Yeshua's Primary Question - Part 5

Ironically, what does serve as the bridge between Heaven and Earth are these very "lesser loves". As Rumi so deftly pointed out, the elixir is hidden in the poison. Mystical Jewish thought proclaims that humanity's unique position is our capacity for dialogue. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz describes the unique aptitude of humanity by contrasting it with the angelic capacities:

The real difference between man and angel is not the fact that man has a body, because the essential comparison is between the human soul and the angel. The soul of man is most complex and includes a whole world of different existential elements of all kinds, while the angel is a being of single essence and therefore in a sense one-dimensional.

Angels are monological beings. They can speak with only one true voice. Each individual angel, according to kabbalistic thought, has a unique voice but can only speak that particular language. Hence, angels cannot really communicate; they pronounce and proclaim, but they can only do monologue. Of all God's creation, only humans are multilingual in the sense I am describing. We can speak and even translate from many voices, both from above and below. We have the ability to stand in the doorway as conduits of Love between these two seemingly separate worlds. These many "Earthly" voices that care called Legion are not evil in and of themselves but become so as they are fractured, divisive, clung to, and disharmonious. We lose our fluency when our gift of harmonizing is forgotten or obscured. The result is a cacophony that we know as "self". Koan work is not to flee from this chaos, but to enter into it. By our kenotic presence to these many "lesser loves", agape necessarily emerges.

Like Eskimos with their very rich and textured language for snow and ice, we can language our love in its full panoply, but realizing that the palette from which we paint is Conscious Love. The palette itself is useless without the rainbow spectrum of colors it holds. The koan directs us to be the vessels that can know, in a trans-rational way, all the loves we hold and bear.