Love has Good as its principle and Truth as target
By Emanuel Swedenborg
The true love in couple
It is given to the human beings to know so little about love in a couple in all its perfection, that there are only a few on earth who would be able to define, because a few are those who look to its principle in the love of love of Good and Truth.
This correspondence, this harmony, this concatenation of the hearts has its first link in Heaven, and the principle in its own spirituality. From the heavenly link it flow the stream of lustful pleasures that brings into our soul all the good things and pleasures. But this fact is true for those who obey the law of love of their own will – the decay of human beings and the corruption of ages have almost completely destroyed this idea.
Therefore, sexual boredom has become for us the grave of true erotic fulfillment, and after desire comes the indifference, which entails a lack of sensitivity, this leading us finally to disgust. Therefore, the lover no longer founds the charms that attracted him/ her in the matrimonial bed in the beginning and forgets the pleasures from the eve terrified in advance by the disgust that will follow the next day.
At birth, the human being is only a matter endowed with certain inclinations corresponding for each member; they expand and develop over time and, leaving comprehension the freedom to exercise its faculties, imperceptibly transform the exterior man, initially devoid of ideas, in a thinking being. Like all Creation, love has its stairs, ascension and its perfection, which is the full sublimation of lust and affirming its value and power in a heart that knows how to keep and maintain untouched its fire in all its purity.
As everything that exists in nature, love has Good as its principle and Truth as target; this universal trend common to all beings is the great mystery of the Divinity which, distinguishing between them all the creatures in all the worlds, made that their supreme Good to be linked to the need of everyone to seek and reunite with each other. This was the harmony enshrined in the universe by the Creator who, planting in all of us the common tendency to reunite, he wanted love to start with the heart, to purify through the spirit and thus, cleansed from all the dross, to bring in our soul the heavenly fire in which it resides the principle of its essence.
The union of souls and the transformation of their condition
If there is no doubt that when he conceived us, the Creator’s original plan was to instill in us a tendency to unite it is no less true that this union must concern as well our souls. Hence we can safely say that our inclination to desire and search one another exists fundamentally in the will of the woman, as well as in the capacity for understanding of the man. This vocation of the will is constant for the woman and often fickle in man; for man, born to worry about so many things, often feels in his heart other calls, which makes him deviate from the first love and forget it.
The trend toward union still occupies the noblest part of us and the force of its principle is so great that surviving our earthly body increases and grows incessantly throughout our spiritual life.
Although these trends, these inclinations towards union are the same for the man and the woman, they differ in terms of their form. Thus, we see how man’s passion rises sharply until it reaches the intensity of strong emotions or the insolence of boundless courage, while the passion of the woman shyly hide itself under the veil of modesty and rejects with grace and self-control the consolations that she still wished. By such small innocent and lawful strategies, the beloved inflames and delights her lover; through such games the woman strengthens her weak natural powers, increasing her strength. Ultimately opening their heart to love, the two lovers come together at the state of union, of serenity, understanding and peace that brings their happiness on earth and supreme bliss in heaven, when their earthly life ends.
The nature of human beings has also contributed to strengthen this principle, giving to the matter that makes them up a fluid whose effusions fed and water continually the mutual sympathy between the sexes, when they like each other. On the other hand, the draining of this fluid to the figure that it produces, through a kind of reaction against its own source, gives rise to hatred, disgust and antipathy. Perhaps in various stages of this emanation we must seek the reason of unintended obliteration of the object of unique love or the involuntary attraction that makes us cherish some beings that we do not know or, conversely, to reject and despise them without knowing them. Through a kind of comfortable breathing down into the lungs, from the lungs into the heart and from the heart into the blood we may come to realize the wonderful effect of the emanation of that fluid that carries in all sides, like a communicating vessel and through a continuous and constant motion, particles detached from our essence, as we receive as well the particles from the essence of the other.
The soul continues its evolution forever
In the undefined space of the flow of time, human life is nothing but a continual migration. As we see it, from childhood, that is lost in the adolescence, just as adolescence flows into the puberty, this into the virility and, finally, virility into the old age, our life is always presented as a kind of progressive change, characterized by an irresistible trend towards a higher level of perfection.
Just as a tree, from the first moment when the seed of which was growing it was fertilized, there is no moment without going through the change of a new era of growth, so the outer man is changing in every moment of his life, until the final collapse; the soul continues its evolution forever, in the eternity of time to get as far as it is possible, at the higher stages of successive perfections. For as love has no boundaries, knowledge, understanding and wisdom as well have no end.
This chain of successive changes is not the same in both sexes. While the man is looking for the light, the woman, on the contrary, seeks only the warmth. Drawn each by the same center, their coexistence starts when, after both going through the circles of different sex-specific progressive change, they finally get to that common center where the perfect bonds of love in a couple settles forever their happiness. At that moment, the man is becoming manlier and the woman more ardent and attractive, and both find in this point of their union the fulfillment of all desires and the source of all wealth.
Excerpts from the book Conjugial love, by Emanuel Swedenborg. yogaesoteric December 2013
