THE FIRST DUTY OF LOVE - George Viney

“The first duty of Love is to listen.”
-Paul Tillich

DUTY in the deepest sense is a sacred obligation, one in which the eros of the heart feels the divine charge to serve with reverence and devotion.

And duty is up-close, personal, intimate, and involved, it dares to always be fully involved. The duty speaking here leaves the fortress and the tower to enter the fray, become fertilizing manure, rich soil, germinating seed, deepening root, growing tree, blossoming flowers, and ripening, joyfully-falling fruit.

Alchemists would say about their sought-for gold: “Our gold is not-the-common gold.” Well, our duty, this first duty, as you will hear, is not-the-common duty.

Healing, loving, compassionate caring, and intimate, complete, and feeling involvement are fertilizer, soil, seed, root, tree, flowers, and fruit of this duty of Love.

Listen! This requires not-the-common listening!

“Heart” has an “ear” in it!

It is our first duty to truly—with, within, and out of, the very fullness of our being—hear with our hearts!

Without heart, duty becomes forced and devoid of living feeling-relatedness, devolving into the dominion of, and domination by, Power.

Power then registers another as faceless, an object to be controlled, possessed, manipulated, and subjugated.

Love is a Power, too, but of an altogether different order.

Love may overwhelm, Love may claim you. By Love, we may suffer, our hearts may be broken open, but all this if not so that the straw hut of ego-identifications might be razed and leveled to make a soul-clearing and let the sound of light in!

Then, there, in its place, a holy auditorium, why yes, a glorious tabernacle arises! One built and created by divine and loving hands.

Into it, Love descends, abides. Into you, Love becomes Presence. And the whole world, your world, every thing, every place, every other, is lit up in flaming, beautiful, witnessed, and revealing uniqueness! You become Love, losing yourself, you no longer are a mighty Me and yet now even more You, uniquely found and made into a radiant essence by Love.

The cacophony of noise suddenly stills and becomes quiet.

Love, now orchestral conductor, smiling and looking with such fierce yet gentle love straight into each of our faces, deep into our eyes, deeply inhales all of us, everything, raises his wand-baton and pauses. We all do.

Love waits like this!

Together, He, You, me, We, this very present and beheld world, become all ears, one divine, dear Ear!

This Silence, this Love, this Presence, this Witnessing, this Hearing, this Us, now deeply, without even a whisper, exhales...

And our Souls are released, entering into this Now-become-Moment, this eternal and never repeating yet ever-occurring Once!

And still...

All is so still; all is so quiet...

Then, softly at first, softer than a pin dropping, the winged notes with a little flame flickering gently, fiercely, over each, suddenly appear in the thick darkness, like stars that begin to shine in the night, like fireflies on a summer night, and sound forth such music!

Such stories, such beauty, such sweet suffering, and sorrow, and joy, such emotion turning into exquisite and deeply moving soundscapes: all are revealing the inimitable shape and contour of each soul’s face!

This is, you are, we all are, every each and every all, the whole and this moment is the Song, this Harmony, this Melody, this Composition and this Concert, this duty, this auditorium, this tabernacle, the very world, every and all worlds and places, all presences, this Presence, and this not-the-common Listening!

It is the very music, and being, and face of the Beloved, our Beloved, this Thou whom Love...loves.

To enter, here, hear, is impossible for the merely curious, the casual observer, the hearers of superficialities and those made small by pettiness.

It is closed for those who shrink and shirk with fear and cowardice. It was once said with gut-tearing and agonizing compassion: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do!”

The greatest tragedy, the greatest agency of harm, though, is not found in those who know not what they do, but in both those who self-righteously THINK they know and those who REALLY know when they act coldly, cruelly, and do so anyway.

Most often, acts of conscious and unconscious Power, with the heart surgically cut out and discarded, are beautifully clothed in the seeming and seductive display of perfect words, accompanied by strategic, manipulative, and persuasive accessories of apparently pure and noble intention, and completed with applied foundation makeup full of sparkling flecks laid on thick with the glittering rhetoric of covering well-wishes, right reasons, rationalizations, and justifications. “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

This all is the shrewd and easy path of Controlling Power that wields its wiles so that one can escape the scary call of genuine loving by becoming one with the fear, by becoming minions of Fear.

Sinister acts are accomplished in the clarion call to action and the obfuscating claims of necessity stoked by fear: “We must do this, we must take this action, or else! Or else this bottom line or that group or those people or this result or such evil or subversion or perversion or corruption or invasion or failing or falsehood or some horrendous result will happen!”

Fear herds people through such words heard, can make us into docile and compliant sheeple unknowingly following Power’s secret dark and disconnected designs.

What is heard in panicking fear becomes spirit-pandemic in the body-politic creating illness through the soul’s infection by Power’s contagion. Power’s infection, too, is not a common infection, but it makes us common, mere numbers, and mass-minded.

Herd immunity at a soul level is this nefarious and viral heard-immunity which immunizes the wrong system in the wrong way with the wrong result: we stop listening to each other, our lungs filling with crystallized beliefs, our blood clotting with polarizing opinions which stop the life-giving and free-flowing circulation of feeling-relatedness, and all of us coughing and gasping and suffocating and crying out, “I can’t breathe!”

And Earth herself cries out, too, weeping piercing grief-words as all these signs of climate disharmony: “What have my Power-consuming people-children done!”

“Earth” has an “ear,” too. Empathy means hearing through the other’s experience. And we for far too long have not been deeply listening through Earth’s ears.

We have forsaken our first duty of love!

Individuating, feeling-related Love is the vaccine, one capable of dispelling fear, turning herd hysteria into the sanctifying and responsive attunement to each other and the needs of the world through conscious and discerning Love.

Love can see through erected walls, electrified fences, and power-gripped thinking, believing, opining, and imagining gone viral.

The awakened heart can hear and know when force has warped speech and song, throat and instrument.

Common listening leads to opinionated belief; not-the-common listening knows through experience, wisdom, kindness, discernment of soul subtleties, detection of the presence or absence of love, an ability to see the roots from which something or someone or some place or some idea arises, and the fruits and effects of what or who is before one.

Power sneaks into, controls, and enslaves those who avoid feeling fear, choosing those afraid of love’s intimacy, and puffing them up into prideful self-referencing puppets with no eyes to see and no ears to hear.

Forgive them, Father, for deep down they are truly afraid. And seized by such fear, they cut out and cut off their hearts to stop this terribly painful feeling and this frightening and overwhelming duty-bringing Call of Love.

Forgive them, Mother, because so often they themselves were so abused, beaten, violated, mocked, humiliated, judged, rejected, marginalized, disempowered, and abandoned, not having been witnessed, blessed, or affirmed by Love, and never having experienced Love’s kindness and nurturance which births trust, that they now know not, recognize not, what they perpetrate and perpetuate and do.

The way, the healing way, is to listen: “Fear” has “ear” in it!

The Mystery that is Love is both protected by it and only accessed through it. Fear must fully be entered, fully experienced; transfiguration only happens this way. The tabernacle only appears, and the ear only hears, when this occurs.

Love is a fire that tries one’s essence in the furnace of affliction and Love is a water that baptizes by drowning. Through that fire and this water, the often me-inflating and power-puffing ego dies so that a relationship with Love can descend like a dove, rise like a Spirit-flame, and our sacred serving and ministering of Love can be born!

Ego once me becomes I becomes eye becomes opening Third Eye meeting Love’s searing gaze and Love’s watering tears while simultaneously all “its,” those once mere objects, become each a Thou, become, each and all, the Beloved!

One must prove worthy; one must prepare and be made ready.

This is an initiation.

By education, one is led outward and comes to know about. Initiation is being led inward, being led into the interiority of soul, and one learns through a thorough, lived sea-change of consciousness and experience. One then does not know about, one knows through. One is then the knowing, one is simultaneously the known!

Love takes what you have known, what you think you know, what you have identified with, and with great compassion and the deepest form of kindness, ends that; then wings grow and you are entirely, completely changed.

You do not study the caterpillar; you are the caterpillar!

Enter and become that mystery, then you will know Love.

One must surrender, submit wholeheartedly, enter into and also become the initiatory, heart-wrenching chrysalis. You must voluntarily offer your known life...

and transform!

When the ego clutches, possesses another and enchains the other to one's identity, to prop it up, Love escapes. When we release our grip on who and what we have identified with, those who love us, whom Love has brought to us, the very faces and places and things and unique presences lighting up in the very world, return to us in freedom, in joy!

Who we thought we were is no longer as we give what we have known away, as we give our very selves as we have known us away, and look: now we are winged! Those we love are winged! The very world flutters with us as we all alight on flowering epiphanies of beauty happening everywhere around us and within us!

And the heretofore invisible ones creating and shaping and attending to this visible realm come into view too, around the edges of all our limits and literalness! These invisible ones include us literal ones, we who are made of flesh and blood, for we are all each more than the eye can see! Just recall how a loved one who is no longer visits you in your dreams. Just notice how dear friends physically not near us so often appear in our oneiric nightly rounds, leaving us as we awaken to feel their continuing importance, influence, support, and encouragement in our lives! Even those who have hurt us, caused us suffering; they, too, join the dreams' stories and dramas and give to us the necessity to reflect more deeply, consider more profoundly, what veiled, quill-covered gifts for our souls and destinies they might have brought to us, are still bringing to us and giving us (it seems no mere coincidence that "forgiveness" has "give" in it!).

What happens in the living experience of the caterpillar within the chrysalis is a mystery, a great literal, metaphorical, and metaphysical Mystery. Perhaps the cocoon is the holy auditorium of the heart, perhaps there is an imaginal altar upon which our pupa-souls are transfigured once we let go of our armoring identities, and perhaps all of this is to say that when we love, we are entirely changed by Love.

When we listen, listen within our heart's echoing cocoon-chamber, we discover our first duty. And we discover that we—including those who are no longer, those not yet born, and all of us here now—are all sacred, are all called to conscious loving, are meant to free ourselves from polarization of endless "us" versus "them" identifications, and realize in the fullness of our loving feeling: we are all in this together and we are meant to lovingly serve, receive each other with mature compassion, and care for each other.

Listen...

Can you hear into the rest between notes? Can you humbly and courageously enter into the cavernous, marvelously echoing chambers of the tabernacle and truly have a meeting within the tremendous Mysteries of the Heart?

Will you let go and be taken up and transformed by Winged-Love?

Will Psyche, your exquisite and precious soul, take up the initiatory tasks and trials because you and her have finally glimpsed, tasted, felt, and heard just enough to set out, follow your longing, her desire, seek True Love, devotedly persevere, and courageously hear into the invisible and subtle, into what cannot be explained, cannot ever-escape into logic and rationality, cannot be sentenced within the mundane and literal, and cannot be pridefully grasped and possessed?

Just listen, truly listen...

Love is just waiting to receive you, all smiles, all welcoming, all recognition, all joy, arms wide open, just waiting to embrace you!

Strange, when we follow the first duty of Love and listen, we leave ourselves and the world...

and we come home!

I will meet you there. With my arms wide open,

I will meet you HERE!

And we will meet each other HEAR!

George Viney, Psy.D., MFT, is a Jungian/Archetypal therapist, magician, poet, writer, and storyteller in Los Angeles whose creative calling and endeavors are all reverently in service to the wedding of Eros and Psyche, Love and the Soul, within and without!  www.TheWeddingOfErosAndPsyche.com