How does Love relate to the “deepest kind of thinking” that I described in the previous posting, which leads to inner freedom (the ability to “be oneself”)? Many people suppose that they could have complete personal freedom, inner as well as outer, without treating other people in any particular way. Without necessarily treating them morally (for example), and certainly without loving them. We suppose that tyrants and other villains can be criticized for their immoral actions, but not (necessarily) for lacking inner freedom.

I think this is a mistake. It’s a mistake because the person who treats others badly, is making a sharp distinction between himself and the others. Himself, he’ll treat well; them, he’ll treat badly, when it’s convenient to do so. But when he constructs his life around this distinction, he  constructs his life very much around his relationship to others. The character of his life is determined by that relationship. But this means that (to that extent) the character of his life isn’t determined by him. It isn’t “self-determined.” Instead, to a significant extent, it’s determined by the boundary between himself and the others; and to the extent that it’s determined by that boundary, which is the boundary between him and the other people, it’s determined by the other people, as well as by him. And this means that he doesn’t have the inner freedom, the self-determination, that he probably would like to claim that he has.

This is why all the great spiritual teachers tell us that we need to treat others well. They don’t tell us this because they happen to care most of all about how we treat other people, rather than (say) about our being free. Rather, they tell us this because they know that we can’t be fully free, as long as we treat others badly, because treating others badly while we treat ourselves well involves being guided by that all-important boundary between us and the others, rather than being guided by ourselves, and thus it prevents us from being fully free (self-determining).

So the paradoxical result is that by treating others as we’d like to be treated ourselves (the Golden Rule), we’re able to be ourselves, much more than a villain can be. This is what it means to say, as mysticism does, that you and I are are “One.” We’re One because I can only really be me, by treating you well; and vice versa. My being guided by the boundary between us, by treating those on one side well and exploiting those on the other side, prevents me from being me. So that when I really am me and you really are you, It’s because we’ve ceased to be guided by that boundary, in that way. For practical purposes, of course, it will still be most effective (most of the time) for me to be in charge of my affairs, and you in charge of yours. But neither of us will feel, as villains do, that this means that the other person doesn’t matter, and can be exploited at will.

Famously, Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies. Is this because Jesus cares most of all about love, and doesn’t care about the difficulty and inconvenience of what he’s telling his followers to do? Or is it because Jesus cares about our freedom, and about love as the only way to find full freedom? If he cared about our freedom, this would explain why he clearly thinks that loving our enemies will make us better off. And as many of us have discovered, he’s absolutely right. Loving our enemies, or at any rate trying to forgive them and to realize that they’re human like we are, lightens our lives immensely and lets us open out and enjoy life and be effective in it in a way that we can’t do while we’re preoccupied with the terrible things that other people have done and are doing.

Please don’t tell me that Jesus is thinking that loving our enemies will make us better off because God will reward us for loving our enemies, by letting us go to heaven. Just try to love others as a way of getting to heaven! I don’t think you’ll succeed in doing it, because the project of loving others as a way of getting to heaven implies that what you really love is heaven, rather than the others. Whereas if you love others in order to be free, this means that you’ve discovered that you are in fact freer, when you’re not preoccupied with what’s yours versus what’s theirs, but do what you can to benefit everyone. You’ve discovered the way in which truly being yourself makes the boundary between you and me irrelevant. You’ve discovered that your own freedom, and your love of others (as well as yourself), are really the same thing.

This, then, is why mystics report that they’re liberated—made incomparably more free—by leaving behind the normal human preoccupation with what’s mine versus what’s yours, and how to increase what’s mine, and so forth. When those preoccupations are gone, we can unfold our personal capacities out of themselves, rather than out of fear and greed. We all have glimpses of this, in our moments of pure “public spirit.” The mystic (the Buddha, St. Francis, Jelaluddin Rumi, Meister Eckhart, Saint Theresa) has nothing else.

It’s also (I think) why Plato connects Love very closely to deep thought and personal freedom, in his Symposium and his Phaedrus. Plato’s way of talking isn’t the same as Jesus’s or the Buddha’s, but the upshot in all three cases, when you think it through, seems remarkably similar. I wrote a couple of chapters in The God of Love, Science, and Inner Freedom about how love relates to freedom, in Plato.