The fear of love

Spinoza is considered the most beloved philosopher. He wasn’t the most intellectually strong but he is considered the most ethical philosopher of all time. He wasn’t born a Jew but left his religion, which caused assassination attempts and persecution for the rest of his life.  His radical ethics meant that Christians hated him too. He was so hated that other philosophers who inherited his ideas could not properly credit him for fear of persecution themselves. However he was known to be totally loved by anyone who personally knew him.

He had an unusual disinterest in money. He said that a person who lives in poverty and chastity had an over-abundance of something else. 

His philosophy was designed to teach us how to live without fear. He had some radical ideas: there is no absolute good or evil. Everything coming from inside of us is good and everything acting on us from outside is bad. God has no knowledge of evil because he contains no evil. Evil is separateness from god and the whole. We act selfishly but we are happiest when we sense our connection to everything else. He believed passion only happened when an external thing was overpowering us. When we want revenge we are overpowered by the person that makes us angry. In our ambition it’s the desire for approval from a parent.

He followed his own rules, and was never found to be irritated or moved to anger. Even on his deathbed he was not afraid, but happily making conversation with the people around Him.

When we get emotional for the past or future, he considers it irrational because in ultimate truth, there is no past or future, only the moment. Anything that makes us emotional for the past is regret and for the future is anxiety. I think about good memories with my brother who passed away and I feel that his love is still alive in the present. I get sad about some ex boyfriend and realize this is regret, which is a projection of his regret, and was an irrational force acting outside of me.

When we contemplate god, when we think about him, we are connected to him, and that connection is love, so thinking about him is the same as loving god. What perplexed many other brilliant philosophers is when Spinoza says that it is impossible to love god and want god to love us. To many people this implies that we love god but god does not love us back. He was criticized for self abnegation. 

But the desire for someone to love us implies a lack and separation, which implies that it is a passion, which implies that there is a force acting outside of us that overpower us and separate us from gods love. If god already loves us we wouldn’t need to desire it.

I cannot love someone and desire that they love me back. Love is binary, you either are in love or you are not. You are in connection or you are not. 

Wanting someone to love us back, wanting to be attractive and desired, is a state of fear, for the ghost of someone or something overpowering us. It also implies that we have no control of someone else desiring us, because we cannot ourselves go from a state of fear to the resolution of fear. We only go from performance to more performance if we head down that path, from a state of fear to a deeper state of fear, no matter how much we convince ourselves that we are not. Then the desire to be loved is actually the fear of love, or love of fear, because they are the same thing. 

There is only love, only oneness, only one state of connection.