What is Self-actualized Love
“Love is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable”-Victor Hugo
"Drop the idea that attachment and love is one thing. They are enemies. It is attachment that destroys all love. If you feed and nourish attachment, love will be destroyed; if you feed and nourish love, attachment will fall away by itself. They are not one; they are two separate entities, and antagonistic to each other." -Osho
The cornerstone of a self-actualized person's philosophy is always Love. Nothing a self-actualized person pursues can be possible without Love. Love for self, love for others, and love for one’s environment all must be in place before a self-actualized person can emerge.
First let me explain to you what Self-actualization is. The term was originally introduced by the theorist Kurt Goldstein for the motive to realize all of one's potentialities. In his view, it is the master motive of a human being. The concept was brought to prominence through Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory as the final level of psychological development that can be achieved when all basic needs have been fulfilled.
My definition of self-actualization is a state of heightened-awareness achieved when one has assimilated and understood the contradictory nature of reality through the seven arts of Self-inflicted Philosophy. By this definition a self-actualized person is a self-interrogator, a rebellious-creator, an infinite-player, a new-hero, a hypocritical-artist, and a new-layman all wrapped up into one open-minded, compassionate finite observer of an infinite reality.
My definition of self-actualized love is a mix of passion and freedom. It is welcomed and enjoyed; non-possessive, admiring, not needy, and pleasure-giving. It is never sated, doesn't require gratification, and generates little anxiety or hostility. Instead it generates abundance, creativity, understanding, open-mindedness, and hunger.
A self-actualized lover has a complete understanding of the male/female human condition; from the difference in hormones to the difference in neuronal mapping; from the difference in sex-drive to the difference in comfort needs. A self-actualized lover realizes that there is no dominance only difference; that the differences between the two sexes is its own beauty: the beauty of opposites; the beauty of the yin-yang; the beauty of anima and animus.
A self-actualized lover understands that mankind’s modern dilemma of love stems from a misunderstanding of nature itself. Modern man believes that he is separate from nature, that he is above nature, and that he has the “right” to conquer, control, consume, and destroy the landscape and any sustainable cultures living there. It is this misunderstanding of the way that nature works that has modern man believing that he can use and abuse love in the same way; by conquering, controlling, and eventually imprisoning love. A self-actualized lover seeks to reverse this cultural conditioning and societal brainwashing by acting like a sponge that soaks up the morass of human ignorance and turns it into love through emotional alchemy and love-mirroring.
At this level self-actualized lovers seek to fulfill each others purposes in life; to help each other realize their full potential. They seek to make each others highest values a reality. Their intimacy is devoted to individual need fulfillment, individual well-being, and relationship satisfaction. They realize that by loving the self (ego-love) they are more capable of mirroring such love onto others. Self-actualized lovers mirror their self-love onto each other, thereby creating a give and take, push and pull, inhale exhale, dance of human energy magnified by the aesthetic, the psychic, and the spiritual transference of difference to create a unification of human nature that transcends the self. This kills egotism, self-indulgence and narcissism in its tracks. It also plants the positive seed of compersion that eventually balances out the negativity of jealousy.
A self-actualized lover also understands the dark-side of love, the shadow that love can cast. They realize that pain is reciprocal to love; that pain is as much a side-effect of love as love is a side-effect of pain, but that such pain is a beautiful-pain in the sense that it is proof that they were capable of loving something more than themselves.
“Life is pain, princess. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.” –Dread Pirate Roberts (The Princess Bride)
It hurts when you lose somebody you love. It hurts when your love is not returned. It even hurts when you cannot return the love you know somebody else has for you. Pain and Love are reciprocal, and that's okay. One burns so the other may glow.
There's an old Greek myth:
The Greek gods were bored so they invented humans. They were still bored so they invented Love. Love drove them crazy, so they invented laughter.
And here we are.