Love [2]: Human love has to adjust to reason

Human love is much higher than all these lower forms of love because human beings have fully developed consciousness.  Though human love is continuous with the lower subhuman forms of love, in one way it is different from them. For henceforth its operations have to be carried on side by side with a new factor, which is reason.

Human love can enter into three types of combination with reason.

In the first type, the sphere of thought and the sphere of love are kept as separate as possible; that is, the sphere of love is practically inaccessible to the operation of reason, and love is allowed little or no access to the sphere of thought. Complete separation between these two aspects of the spirit is of course never possible. But when there is an alternate functioning of love and reason (oscillating in their predominance), we have love that is unillumined by reason or reason unenlivened by love.

In the second type, love and reason are both simultaneously operative, but they do not work in harmony with each other. Though this conflict creates confusion, it is a necessary phase in the evolution of the higher state where there is a real synthesis of love and reason.

In the third type of love, this synthesis between love and reason is an accomplished fact, with the result that both love and reason are so completely transformed that they precipitate the emergence of a new level of consciousness that, compared to the normal human consciousness, is best described as superconsciousness.

-Discourses 7th Ed., p111

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