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THE TEST OF MUTUALITY
More than nineteen centuries ago, Jesus gave men two fundamental precepts: "Love one another"; "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". The second of these great statements explains and gives to the first its most essential meaning.
So many things, strange and wonderful, have been meant ever since by the word "love"! It has glowed with tender and mystic light; it also struck here and there tones of frenzy and even depravation. Who does not claim to love? But love, throughout our Christian culture that strove toward other-worldly goals and sought to deny the "good earth", this love has assumed the ideal character of transcendental feeling, rather than that of productivity and radiant activity.
Yet Jesus did not come to teach man to despise the earth and the activity of the earth. He did not come to exalt feeling and sentiment over productive and creative action. He came to show a new way of activity: the way of conscious mutuality. As he took birth at the dawn of an age which, he well knew, was to stress above all the principle of individualism and ego-separateness, he offered to humanity as a gift the antidote of the sickness of isolation in self: mutuality — which means interchange, reciprocity, the "one another" in all deeds.
The first great test of the spiritual life is isolation. Birth is isolation. All great things begin in isolation. But they can only mature through mutuality. Selfhood is singleness; love is cooperative sharing. These are the two polarities of human growth. That which begins in self must understand and realize itself in mutuality and in love. Love is not primarily a feeling; it is the seed of mutuality. It is the vision of the "one another" to the "one", the annunciation of activity performed in common.
Not merely in common, however, rather, in mutual interchange. Where there is no interchange, no interplay, no reciprocity, there can be but the shadow of love. Love is mutual action; and the mature "feeling" of love, this wondrous essence of fire and light, is born of mutuality in sharing, of the "one another".
The word "mutual" comes from the Latin muto, which means "to change". The etymology, here as in so many instances, reveals the core of the mystery. The realm of self, where the I stands in singleness out of God, is established in eternity. The "I am" is the invariant tone; the permanent foundation in spirit; the seed which at the end of time is that which it was at the beginning and which it ever remains throughout all birthing and dying. But in the realm of relatedness there is constant change. There is change because there is inevitable mutuality. Each acts upon the other, as he re-acts to the other. This "Karma"; action that is caught in the web of response woven by the universe resounding to the act.
In child-like man this mutuality is unrealized, because he does not know yet that he, out of his singleness of self, can be an origin; that he can give birth to a new chain of action and throw the weight of creative decision into the pond of the surrounding life. As the child becomes adolescent, his sense of individual freedom intoxicates him. Wildly he catapults his decisions through the space of, to him, an empty universe, just for the joy of throwing away seed and feeling himself unburdened of self. Great is his dismay when the universal womb responds to his sowings with a progeny, for him to father in responsibility.
Through pain and weariness, he comes to learn the lesson of mutuality - the balancing of action and reaction in responsible productivity, in efficient management, in this love that is not self-projected alone, but love that is the one changing into the other in the mysterious antiphony of the sharing of each other's gifts and each other's burdens, as melodies of individual being weave themselves into garlands of deeds, from the one to the all, from the all to the one.
Mutuality is change that returns to its source after having partaken of the universal life; not only the interchange of lovers immersed in relationships and tossed about by waves of passionate blendings, but the great play of universal change in which each becomes all, so that the whole might become focused into every one.
This mutuality is a universal fact; none can escape the return tide, who ventured forth into the sea of action. The horizon of most men is so narrow that the wave which throws them stunned upon the rock of their separate existence seems a thrust from nowhere. Could they but see, far in the abysmal distance, its recoiling from an originally opposite direction, they would know that the blow that fells their proud singleness is the child of the unlived relatedness of gestures they themselves threw into a space which they thought but passively receptive.
Space is not a hollow receptivity, a bottomless vase. Space is mutuality. It is indeed the substance of universal and total relatedness. Everything cast away into space returns with the whole world added to it, as a sounding board adds overtones to any original sound. Every note that ever sounds forth resounds enriched with myriads of overtones. Each string of the universal harp calls forth a resonance from every other string. To the bound ego, this is karma. To the wise, it is love. Jesus' mission was to transfigure karma into love. It is always the task of the Christ-being to transfigure karma into love, unconscious interdependence into conscious mutuality, unwilling reciprocity into deliberate sharing — nay more, into joyous participation.
Conscious mutuality becomes joyous and creative participation as the related selves transfigure the walls, which bind and isolate them as particular egos, into living membranes through which flow the osmotic currents of love; for love is an osmosis of life, of light and of truth. Walls are forever to be shattered; cell-membranes forever to be enjoyed. There can only be pain out of fortified boundaries; there should always be joy, as skins that touch one another become thresholds for the life of man's common humanity to pass through, in the flow of companionship and common participation.
Conscious and joyous participation makes of universal space not a mere web of related "world-lines", but instead an organism of love. Love is space become full with creative joy; it is the song of birth of a universal Whole in whom all related selves have incorporated the fragrance of feeling released by the flowering of communal deeds. It is mutuality made significant by men and women who overcame unconscious fate through the magic of conscious love; mutuality not only accepted, but given meaning — not only purified of passion-heavied dross, but transfigured as the light of a birth of spiritual living.
Mutuality is change. All life is constant change. A Buddha overcomes change by encompassing the Whole in intelligence and in perfect peace. A Christ makes change significant, fecund, and warm with conscious mutuality. He walks upon the sea of change. He calls unto Him those who are not afraid. Most men, alas, like Peter, are afraid; they sink heavily into the world of change, because they are not at peace with themselves and the world. They have not bound themselves joyously into the companionship of the Whole, where every life would support them, in as much as they would then be fitted into the magnetic pattern of the love that encompasses all — the pattern of the universal Harmony, that is God.
Harmony is the effulgence of love; the substance of mutuality. Harmony is the "becoming one" within the act of participation in the Whole. To experience truly Harmony, is to become consciously implied in the wholeness of the Whole. The Whole implies you; your activity implies the Whole. This is real sharing, boundless sharing — a current which stops nowhere, because it returns everywhere. The Whole flows into the part; the part "loves", as it focuses the Whole-in-act in the name of, and together with, all other parts sharing in the act and in the love. Every part is united with all other parts through that which makes it distinct from all other parts.
Distinct; not different. No one becomes greater by becoming different from all other men. Greatness comes from distinctness. What one has to say, that must be said distinctly, clearly, forcefully — in purity and in truth. Then the word that left the firm and vibrant lips speeds forth among all other distinct words. They are logos and they are truth. As they interact in mutuality of response and in participation of meanings, the vast resonance of the Whole organizes all truths and all tones into that all-encompassing Harmony which men who are wise in wonder and in awe understand to be God.
God is substantiated in love, even as He is expressed forth in selfhood. Love and Self are the two polarities of God, the two wings of the Bird of Eternity. Through Self that is changeless, the Divine Essence becomes substance and power in the infinite polyphony of a love in which unity demonstrates itself as mutuality, and the Whole is "made flesh" in change forever revealing in the total relatedness of space That which, in the wholeness of any and all cycles, IS.
To love is to bless change with the realization of inclusive eternity. It is to participate joyously in the Harmony wherein all selves become what they are by resounding to what everything is, while demonstrating in utmost distinctness that truth, that identity and that flame which constitute their share of responsibility within the universal Whole. Love establishes the sharing; God, the responsibility. Man becomes truly man as he understands both and fulfills both in that reciprocity of being which constantly renews and proclaims the common foundation of all activity and all consciousness.
To share, while remaining distinct; to be harmony, while retaining the indivisibility of self; to act out power, while losing none of objective wisdom; to swing rhythmically with the tides of change, while secure in the inalienability of that identity which is God's Presence in man; to love, yet to be at peace; to give all, yet forever increase the substance of one's external being — these are some of the many phases t-he test of mutuality includes. It is man's most poignant yearning, the yearning to love.
. . .And Jesus said: "Love one another". His eyes must have glowed with a great light as he said the words. His hands perhaps swayed, a little extended, as if to gather the vastness and the mystery of space. Yet, there must have been in the taut smile that glided over his lips a strange and subtle poignancy; for he knew — oh, how he must have known! — that the love he summoned into the midst of men would often be dark and heavy with the presence of death; that there would be pain and despair in hearts seeking in vain to grasp within themselves a space they could not contain — and not containing, would be lost. For "love" without "one another" is a sea haunted by ghosts of ships that found no harbor, and love without sharing is a deep fog — as self without love, a desertic waste.
But Jesus said: "Love one another". And his words rose to the stars. And the stars sang with joy; they, that forever move throughout spaces and times without end; they, that circle in the companionship and the mutuality of light, single but at peace, in that Harmony of the Spheres which men, who love greatly, in wonder and joy experience as God.
