In his journeys in infinity, Robert Monroe experienced a perspective of our world as a colony that refined the commodity of love, which he called loosh. This, he discovered, is why we are here, that the real reason for our sojourn through life in this world is to refine love. But how do we do that?

The notion of refining love suggests a developmental process for love, spanning its first coming alive in gross matter, at physical birth, to its subtly refined pure, spirit-energy state at physical death. Refined love is the one thing you really can take with you! Furthermore, the energy of refined love is the fuel for total acceptance, the key to wholeness. Everything that is, is part of the whole. If you cannot accept something, you cannot be whole.

Our world provides the ideal framework for this refinement process. Psychology teaches us about the absolute necessity for an infant to attach to a secure love object to move forward into life in this world. Rene Spitz, an early pioneer in attachment theory, discovered that institutionalized babies, separated from their mothers beyond three months, sank into what he identified as a progressive anaclitic depression, which often resulted in failure to thrive and death.

To survive and thrive in this world we must attach. Our emotional attachments in this world are the playing field for the refinement of love. Ironically, to achieve the maximum refinement of love required for it to transcend physical death ultimately requires us to completely detach from the physical dimension and all the objects we have loved. Many departed souls struggle with this challenge on the astral plane, especially if they haven’t reached that level of physically letting go during the dying process.

The primal necessity for attachment to a secure object can be transferred to a host of objects, including one’s physical body. For example, rhythmic rocking behavior in children enables a self-soothing behavior that somewhat autonomously satisfies the need for comfort from a secure other person. Freud illumined fixation upon particular erogenous zones of the body as serving similar self-soothing functions. 

Attachment to screens, even in very young children, can provide a sense of primal connection with an energetically vibrant and stimulating other. The pleasure derived from food and substance can serve as a displaced soothing interaction with a secure love object.

As Gabor Mate suggests, addiction is persistence of attachment to any object or habit that offers soothing connection, in spite of its destructive consequences. From this perspective, the task of recovery is a refinement of love that withdraws the outer projection of maladaptive connection into the ability to truly love the self.  

Psychiatrist and pediatrician, Margret Mahler described the achievement of object constancy as the internalization of the outer primary love object into a stable inner sub-personality that can soothe the child from within. Thus, if mother is not in the vicinity, the internalized mother image can bring calm and reassurance that she will return. Emotional object constancy refines love into an inner ability to love and accept both the good and the bad of self and other.

Emotional object constancy is also the foundation for the adult self, as the parenting functions of emotional regulation are now in the inner hands of the growing personality. The greatest challenge for the adult is to refine its critical judgment of itself, and others, into total acceptance of everything and everyone. Love is all-embracing.

To accept and love all, does not mean that boundaries are not necessary. We can love people who must be stopped. We can abandon people physically who must assume responsibility for themselves, yet we can still love and accept them with equanimity. Total acceptance is wholeness, even when some parts of the whole may need to occupy different places for the overall balance and welfare of the whole.

Perhaps the most challenging arena of acceptance is self-acceptance. When we recapitulate our lives, we are asked to completely accept everything we have done and that was done to us. This is not about seeing someone’s potential bright side to find greater acceptance of their dark side. This is full-on acceptance of the total truth, in its full ruthlessness, of what we have done and what has been done to us. This is acceptance completely devoid of shame and blame.

The shamans of ancient Mexico imagined the force behind our loosh/love colony to be a great Eagle that consumes the experience of our refined love journey to enhance its own evolution. The Eagle grants souls continued love journeys in infinity, once they arrive at total acceptance of their complete love journey while in the sojourn of human form.

The journey always continues and love lives on.

Refining love and acceptance,
Chuck