Is it really love all the way down?

How God hurts itself

The most useful thing I’ve heard in the last few months was in a podcast with Stephen Zerfas, the founder of the meditation/tech startup, jhourney.io. He was talking about what mystics across traditions tend to have in common; the qualia of genuine spiritual experiences.

“The mystics are sort of having these kinds of experiences and developing these sorts of tools to point at this... difficult idea of spotting and releasing mental tension, or awareness and love all the way down, or recursive self-acceptance — those are kind of the three ways we like to say the same thing on retreat.”

This is worth sharing in itself. But what it stirred up for me in conversation with a friend a few days later is a question I keep circling back to: is it really “love all the way down”? And if so, what are we actually talking about when we say that?

---

I once heard a definition of evil that stuck with me. Evil is God hurting itself, without realising it is God. A few lines of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem “Please Call Me By My True Names” says it better:

“I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am also the pirate,
my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.”

The perpetrator acts upon the victim, not realising the victim is itself. For me, this is what non-duality points at. Not the clunky “I am you, you are me, there is no self.”

It’s more that there is no subject (me) experiencing an object (you). There is only experiencing, and the self that experiences is in itself part of the experience.

And yet something about the “love all the way down” framing irks me. It feels too easy and oversimplified. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

I think part of the reason is because this is probably not the love we talk about in ordinary conversation; not the warm, positive affect we feel when someone we care about gently touches our arm.

Love in this case is not an emotion. I think it’s a recognition, a state of beholding. My best working definition is “unconditional acceptance of what is”. It’s a feeling of being at one with everything, leaning into the dissolution of separateness.

And that brings with it some shadowy muck that is definitely not warm and fuzzy. “And I am also the pirate”.

Not a pleasant thought. And therefore I do not judge the pirate.

Kahlil Gibran echoes a similar sentiment in The Prophet:

“And one of the elders of the city said,
Speak to us of Good and Evil.
And he answered:
Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves,
and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.”

Maybe it’s actually paradox all the way down?

And accepting that paradox is the hard part.