Esalen: Michael Murphy — The Extraordinary Capacity of Love

The Extraordinary Capacity of Love

Michael Murphy

"We live only part of the life we are given," writes Michael Murphy. Thus he introduces The Future of the Body, his definitive survey of extraordinary human capacities that point toward the further evolution of human nature. In his book, Murphy classifies the basic human attributes: sensorimotor, kinesthetic, communication, and cognitive abilities; sensations of pain and pleasure; vitality; volition; sense of self; various bodily processes; and love. While calling this classificatory scheme "only suggestive," he goes on to posit that by consciously developing these attributes we are taking the crucial next step in the world’s evolutionary adventure. In this excerpt, he writes of the transformative power inherent in the attribute of love.

Loving behaviors are evident in many animal species, as for example in the self-sacrificing protection provided by cetacean mothers for their young, the mutual grooming of primates, and affectionate feline play. Both the animal and human worlds exhibit countless acts of caring and erotic delight. Indeed, human growth depends upon love from its very inception. No infant can survive without physical and emotional nurturance, nor enjoy anything approaching normal development without some sort of loving touch. No child can learn to talk, think, or be sociable without continuing affection from people around him. Love, like all human attributes, grows through its exercise. Love grows through acts of love, both given and received.

And like our other capacities, love can flower in extraordinary ways, transforming this world to some extent while revealing new worlds to us. As we are conceived in love and brought forth from our mothers in love, we are opened by love to our greater possibilities. Though the many varieties of love have unique properties, they all involve a complex set of capacities upon which our further advance depends. They all transform, even if momentarily, every person they touch, bringing new substance, beauty, and joy to lover, friend, child, or stranger.

Psychiatrist Rudolph von Urban, a student of Freud, described several kinds of erotic experience. One married couple told him, for example, that during moments of physical intimacy the wife was suddenly outlined with "a nimbus of greenish-blue light that radiated from her whole body." Another man and woman experienced an electrical flow through their skin: "a million sources of delight merged into one," they told von Urban. Commenting on such experience, the British poet Peter Redgrove quoted Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s saying that "He, who has made his soul dry like the spider, has put on his aerial tunic. It extends from the head to the extremity of the feet." Relating the saint’s metaphor to an episode reported by a friend, Redgrove wrote:

He slept, and then woke a short time afterward with a beautiful feeling from love-making, as though [his skin] were open and enlarged and no longer a barrier, and through it he could feel his wife sleeping by him and interpenetrating his skin, as though their bodies had intermingled. . . . After lying there and enjoying this afterglow, he opened his eyes and found that the room was full of a golden-coloured gossamer arranged in a webwork that emanated from . . . centres of gold, and this webwork extended as if in care to the small bed of their daughter. He thought this was a dream reflecting his relaxed state until he saw the passage I have just quoted from St. Gregory.

Erotic intimacy can be enjoyed with deliberate attention to [such] states. A woman who had practiced Tantric intercourse wrote that as she and her husband lay side by side,

the energy between us was communicated [through our] eyes, and made me begin to cry. We were both feeling the same thing, without any words being spoken. It was as though we recognized one another, not merely from the objective point of view, but as though we were one entity, or one field. There was no obstruction or delineation between us. My heart felt like it had burst open.

I was very vulnerable, very airy, very light. [My] whole body was breathing, in a certain sense. I was perceiving through the heart, not just through the eyes. It was like the . . . etheric being was in resonance with my husband’s etheric being. Somehow this alignment occurred, and we were not limited to the flesh. . . .

In erotic union, joy overflows, erasing boundaries between lover and beloved, deepening the care of each for the other. But this marriage of caring and delight does not depend upon sexual intimacy. It is a characteristic of love in all its expressions. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James cited this account by Mrs. Jonathan Edwards of the love which arose from her spiritual illumination:

Last night was the sweetest night I ever had in my life. I never before, for so long a time together, enjoyed so much of the light and rest and sweetness of heaven in my soul, but without the least agitation of body during the whole time. Part of the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and sometimes between sleeping and waking. But all night I continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ’s excellent love, of his nearness to me, and of my dearness to him.

When . . . I arose on the morning of the Sabbath, I felt a love to all mankind, wholly peculiar in its strength and sweetness, far beyond all that I had ever felt before. The power of that love seemed inexpressible. I thought, if I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible that I should cherish any feelings towards them but those of love, and pity, and ardent desires for their happiness. I never before felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure others, as I did that morning.

"There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness," James wrote. "Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of selfhood incline to disappear and tenderness to rule." In a state such as Mrs. Edwards described, we give birth to energies, joy, and beauty beyond our normal experience. This regenerative, incarnational power of love is especially apparent in religious passion. "In the course of spiritual discipline," said Sri Ramakrishna, "one gets a ‘love body’ endowed with ‘love eyes’ and ‘love ears.’ One sees God with those love eyes. One hears the voice of God with those love ears. One even gets a sexual organ made of love . . . and with this love body the soul communes with God."

But the incarnational power of love is not limited to sexual or religious passion. It is evident as well in other kinds or relationship. Think of a struggling student you have known who exhibited new virtue or talent through a particular teacher’s interest, or a normally glum acquaintance who was filled with new creativity by performing some generous deed, or a dispirited friend who was given new purpose and meaning by someone who appreciated his special gifts. There are many expressions of love, indeed many types of love, each with its own transformative power. Poets and philosophers have celebrated agape, goodwill, philanthropy, friendship, fellow feeling, empathy, congeniality, romance, married devotion, parental self-giving, and love for a work or set of ideals, as well as eros and religious devotion. Love takes many forms and has many kinds of effect but always gives birth to new life.

Love in all its greater expressions requires dedication as well as natural attraction, and steadfastness through many kinds of difficulty. But it is always renewable, and it can take root anywhere. Indeed, it is part of the genius of love that it can be summoned in situations where its existence at first seems impossible. In the novel Incognito by the Romanian writer Petru Dumitriu, this fact is revealed to the protagonist as he is brutally tortured. Why, he asks,

had I needed to search so long? Why had I expected a teaching that would come from outside myself? Why had I expected the world to justify itself to me, and prove its meaning and purity? It was for me to justify the world by loving and forgiving it, to discover its meaning through love, to purify it through forgiveness.

They went on beating me, but I learned to pray while the screams issued mechanically from my ill-used body—wordless prayers to a universe that could be a person, a being, a multitude or something utterly strange, who could say?

This realization leads Dumitriu’s protagonist to find possibilities for love in all circumstances, and thus to see everywhere the presence of Divinity. All events, all persons, are the incognitos of God.

If I love the world as it is, I am already changing it: a first fragment of the world has been changed, and this is my own heart. Through this first fragment the light of God, His goodness and His love penetrate into the midst of His anger and sorrow and darkness, dispelling them as the smile on a human face dispels the lowered brows and the frowning gaze.

Nothing is outside God. I have sought to love in as far as may be. I have tried to keep within the radiance of God, as far away as possible from His face of terror. We were not created to live in evil, any more than we can live in the incandescence that is at the heart of every star. Every contact with evil is indissolubly linked with its own chastisement, and God suffers. It is for us to ease His sufferings, to increase His joy and enhance His ecstasy.

Some of us will question Dumitriu’s hero. Isn’t it the case, we ask, that those who return only love for injustice surrender the world to thieves and murderers? Doesn’t this imperfect life require that we oppose tyrants with force, cruelties with punishment? "We must frankly confess," wrote William James, "that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them." To this concern, of course, we can respond as James did. If the world depended solely upon "hard-headed, hard-hearted, hard-fisted" methods, he wrote, it would be an unimaginable horror. Our everyday life depends upon countless acts of kindness. the overcoming of injustice requires love as well as strength. Without many kinds of charity, this world would not last for long. While love requires other virtues, among them courage in dealing with cruelty and aggression, it can bring forth goodness in all sorts of circumstance. It is the culmination of caring behavior evident in animal life, and our profoundest transformative act.