Love is a force that helps us avoid the formation of false identities. If we remove sentimentality from the exercise of love, it becomes the capacity to know another’s being. Without love, we live in a world where everyone is in their own inner world. In this world we have no hope of ever sharing an experience or truly knowing another.

Self-remembering and being present are important because they give us a foundational self. This in turn makes it possible for us to practice love without the loss of self.

When we create identities without the benefit of presence, we bundle our confidences and insecurities together into attitudes that separate us from others. “I am this and you are not a part of it.” We become strong in keeping people out. With presence, we create a self focused enough in itself to know others without losing itself.

Presence not only allows us to know others. It also makes it possible for higher influences to use us to further their aims. Without presence, it is difficult to recognize higher influences. The importance of serving higher influences is vital. When presence is selfish, it lacks certain basic components essential for a balance between consciousnesses, unity, and will—all of which one needs to create a soul.

Love evolves to form finer and finer identities beginning with true personality and ending with the higher intellectual center. In true personality, love is an idea, not realized in any form. Love in essence is love to do with the body. Sex, for the body, is the closest it comes to the realization of love. But even sex, if limited to essence, is subject to the boundaries created by mechanical attraction. Love for family most often comes from essence. Families share a common physical origin; this does not lessen the importance of love shared within families. The act of loving a stranger (or an enemy, as Christ recommended) is more difficult and therefore more spiritually significant.  Essence can sympathize with another’s state but cannot know it by direct experience. 

An identity formed around the higher emotional center can begin to know another from the inside. The finer material that is natural to the higher emotional center has properties that can pervade another. Still, the focus of attention of the higher emotional center is self-consciousness. At the same time, the capacity to know another exists at this level. It is only when the higher intellectual center functions that energy is fine enough to know another fully. 

The element of will cannot be separated from love. Without will and consciousness, love would be indiscriminate, drifting like a cloud from object to object, inhabiting each without aim or direction.

This article is excerpted from a longer article by William Page, on his website BePresentFirst.org: https://bepresentfirst.com/the-moon-the-nature-of-constructing-an-identity-and-the-evolution-of-love/ . For more of his articles in FourthWayToday.org, see: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/william-page/.