It is not only the experience of being loved that is therapeutic

It is not only the experience of being loved that is therapeutic. The very response to love is therapeutic, too. This answering love is not directed towards some abstraction but towards the living, risen, cosmic Christ who is in our friends and our enemies, who is in the poor and the sick and the afflicted. And the experience of loving him in himself and in others, no less than the experience of being loved, is therapeutic in its consequences because it purifies the whole person- mind and memory and the unconscious. When one begins to love profoundly at a new level of awareness (as often happens in deep intimacy between a man and a woman) it may happen that latent or repressed forces rise to the surface of the mind: Hatred, jealousy, fear, insecurity, anger, suspicion, anxiety, unbridled eroticism, and the rest surge up from the murky depths of the unconscious. And all this, it is well known, can coexist with true love. This violence, unleashed in human relations, can be unleashed also in the divine- the two are not so distinct, and divine love is incarnate. And one is liberated only by continuing to love. By fixing one's heart on the cloud of unknowing with deep peace, one becomes detached from these turbulent uprisings; and then they wither and die, leaving only love. It is by loving at the ultimate point, by going beyond all categories to the deepest centre, that one is liberated from jealousy, and hatred and the rest. But this is an agonizing purification.

All this is particularly evident in that form of love which we call forgiveness. Most psychologists will agree that one of the most damaging traumas that can exist in the memory is suppressed anger and refusal to forgive. Because of early wounds, people refuse to accept others and to accept themselves and end up in emotional upheaval. Often the root problem is an unconscious refusal to love and forgive their parents. And this makes it difficult to love and forgive anyone: Because we are ever projecting parental images on to the people we meet. One may succeed in forgiving in the conscious mind (and this is enough for salvation) but the unconscious lags behind, leaving our love so much less human.

But through meditation a deeper level of awareness is opened up. Love and faith, if only they are present, can now seep down into the more profound caverns of consciousness and into the subtler layers of the mind, enabling one to love and forgive with a totality that was hitherto unthinkable. At the deep center now reached, one can pass beyond parental projections, childhood fears, and other obstructions, to meet the person of the other. When this is done and one forgives from the core of one's being, an enlightenment takes place in a moment of total reconciliation with the universe. Barriers fall down; no one and no thing is rejected; all is one. In the act of forgiveness one realizes that one is forgiven; one loses self-hatred (which is the source of every other hatred), one is healed in an act of love...

Then comes the liberation of the true self. When the Parent and the neurotic Child have perished from exhaustion or neglect, the natural Child, nurtured by this great love, rises up from the depths of one's being. This Child, unlike the other neurotic, is innocent, wondering, religious, artistic- the sources of creativity. This is the contemplative Child who is the subject of "samadhi" (Japanese: a state of heightened awareness) and ecstasy and the prayer of quiet. He now begins to love and to sing and to dance and to beget beauty. But above all, he cries out, "Abba, Father!" And in that moment of awakening we are healed.