MASLOW, AH. _The Farther Reaches of Human Nature_   SBN 670-000-360-3
pg 142-144 chapter 9 "Notes on Being-Psychology"

V. How can Being-Love Bring Disinterest, Neutrality,
   Detachment, Greater Perspicuity?

When does Love sometimes bring blindness? When does it mean greater and
when lesser perspicuity?

The point at which a corner is turned is when the love becomes so great and
so pure (unambivalent) for the object itself that its good is what we
want, not what it can do for us, i.e., when it passes beyond being means and
becomes an end (with our permission). As with the apple tree, for instance:
We can love it so much that we don't want it to be anything else; we are
happy with it as it is. Anything that interferes with it ("butts in") can do
only harm and make it less an apple tree, or less perfectly living by
its own intrinsic, inherent rules. It can look so perfect that we're afraid
to touch it for fear of lessening it. Certainly, if it is seen as perfect,
there is no possibility of improving it. As a matter of fact, the effort to
improve (or decorate, etc.) is itself a proof that the object is seen as
less than perfect, that the picture of "perfect development" in the
improver's head is conceived by him to be better than the final end of the
apple tree itself; i.e., he can do better than the apple tree, he knows
better; he can shape it better than it can itself. So we feel
half-consciously that the dog-improver is not really a dog-lover. The real
dog-lover will be enraged by the tail cropping, the ear cropping or shaping,
the selective breeding that makes this dog fit a pattern from some magazine,
at the cost of making it nervous, sick, sterile unable to give birth
normally, epileptic, etc. (and yet such people do call themselves
dog-lovers.) Same for people who train dwarf-trees, or teach bears to ride a
bicycle, or chimpanzees to smoke cigarettes.

Real love then is (sometimes at least) noninterfering and nondemanding and
can delight in the thing itself; therefore, it can gaze at the object
without guile, design, or calculation of any selfish kind. This makes for
less abstracting (or selecting of parts or attributes or singles
characteristics of the object), less viewing of less-than-the-whole, less
atomizing or dissecting. This is the same as saying that there is less active
or Procrustean structuring, organizing, shaping, molding, or
fitting-to-theory, or to a preconception; i.e., that object remains more
whole, more unified, which amounts to saying, more itself. The object is
less measured against criteria of relevance or irrelevance, importance or
unimportance, figure or ground, useful or useless, dangerous or not-dangerous,
valuable or valueless, profit or no-profit, good or bad or other criteria
of selfish human perceiving. Also the object is less apt to be rubricized,
classified, or placed ina  historical sequence, or seen as simply a
member of a class, as a sample, or instance of a type.

This means that all the (unimportant was well as important) aspects or
characteristics of (holistic) parts of the object (peripheral as well as
central) are more pat to be given equal care or attention, and that every
part is apt to be delightful and wonderful. Being-love, whether of a lover,
or a baby or a painting or a flower, almost always guarantees this kind of
distributed looking-with-care-intense-and-fascinated.

Seen in this holsitic context, little flaws are apt to be seen as "cute,"
charming, endearing, because idiosyncratic, because they give character
and individuality to the object, because they make it
what-it-is-rather-than-something-else, perhaps also just because they are
unimportant, peripheral, nonessential.

Therefore, the Being-lover (Being-cognizer) will see details that will evade
the Deficiency-Lover or nonlover. Also he will more easily see the per se
nature of the object itself, in its own right and in its own style of being.
Its own delicate and cartilaginous structure is more likely to be yielded
to by receptive looking, which is nonactive, noninterfering, less arrogant.
That is, its perceived shape is more determined by its own shape when
Being-cognized than when a structure is imperiously imposed upon it by the
perceiver, who will therefore be more likely to be too brusque, too
impatient, too much the butcher hacking a carcass apart, for his own
appetite, too much the conquerer demanding unconditional surrender, too
much the sculptor modelling clay which has no structure of its own.