One of the deep and universal principles of spiritual wisdom states that the wellbeing and fulfillment we seek in life cannot, and will never, be found in this world. Many religions misunderstand this principle to mean that our salvation lies elsewhere or awaits us in the afterlife, in another world beyond this one.
Any interpretation that advises us to renounce the world and fix our devotion on supernatural, heavenly, or otherworldly things is a contradiction of wisdom’s vision. Tragically, although most religions originated in this vision and its profound insights into the nature of Reality and our human promise, too many of them, and too soon, lost its compass and got distracted from the path into deathtraps of dogmatism, conviction, and power politics.
The grand vision of the spiritual wisdom tradition, better known as the Perennial Philosophy or Sophia Perennis, honors the human spirit in each of us as a force of creative freedom that seeks, desires, and drives our quest for wellbeing and fulfillment. This quest is frequently frustrated by the lesser ambitions of our ego, the unique and separate “I” who is busy being somebody special and chasing after happiness.
Spiritual wisdom invites and challenges us neither to renounce nor glorify the ego, but to reach out from its personal center for a more genuine connection with others.
Our Longing for Perfect Love
Love has been a human fascination probably for as long as we’ve been reflecting on things that matter most in life. The early Christian movement was so bold as to even identify it with God – not in terms of a god who is loving, but as the supreme Reality behind, within, and beyond everything (“God IS love,” 1 John 4:8).
In its subsequent history, the Christian Church would abandon this profound insight into the divine nature of love for a realpolitik that could justify its ambitions for world domination. Perhaps it is in the very design dynamics of organized religion, that the love of power in hierarchical authority should take the upper hand to the power of love in basic human fellow-feeling.
Jesus himself lived in devotion to the power of love. In the end, however, it was the love of power at work in the political ideology and religious orthodoxy of those who resisted his message that put him away, launching the early messianic movement in his name.
In other posts I refer to this ideal power of love in human relationships as “genuine” love, with its connotations of authentic and real, distinguishing bona fide love from cheap knockoffs and sugary substitutes. Here I am using the adjective “perfect,” but not in the sense of something absolute, transcendent, or meticulously airbrushed of every imperfection.
The word “perfect” has surprisingly little to nothing in its original meaning of the flawless ideal, but rather refers to what is finished or brought to completion. Perfect love, then, is love that has been cultivated into the full flower of relational harmony and communal wholeness. It is decidedly not the “perfect partner” contemplated in mythology, conjured in our dreams, and pursued on dating apps.
There is no perfect partner; and yet, perfect love can be nurtured between and among very imperfect persons.
Once again, the principal difference in these competing concepts of love has to do with whether our perspective is centered in the (personal) ego or the (human) spirit. Our longing for perfect love is an aspiration of the human spirit, anchored by an intuition of essential oneness in the depths of Being itself. This deeper oneness is axiomatic in the spiritual wisdom tradition of Sophia Perennis.
All things originated and are presently rooted in this grounding mystery of Being. Which also means that everything is connected, not just externally by the logistics of cause and effect, but internally through the more subtle vibrational field of communion.
In fact, communion has been our experience from the beginning, far below and prior to self-conscious awareness.
With the rise into ego consciousness, this intuition of communion was lost – symbolized in the myths as a fall or exile from an original paradisal state. Rather than interpreting the tethered detachment of self-consciousness from the deeper animate consciousness of the body as a move in the wrong direction, however, we can appreciate it as the necessary precondition of just about everything uniquely and profoundly human.
Ego provides the position from whence conscious awareness can drop into inner peace, rise to higher purpose, probe for deeper meaning, and connect in perfect love.
Ego formation opens up the frontier of interpersonal relationships – which, it should be obvious, are not possible without egoic personalities – and it is here that the human spirit’s longing for perfect love can find fulfillment.
Perfect (complete, finished, and fully actualized) love is where the communion of deeper oneness is refracted though individual persons and across the divide of what makes one unique and different from another, transforming it into the distinct frequencies of compassion, kindness, generosity, goodwill, trust, fidelity and forgiveness.
Such a flourishing of perfect love remains only a spiritual longing if it happens that the egos on stage are neurotically insecure, codependently attached, and consequently incapable of transcending their individual fixations for the higher wholeness of genuine community. It’s here that we find all those counterfeit forms of love, so many lures on the hook of self-indulgence.
The spiritual mystery is this process whereby the deeper oneness of communion transforms into the higher wholeness of community, facilitated by the “conductor” of a stable, centered, balanced and self-transcending ego.
The perfect love of community is only possible to the degree we can get over ourselves.
Other Posts in This Series:
Tracts of Revolution 
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