Since the dawn of history well-intentioned people have devised systems whose aim was to save the world by means of love. Less ambitious people have never tired of seeking personal salvation by the same means. But how could anything be achieved by love?
Do not love and hate constitute one whole? Can they be separated? It would be like walking upstairs with one foot remaining on the ground. The same kindly optimists advise their fellows to conquer hate by love. But can treble counter base? You can thump one set of keys harder, that is all.
In order that what these well-intentioned people seek may be achieved it should be necessary to transcend both love and hate - since they are one. But that too surely is just a romantic notion, for who is there to transcend what, and by what means? The human will? Springes to catch wodecockes!
Love and hate cannot be experienced simultaneously, any more than any thoughts or emotions: how can two independent perceptions be transcended? But if we regard them one after the other, realising that they are one, we can see that they cancel one another and so cease to appear to exist as either the one or the other. What is left is neither, but just affectivity, pure affectivity, the essence of both. Love and hate are powerless, except in imagination since they are works of imagination: pure affectivity is unlimited in power - since it is the atmosphere of reality itself. That is what they mean who seek to save the world, or themselves, by means of love. But never could they do it by what they know as love, alone, which is as powerless as any dream-gesture. They may cite great teachers, but such teachers surely knew the truth and, alas, their words have passed through many mouths and have been deformed by many hands, disciples who only partially understood.
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Pure affectivity, however, is not reality itself, but only one element of a dual aspect thereof. The complementary element is pure cognition.
Knowledge and ignorance represent a duality that cancels out like love and hate, leaving an essence that we may term pure cognition, which is as powerful as pure affectivity, being also an aspect of reality. But, like that, it is not reality itself, but one element of a dual aspect thereof.
Just as reality cannot be experienced by the emotion of love, renamed for the occasion devotion, which is the flaw in all dualistic religions, so reality cannot be experienced by intellectual means, called knowledge in this context. This is, no doubt, the explanation of so many failures on the part of the only saintly or the only wise.
These two dual aspects of reality itself, which I have termed pure affectivity and pure cognition, karuna and prajna, must also be 'transcended' in order to integrate reality. But even here two independent percepts cannot be experienced simultaneously, and so cannot in effect be 'transcended', not even by the concepts that we are! They must be seen as complementaries, and they too must be seen as one whole.
That is surely the nameless reality that the Buddha knew.
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Discouraging? Whyever? Anyone who has read this book so far should be able to dispose of the twin notions of love-and-hate, knowledge-and-ignorance, in that twinkling of the mind that is called intuition. Having arrived thus at a realisation of pure-affectivity-and-pure-cognition, we have only to lay ourselves open to that awareness which ignores thought - for the final comprehension is not a concept but just the essence of consciousness.
We cannot seize it? Of course not: we are it.
