Love rides on a ray of truth: expanding outward, reaching an understanding that pervades all. To experience based on knowledge, and to know based on experience, is to open the door to the kind of love that is otherwise blocked from deeper vision.
If you know the truth about something, no matter what it is, against the iron veil of all the smallness and narrowness that propaganda and zeitgeist-masquerading-as-universal-truth bring, then you begin to understand people past and present. With understanding comes love: love for their struggles, the conundrums of their existence, and how they sought and seek to express their love in their own heroic struggle, something otherwise obscured by our ignorance and pre-conditioned reactions. With understanding comes rejection, too: not all deserve our love. Indeed, with certain individuals, love is not possible at all: calling it that is simply a mistake, a mere category error.
Language can only sound kitschy and flat when we seek to describe these matters. Another reason why experience is so important: you will never understand unless you develop to the point where you can have a glimpse into what it means to know, to love based on this knowledge, and to know based on love.
Love without knowledge turns into soul bleeding and hatred. Knowledge without love turns into ignorance and destruction. Both lead to evil.
True morality therefore is to seek: understanding, knowledge, hard truth without blinking. But also to discover: the loving gaze of that small holy part in you, shining through your heart and eyes, coming from the All, engulfing the All, alone able to pierce the darkness of a misguided existence.
Why must we suffer? Because we don’t have to. Why do we fall? Because without balance, gravity pulls us down. Why all the demands? Because there is much to earn.
Love rides on a ray of truth.
Lovely! Still working my way through McGilchrist, but I very much like the knowledge->experience->love formulation. It's like the difference between loving a piece of music, learning to play the piece of music, and then loving the piece of music when you play it. Assuming I know what you're talking about. 😄
Great unpacking (to one prayer of Love and Knowledge I so often repeat to myself before starting new day). It is fascinating to look back on one's life to see how different it once was, but it was the choice to have those particular experiences that led to my current understanding of love and that gives me feeling that is so deep because it's about something greater then me. Thanks Luc!