yet, why is love what we avoid like the plague? Because we are committed to neither love nor to life, but to knowledge, the knowledge of the fruit of good and evil. Science bows before facts, statistics, sensory knowledge, and so does the human mind. Yet our DNA and our basic self cries out for love as much as for water and air. We just can’t hear those cries, or if we do, we perceive them to mean something else. Love is the most desired and yet the most resisted force in the universe. Our souls cry out for the power of love but we feed them all kinds of inferior energies and forces.
And so, pain is love’s strange teacher.
Look at your pains and hurts, your aches, your stresses. What is missing? What is lacking? What is being mis-qualified? Wht is being misinterpreted? What is being denied? What are we most afraid of? We say that we want security, knowledge, control, power, freedom, and ecstatic pleasure, but all of that is encompassed in love.
Every person has a bottom line, and if we analyze our motivations. People come to me for psychotherapy. Before they sit down to talk, I already know what is wrong and what is lacking. I already know that all symptoms point to the desire for love and the fear of love.
A man pursues freedom, his wife pursues romance, and they fight over it continually.
They are going to divorce because she demands something and he protects something else. She says she is starving for attention; he says that he is not going to lose his freedom to be himself. She imagines that love is absent; he imagines that love is suffocating. She imagines that she is alone; he imagines that he is bound. They each have a half truth that they will divorce for and even die for. Each has the missing half that the other needs.
We shall call this wholeness Love Power. She does not have love power, she has love deprivation, love weakness, love absence, love need. He does not have Love Power, he has love fear, love dread, love restriction, love constriction, love evasion. She believes that she could lose love; he believes that he could lose love power and love freedom. She thinks that if she had freedom, it would kill her. He believes that if he gave in to love, it would kill him. It would only kill their life strategies, not their self.
Love, freedom and power cannot be separated from our creativity. At every moment we are creating images of love and of love’s power. Since love’s individuality and love’s unification are at the heart of love power, we are in an endless search for love’s meaning and wholeness. Since this search is largely unconscious, we develop a whole language of evasion and denial. We develop a whole clinical casebook of symptoms which attempt to replace love’s centrality. These symptoms carry many messages which indirectly say that something is wrong or missing. Pain is love's strange teacher.
posted by Dr. Joe at 4:57 AM
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