Eros and Holiness: Part Thirteen: To Love is to Know REALITY: Marc Gafni

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To Love is to Know REALITY.

I wrote yesterday of the path of Love. {Eros and Holiness: Blog Post Nine; The Path of Love}.

But what is love?

Love is the inner reality of the universe when all else is stripped away. The lack of love is the source of all that creates evil in the universe. Evil results from the denial of love in all of it’s forms. Love is a denial of reality.

To Love therefore is to know reality. The lover is the most realistic person around. And the lover sometimes also appears as dreamy eyed, wistful and star struck. Because sometime reality in it’s surface manifestation is unreal. We then need to wist, dream and passion, verbs all, in order to find our way back to what is real.

This writing is in some sense a work of ideas. But it would be a mistake, unreal, to call it merely an intellectual work. It comes from the heart as much as from the head. Sometimes I thought so hard it hurt, at other times my heart danced with ecstasy, even touching on two occasions on what Buddhist and Hebrew mystics have termed enlightenment. At other times the pain was so radical and intense that I prayed for my own death.

By the time you reach the end of these writings I hope you will have experienced a taste of enlightenment yourself.

In tomorrow’s blog post I will write a word or two of what I mean by the word Enlightenment. A word that is frightening to many people but whose meaning is simple, direct and core to many important teachings in the Hebrew wisdom tradition, particularly those of my teacher Mordechai Lainer of Izbica.