gollum

When I studied literature at university we spent a lot of time taking enjoyable, fascinating books and ripping them to shreds with our minds and words, creating "symbols" and "metaphors" where before there had been instinctive empathy with an author's Purpose. It is a murderous process, this pursuit of knowledge, but sometimes kernels of wisdom show up.

In Fantasy Literature, for instance, I was taught that the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings was a symbol of vision and thereby of power and control. Boo-yah, eh? And also, "whoop-de-doodle-doo". Still, there is something to be learned.

Ready? Ok: always let Love supercede your desire to know. The desire to know, which disguises itself as a desire for the truth, is usually just a desire to control. True love does not desire control or power. True love (in people) desires right relationship with all other things and pursues that desire through a truth-aligned acceptance of the self as a finite, limited being who can only become completely whole in the context of the Source.

This "Source" I refer to is Love. Not just the feelings that accompany romantic entanglement, but something far Bigger. Love is patient and kind - not jealous. It doesn't brag or think of itself as greater than it is. It isn't rude or selfish and it easily forgets the wrongs inflicted upon it by others. Love doesn't get pleasure from pain, suffering or lies. Instead, it gets its exhuberant fullness of purpose from being lined up with the way things really Are. Because of this, Love bears all manner of indignity, hoping for the best and believing in the power of itself. For my part, I believe that Love is what God is.

I believe this without Knowing through a still, small voice coiled around whatever it is that lives in my guts and makes me be me - a sort of super-reason that goes deeper than any cogniscent thought. It is as though my whole life I have been standing naked in front of a fogged-up mirror. Although my eyes can just barely make out the form of a man, a vestigial image of what I really am resides somewhere within me - perhaps in the cockles of my heart (or maybe the sub-cockles). This image is my inbuilt sense of the way things should be - it is the part of me that reacts to that which is Not-Love and says "No! That's wrong!" It is Love. It is God.

I forget this memory with great ease, suppressing it beneath the weight of a thousand selfish agendas. But some day, I hope, love will out and all not-love will fade. In the meantime I will cling to my lost memories of Love, struggling every day to allow them to surface and overcome my lust for control.