Agape

Two classically taught forms of love often get filed under one word. One is built on lack. Running on the distance between you and what you want. The other is built on fullness and runs on what it already has.

They are built through different foundations with different architectures and Truth. These are not two intensities of the same thing. The first is the one we inherited, that nearly all our language is tuned to. The second is often what we mean when we say unconditional love without examining it. Its hard to say in English at all. What follows is an attempt to hold them apart long enough to see which one you are actually practicing.

Eros

Eros is a kind of love that arrives already hungry and full of desire. You feel it as reaching toward a person, toward a body, toward the version of your life that would finally be complete, if you just could get your hands on it. We are fluent in this. We have written most of our songs and built our businesses around it. Along the way we mistook the reaching for the love itself. But sit with it long enough, in a quiet room, with someone you actually love, and you notice the reaching is a felt experience, inside your body. It's aimed at the gap. Love organized around a gap will always need the gap to stay open.

In the Symposium Diotima taught us that Eros is the child of Poros (resourcefulness) and Penia (poverty).

Eros starts out as needy, always pursuing, never fully possessing what it desires. Eros functions as a daimon, an intermediary between the mortal and the divine. It is the pull between the Beautiful and the Good. Eros wants. Eros is desire. But in desire there is lack. It seeks resourcefulness to come into maturity through an ideal concept. Eros can't get there on its own terms.

Agape

Agape is quieter. It is not loaded with desire and lack. It is rooted in a fully-resourced sense of abundance within the self. It is a type of love that gives without needing transaction or reciprocity. It moves from a fullness that increases in the giving.

Thelema (Will) and Agape in Greek isopsephy both sum to 93. They are mystically the same operation seen from two angles. Will is Agape's engine. Agape is Will's expression. It refuses Eros' structure of lack. The 93 current isn't asking “what am I missing and reaching for,” it's asserting a completeness that acts from the inside out. Diotima spoke of the ladder of love that Eros climbs. Agape transcends the ladder.

Diotima's Eros matures by becoming more resourceful and wanting less of the specific and more of the universal kind of love through connection to the virtue of Beauty, rather than any particular instance of it. The Beloved is a means to a virtuous end. This counterpoints with Agape's Beloved, it demands we stay fully-embodied in a resourced inter-being. The expression of Agape lives within and express through an internal thriving, regardless of the external circumstances.

"[Love is] the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."
- The Road Less Traveled, by Scott M. Peck

Will and The Law

This began as an argument with Diotima. She is the one who taught us to climb, to love this body, then all bodies, then the beauty in souls, in laws, in learning, until the particular face that started the whole thing is a rung you no longer need.

It is a beautiful teaching, and I have followed it. Many teachings, using differnt words, hold Eros as one of the highest attainments. What I want to say is that somewhere on that staircase the Beloved gets left behind. That leaving, to me, is not the price of the ascent toward the divine. Rather, it's a sign we took the wrong stairs.

And Diotima saw love as a stairway. As you love you ascend by expanding your concept through generalization toward the love of Beauty. At the top, in a non-dual state, love is not embodied, not particular, not attached to one face or body, realizing that the Beloved was never the object. The Beloved at that last rung was only the hand that points to the moon. Ultimately, this ladder is quietly ungenerous to the Beloved, to the intersubjective relationship of that specific instance of love with another being.

Led Zeppelin - Stairway To Heaven (Live at Earl's Court 1975)

Agape is genuinely present with the Beloved. The embodiment of the virtues of love in meaningful relationship. This is foundationally divergent from Eros. It is not an ideal, not a concept. It is an act and a series of acts over time. Something real. The Beloved is the end unto themselves, rather than the means. Eros cannot hold what Agape is. The partner, the Great Work, is not a placeholder for a generalized cosmic principle of ascension.

The power can be found within eudamonia and autarkeia, in other words: happily flourishingly self-sufficiently and finally, present and abundantly overflowing from within.

IO Babalon

In Existential Kink terms that's the whole method. You don't transcend the specific desire or the specific object, you grok it. You give as a drink from a cup that overfloweth, nourishing your entire being.

The Truth is in the formula.

93 93/93

Love is the Law. Love Under Will.

"love is what love does, not what love feels" - bell hooks