Chapter 8Human Relations and the Spiritual Life · Vital Love and Psychic Love

Ordinary human love is vital, emotional and physical and always egoistic — a form of self-love. The psychic element is very small except in a few.

* Human love is mainly vital, when it is not vital and physical together. It is also sometimes psychic + vital. But the Love with a dominant psychic element is rare.

* It is difficult to define its [psychic love’s] limits or to recognise it. For even when there is the psychic love for another person, it gets in the human being so mixed up with the vital that it is the commonest thing to justify a vital love by claiming for it a psychic character. One could say that psychic love is distinguished by an essential purity and selflessness — but the vital can put on a very brilliant imitation of that character, when it likes.

* It depends on what you mean by psychic “love”. One can have a psychic feeling for all beings; it does not depend on sex nor has it anything sexual in it.

* There is a fundamental psychic feeling which is the same for all; but there can also be a special psychic feeling for one or another.

* It [psychic love] is sometimes turned to the human person, but it never gets its true satisfaction till it turns to the Divine.

* Men are necessarily separated by the individualisation of their nature and can only establish contacts there. In the psychic being one gets the sense of oneness by psychic sympathy, but not any unification, for the psychic is the individual soul and must unify itself with the Divine before it can through the Divine unify with others. In spiritual realisation there are two quite opposite forms — one in which one withdraws from all outer things including all material beings in the world to merge in the Divine and one in which one feels the Self or the Divine in all and through that realisation attains to a universal oneness.

* Certainly, as the psychic attitude develops it is bound to have an effect not only on oneself but on the relations with others.