On Love

On Love

Caleb Gattegno

Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.

First published in the United States of America in 1977. Reprinted in 2010.

Copyright Š 1977-2010 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. Author: Caleb Gattegno All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-87825-245-9 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. 2nd Floor 99 University Place, New York, N.Y. 10003-4555 www.EducationalSolutions.com

Acknowledgments Close friends of mine have advised me about improving the language in a number of places in order to make my thought clearer. I would like to thank them here, particularly Roz Blanck who was the first to make suggestions.

As usual, my secretary Yolanda Maranga showed how much patience she has for handling my handwritten texts and the corrected ones she receives after editors make their suggestions.

As usual too I must extend my thanks to her for her vigilance and care in making the text ready for duplication.

Table of Contents Preface ........................................................................ 1 On Love ....................................................................... 5 Can We Understand Love........................................................5 A State of Being ...................................................................... 6 Love-Attachment ....................................................................7 Longing .................................................................................. 8 Pull of the Past ....................................................................... 9 Projection Into the Future ....................................................10 Three Categories of Love ...................................................... 11 The Impact of the Beloved ....................................................12 Evocations in Relationship ...................................................13 Masses of Energy ..................................................................14 The Sense of Truth in Love ...................................................14 Love in One’s Evolution ........................................................ 15 Infatuation ............................................................................19 The Creation of the Couple .................................................. 20 Affection ................................................................................21 Tenderness and Passion ...................................................... 22 Romantic Love ..................................................................... 23 Love and Sex ........................................................................ 25 Love-Making ........................................................................ 28 Friendship ............................................................................ 35 Universal Love ..................................................................... 40

The Spectrum of Love .......................................................... 43 Falling in Love ......................................................................48 Complexity and Relating ...................................................... 52 Outgrowing Egocentricity .................................................... 53 Love-Relations ..................................................................... 58 A Dimension of My Self ........................................................ 62 Glossary …………………………………………………………….69 Further Readings ………………………………………………...75

Preface

Like everyone else, I know that love has occupied a big place in my life. Like everyone else I have had plenty of opportunities to consider it: in my flesh, in my mind, in discussions with living people and with writers of all ages, times and places.

But since one life is too short to know in a comprehensive manner that which needs to be lived by mankind as a whole so as to be known, I was prepared to sail through this life and know of love only that limited area which my actual life would bring to me.

Yet, in the way encounters open up one's heart to a new life, a neutral question came to me recently and invited me to revise all I thought I knew of love. The question I faced was: what could I learn about love if I considered it as an attribute of the self and looked at it in terms of energy? With this question I start the body of this writing.

An essay like this one (which I could have entitled: “Phenomenology of Love�) is, at every moment, a personal 1

On Love

statement, even if the first person pronoun is used only occasionally. It therefore takes me back to what I said above, that is, no claim is made to speak on everybody's behalf. In this essay much more of what could be said about love will be left out than taken in. I do not see that it could be otherwise. So, my essay's contribution is mainly to place readers in front of my deliberate attempt to present them with what resulted from my asking seriously the question above. What I know is that as a result of this study, I feel that I became much clearer on many issues I had left to chance to develop, and I see that the question was a useful one for me in my quest for understanding love.

Perhaps readers will find it useful too.

As I wrote, I also saw that I could have made the essay into a much longer, more detailed and more explicit study including several developments of points barely touched upon in the text I am publishing. On reflection, rather than try to do justice as a scientist to the subject studied, at this time at least, I want to leave it in the format of a longish essay made to stimulate discussion and self-examination. I believe there is room for meeting readers in this way. If they cared to let me know that I did meet them I would certainly be grateful for the trouble they would take.

Since the vocabulary I use in this writing has been in circulation in my other studies for more than 30 years, I did not feel the need for a glossary, but my friends who looked at my manuscript felt that a few definitions should be made available to avoid ambiguities. A glossary has been placed at the end of the text so

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that its continuity is not broken by references to footnotes. The order given to these special terms in the glossary corresponds to the order in which they appear for the first time in the text, and they are indicated by a *.

I dedicate this writing to my wife Shakti, who knows much more than I do and certainly knows different properties of the self in love than have been revealed to me. It is my hope that she will be encouraged to share soon with my readers her insights, her awarenesses, her certainties.

C. Gattegno New York City September, 1976

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On Love

Can We Understand Love Can we understand love in terms of the self* and energy*?

Will it add anything to our understanding of love?

This writing aims at answering these questions.

If it is true that man is man because he can become aware of himself, and if this means aware of his “self� and its energy, then it is likely that love will be met anew if one can know it in such terms.

The self, endowed with awareness, can know any one of its own movements that structures its time; and love is one of them.

Indeed as soon as one is in love one knows love as an attribute of oneself, as something that has affected the self, not parts of oneself or of one's self. Because of this elementary observation 5 Â

On Love

there is no doubt that love is a property of the self. But more than this, because love can be known to the idiot or the genius, to the poor or the rich, the ugly or the beautiful and because love transcends religion, country, climate and all cultural distinctions, it must be an attribute of the most primitive endowment of men and women. And none is more so than the human self.

In my other writings I have singled out some of the attributes of the self. Awareness*, will*, retention, recognition, intelligence, imaging and imagining, all have been described and somehow known in terms of energy. The psyche*, affectivity* and the ego* have been easily recognized as such. It is clear that longing can also be seen in the same light. We have to come back to all of them to understand them better so as to reach the reality of love which must be akin to them all, since experiential awareness links love to all of them; and to pain, joy and pleasure too.

A State of Being One first condition for a proper study of love is to be with it as a state and not as an idea or an abstract relationship existing in some couples.

Stressing the importance of another being in oneself is clearly a mobilization of energy for that self. An energy kept aside, reserved for that person. This does not exclude that one can love a number of people, forming with each of them a separate

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On Love

distinct couple. The problem is not more complicated because more than one couple exists involving one self. Perhaps, if such couples exist in fact, it may be even easier to know better what love is actually, because what is found in one can be tested in the others. Because of the fact that in terms of time we spontaneously give of ourselves to some people — thinking of them, feeling with them and about them — we shall consider here the time component to be the presence of the self in a relationship, feeding it and transferring to it the free energy that is in the self. Thus receiving some of the energy of the self, love flourishes in time.

Love-Attachment It is already clear that in love-attachment, psychic energy — which is also energy of the self (but not free) — is present and in such quantities sometimes, that it creates obsessions, permanent consumption of one's time and energy in going over that which automatically creates impasses for the couple or for one of the partners. One feels the uneconomical use of one's energy going round and round, but one still does it creating for oneself the distinct feeling that something is wrong in one's functioning. The expression “If only . . . ” makes its appearance because the self knows intimately that love is energy, but it has not been able to articulate it affectively.

We may be able to learn a great deal about love as energy, as an attribute of the self, if we begin with love-attachment. But we shall only resort to this if we can not manage to do it directly by

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On Love

being with love as a proper functioning of the self, not deviated to serve other purposes created by the psyche.

It is clear that love is known consciously outside the immediate family or community environment in which one is born. Later on, after one has known love with someone outside the clan, one can return to the relationships in the clan with persons one says one loves, and find out the similarities and the differences. To love somebody outside is a surprise to one's self. But as soon as it happens, one discovers that in oneself there was that spiritual space available which is now occupied by the beloved one.

Energy is needed to keep the space vacant. It is experienced on other occasions as a longing, a yearning, which obviously is an energy move associated with affectivity.

Longing Entertaining longing is a functioning of the self; to offer one sample of it to the self, a function of affectivity. Indeed, the mere fact that the longing is experienced as involving the somatic and psychic components, that is, the presence of someone akin to ourselves and capable of spontaneously mobilizing psychosomatic functionings, tells us that longing can be looked at as energy in the move of whose dynamics the self can become aware. This awareness is experienced by the self as intimacy which allows us to return to our state of nakedness known in babyhood in which there are no inhibitions with respect to the beloved one. There is energy in the flow of affection. There is energy in the putting aside of inhibitions which spontaneously

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On Love

operate in other circumstances. Both affection and inhibitions, are differently directed by the self, and both are differently known.

In the sexual expression of love between grownups there is consumption of energy and a complex dynamics which we shall look into later on. But sex is only one of the concomitants of love within the self engaged in living love.

Because human beings are complex and every one of their inner moves involves several functionings (the psyche as one's mental past, the soma* with all its objectivations* and functions, affectivity with its creation of hopes, projections, illusions and special dynamics), we cannot understand love as lived until we reach a certain stage in our spiritual evolution.

Pull of the Past Through the psyche, love seems more to consume and absorb energy than produce it as it does when affectivity is dominant.

In love-attachment, where the future is solely required to reproduce the past, the energy cycle seems sufficient to keep the energy of the psyche at the center. It is circular because time goes on, and one does not want to participate in change, thus bringing back all moves to the starting point, consuming the energy in keeping up with all the pulls and pushes so that only one aspect of oneself at work is lighted in one's awareness. Then, marking time, which takes energy in idling, is considered

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On Love

progress, particularly if one sees that the changes are kept in check and one can believe that permanence of what one holds as satisfactory exists.

Projection into the Future Through affectivity, love as an illusion requires energy for one's flights towards the presumed future. Unloaded from the pulls of the past, the energy moves seem lighter than in loveattachments. Infatuation, an expression of affectivity, is always experienced as a good thing happening to oneself. Indeed, because the vector of the energy is not yet identified with a feeling that a status quo must be preserved, because the vector is actually seen to be a pursuit, to be a conquest of something to come, the self gets engaged wholeheartedly in creating the time, the arrangements of events which would produce the desired encounters. In the desires there is energy held in reserve. In the efforts to arrange events there is energy of a kind known in social action, in acting, in being attentive to a number of components involving the beloved one, as well as the social fabric around oneself and the beloved one.

Affectivity is not free energy but energy that the self keeps in contact with the objectified. Although it operates at the service of the immediate future, it can mobilize the psyche to make it contribute all it commands in the soma and in the mind. Images are energy; imagination adds its dynamics to images; desires stir the imagination and through them the soma contributes its heavier functions. As the psyche yields its precedence to

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affectivity, it does not bring out the stress on the past and one can experience the happiness that goes with being creative in this kind of love and in entering the new.

Three Categories of Love In the three possible moves which link affectivity and the psyche we find the three categories of love known to most pre-humans* of which the literature is full. Either we experience the flight where affectivity and the future are in charge, or we know attachment in which the psyche and the past are in charge, or we see an oscillation where the psyche and affectivity take turns to color one's love, one's life. In this third case, the most common one, one's temperament installs in one's memory either the components that stress the tragic, the difficult, the demanding, or those that stress the expectancy of being together, of receiving and giving attention, of the feeling that one is succeeding in one's love-life. The oscillations being as real as the extreme positions, one has to devote energy in trying to know how things do change, how one could stop the movements towards what one does not like.

So far we have seen love as it appears when it operates at the level of residual energy (i.e. either the psyche, or affectivity, or oscillation of the two), in contact with locked up energy in the form of the soma and all sorts of mental and somatic objectivations. One may live at this level without any consciousness* of the self at work. In humans, the self copes consciously with the here-and-now as well. This happens when the self becomes

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On Love

aware that free energy is available to be poured into that which seems inadequate without it. With the flow of free energy, the self meets consciously the challenges encountered.

The Impact of the Beloved Love in humans aware of themselves may offer us a new and utterly different way of being. In this neither the psyche nor affectivity dominates, nor is there a pendular behavior between being in one state and then in the other.

The free energy of the self, when present, becomes operative 1

in stopping any of the moves in one which indicate that the momentum originates somewhere else than in one's consciousness, and

2 in nourishing the presence of the consciousness in every one of the sensitivities and functionings called in by the impact of the beloved.

If the impact comes from the concrete presence of the person with whom one is involved, then the presence of love in the self is known because it affects one's thinking, one's feelings, one's physical and mental moves. If the impact results from the potential presence of the beloved one, then the self can watch how the dialogue with him or her reflects one's being in awareness of the other. Is there the slightest pressure associated with the evocation? Is one experiencing that masses of energy are being displaced in one's bag*? Is the dominant tone of the

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energy that which one will call free? Are there subtle moves telling one that one has evolved in one's knowing of love, of the beloved one, and of oneself? Are the stresses felt as minute movements of energy within the self but resulting in a definite perception that one now is mainly concerned with being human in one's love?

Each of these is worthy of our attention.

Evocations in Relationship Evocation is a mobilization of energy within one for a specific purpose. It is a genuine movement in the self that can be scanned by the self (and only by the self) to examine whether in it there are particular features which inform on the relationship even better than does the beloved one aware of what he or she is receiving in the actual presence of the other. Because in evocations there is a virtual-actual presence of the beloved, they are themselves energy. It is the state of this energy which can be studied by the self. Any tension in it can be known as such. Any connections to one's past can be met as associations with the psyche if it is at work. Any investment in the future can as easily be sensed; any oscillation, reservation, hesitation, as well. By examining the evocations one knows where one is in relation to the other and one may want to take steps to give the relationship another form for acceptable reasons, i.e. acceptable to oneself.

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Masses of Energy If in the inner dialogue, the prevailing feature happens to be the one in which masses of energy are being mobilized in oneself, the truth about oneself in that relationship can be reached provided that other lights of the self can be shed on one's love.

Masses of inner energy are either a concentration of the energy of the psyche, or a move of affectivity experiencing the availability of the psycho-somatic energy, or a stimulation of both. These are mobilized by the self who knows that this is required to be done for a clear purpose. Masses of energy that relate mainly to the psyche forecast that the love is probably on the way to being attachment, in other words, doomed to remain prehuman. Such masses of energy are experienced as generated in one's self, and they are interpreted as enhancing the fact that love begins in oneself, thus giving the ego some merit in the relationship.

Thus one can know when one loves, though not whether one is loved.

The Sense of Truth in Love Our sense of truth will tell us whether indeed the beloved one is moving freely in our self. It will let us know if we are respectful of the otherness of the other. Our sense of truth will allow us to sense that the other person to whom we relate is endowed as we are, with a will, a sense of truth, a sense of discrimination. It will

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let us know that like ourselves that person can give him or herself a life which includes at least as many components as does our own, affecting our actions, our thoughts, our moods, our commitments and our involvements. In this realization we shall know freedom. We shall know something of human love which makes it human.

Love in One’s Evolution Besides the triggering of one's love for another caused by the existence of the other in one's self, there is the possibility of being given to love as it is unfolding, unrolling in one's self. The self can then dialogue with love, not only as the energy given to someone but also as energy itself. One can find in it features which feed back, by their mere existence, what kind of presence it is that forms the background of one's inner life. It is then that one can learn about one's evolution generally, and one's evolution with respect to love: how one loves, how one receives love, what love has done for oneself, what one does for love. It is then that one may find that one's being is in time, that one is capable of experiencing, of reliving, of transcending feelings, thoughts and events, of remembering discriminately what one has lived and finding in it the components of forgiveness, of hope, of readiness to get once more in the relationship. It is then that one learns that love is not static, repetitive, frozen, a cycle that exhausts reality, but that it is indeed susceptible to being totally renewed. Evolution is not a thought. In one's actual existential being it is soon exposed if evolution has indeed taken place or if it has been perceived merely as a possibility for

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oneself, by oneself. Evolution in love is in fact evolution of the self, that is, the self knowing that it lives at a different level of awareness and does with itself what has seemed to have been excluded previously.

One may become aware of one's evolution in many fields. But how does one know one's evolution in love? When concerned with others, and in the field of love (i.e. when one is involved in relating with other persons) one's own evolution takes certain precise forms. In relationship one's evolution cannot be restricted to what happens to oneself alone. The test of evolution in togetherness is whether one knows that the other is more accessible, feels one's concern for the other without feeling any pressure, delights in the newness of the relationship between oneself (as one knows oneself to be) and someone who is clearly living differently. The loved one has a say in underscoring the evolution that is said to have taken place.

Evolution in love may simply be the present acknowledgment that one can do with the beloved one, for the beloved one, what one could not do so far. For instance, one finds in oneself a new and more authentic place for the other, a place where the other can be as he or she is at the present stage of the relationship, with the inescapable limitations resulting from one's involvement in life.

It could also be that in the process of relating one comes to see one's own reality differently, and finds that until now one had been allowing in oneself moves and visions that had restrictive

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impositions upon the relationship which now no longer present themselves.

This could also result from a deeper understanding of love as an expression of the widening of one's sensitivity so that one can be comfortable with what one is not, with what is different from oneself, and live that by proxy. One could evolve in love by becoming conscious that love is needed for one to be more oneself by letting a strange person find his or her dwelling in oneself thus expanding one beyond one's own limitations which so far had been considered to be the natural boundaries of oneself. In this sense love is the instrument the self gives itself to transcend the restrictions constructed by the self engaged in doing the jobs leading to survival in the environment, natural and social.

So love becomes for every self the key for some evolution before some evolution becomes the gate to the widening of one's capacity to love and to cope with demands that exist only because they are generated by a relationship.

It is a unique feature of love that it is known to the self to exist because of the existence of someone else dwelling positively, forcefully within one's self. The self lets love be, knows it to be in one's interest and nourishes it. Love is longed for by everybody, the brute and the saint, not because it is an ideal, an attractive idea, but because man, every man, knows that to evolve is to be more oneself by letting the other order one's energy to get into channels not offered spontaneously to oneself as one is conscious of oneself on one's own.

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The universality of longing tells us of the universality of the self as energy and of the universality of love as the lever for one's awareness, one's evolution, both of which make us different from what we were before the advent of love, different to ourselves from within, and to those who care about us from without.

Love is the instrument of the self which breaks through selfishness, self-centeredness, the existence of our individuality, our being in a bag, our being only with ourselves.

Although love has been described as blind it allows one to see what others cannot see, and to enter into a relationship.

Whereas others see certain characteristics as dominant, the lover sees them merely as unimportant features. Love is experienced as capable of coping with asperities, with disparities, with unforeseeable consequences, while the absence of love makes each into a major obstacle. Love “blinds� by making one into a seer, by showing too much light at once.

Love reveals to each of us the wealth we have in our capacity to endow the other with all the gifts that may only have a very small representation in the consciousness of the other. Love promises oneself the rare encounter of the alter ego in the person met who becomes a candidate for one's love. This rare encounter becomes the direct encounter chance produced, and lucky are those who are fulfilled. They too are rare. They are sung in all languages and called legends.

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Infatuation The miracle of infatuation tells us that we can fall in love at once and endow an unknown person with attributes which make him or her the one who will fulfill us, will take care of our longing, of all our usual objections to meeting the unknown. The miracle of infatuation is common place in human beings. It is an integral part of the dynamics of love and no one will know what love is who does not give it its place.

Infatuation like flood waters, removes obstacles on its way. One feels energized by the impact from the other, present or evoked.

Affectivity, the source of infatuation, mobilizes the psyche and the soma but remains in control. The lover can express himself or herself better in words and otherwise. It is as if a great deal that was potential in oneself suddenly is available for immediate use.

Infatuation changes the impacts emanating from the other into excitements that mobilize one in a variety of fields, not the least of which is the range of sexual expression. The energy of affectivity released by the presence of the other, is experienced as triggered by that other and as present in one's soma on some occasions more especially in one's sexual apparatus. Infatuation then is definitely known as energy of the self involving one in an area of experience in which one was not before its emergence.

Infatuation rarely remains for very long at that level of expression of energy. Often it withers away. But on many occasions it changes itself into other forms of love, affection

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being one of them. It can also remain the form preferred by the self for that couple. When this happens it means that the members of the couple are expressing together a phenomenon which can throw light on the workings of love.

Indeed, the ability to love at a level of excitement which tells how much the energy of one person is permeated by the presence of someone not oneself, opens up a new perspective on man. The individual yields some mechanism of the self, including the psyche, to another's will. One yields to another to the extent one does to one's own will, i.e. with the exception of those functionings, which are either not known normally from within or are permeable only to one's imagination. Because infatuation allows yielding to another, it becomes a part of the process of human evolution. Through it man creates new functionings which take him beyond the individual and into the next stage represented by the couple.

The Creation of the Couple To live “the couple,” made possible by love, is not merely to integrate another into oneself. It is to explode the boundaries of individuality. Individuality has been our form from the level of cosmic atoms, through monocellular plants and animals, to man in his bag and aware of it. With the explosion of individuality starts the reign of “one-and-one” which becomes a new “one” within the realm of human consciousness. To “live the couple” is a new kind of adventure for mankind, the one which generates the unit that transcends the component individualities while

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maintaining their separateness in the other three realms*.

Couples, when they learn to live their life as couples, form a new layer of humanity creating all the unrehearsed forms, original in time and true to the new awareness. In it individuality loses its supremacy as molecules lost theirs, as cells and tissues lost theirs, and as behaviors lost theirs, each melting in the new level of being proposed by the process of evolution.

Affection But not everyone reaches that level of transformation of infatuation into a new life. Many give it the form of affection.

This too is capable of creating its own layer of the expression of human consciousness concerned with love. Affection is a form common enough for most people to know what we are talking about. In affection the evocation of someone creates an inner climate which one feels is beneficial, smooth, warm, welcome and worthy of becoming permanent in one's life. Affection does not trigger the excess of energy expressed in infatuation. It is of a lower potential*, though not less human, nor less significant in one's life as a component of one's evolution. Felt as part of that which makes life continue smoothly rather than jump into a new world, affection does not create a new awareness of the couple, but maintains a link between one-and-one that foretells of other possibilities without using its energy to actualize them. Affection is the instrument of the self that makes one find another person a companion capable of taking with oneself steps which are compatible with those taken spontaneously for one's own ends.

As such, affection can produce couples who feel together, work

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together, enjoy things together. Theirs is a togetherness immersed in actual living.

Affection is a form of love that has as its effect the smoothing of relationships. It has the active role of eliminating the thorns and the wounds that two distinct individuals could offer one another simply because of the freedom of action and of feeling that goes with individuality.

Tenderness and Passion Affection is contiguous to another form of love known as tenderness. Tenderness is the deliberate move of a member of a couple to provide the other with enhanced features of affection.

It provides an active warmth which seeks to generate a new intimacy — compatible with other forms including sexual expressions — the intimacy that transforms these forms to make them singularly of this couple. While appearing to be given by one to the other, tenderness is generated in one by the other in the form that fulfills one at a certain layer of being. It brings forth the awareness of the existence of the couple as a new entity. Because tenderness outlasts other components such as passion and sexual fulfillment, it is experienced as a broad link between two people. Tenderness can become an attribute of oneself, available to be offered to everyone of those one loves. It is generated and received in a non-competitive manner for it is perceived as emerging from one source, as being part of it, coming to one as do the rays of the sun, warming up one's feelings within a general well-being.

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Tenderness is compatible with passion because of the attributes of the energy of love in both. But it remains distinct from passion for while passion requires a high potential for its manifestation, tenderness is experienced as a diffused presence rounding sharp edges and turning an outgoing movement which seems to stress individuality and separateness, into one that definitely involves the other. Passion without tenderness is perhaps unable to produce the couple yearned for by the partners. Passion depends upon tenderness to stress its humanness. The self that supplies it serves the formation of the couple, for tenderness is an attribute of human coupling much more than passion is. Passion may be temperamental, that is, connected with the psyche and the soma one gave oneself when making oneself, and it may stress the individual and weaken the couple.

Romantic Love In the formation of stable couples tenderness and affection play an essential role. These attributes of the self, known only when manifested and expressed in couples, are so distinct from infatuation that a love that holds these two simultaneously along with infatuation has a special name: romantic love. This kind of love, it seems, remains alive in one's longing for love because longing is often for romantic love. Its attractiveness comes from the reconciliation of opposites. One feels that “if only� one could merge the mass of energy triggered by infatuation with the smoothing and the permanence that go with the awareness of tenderness and affection, one would produce the ideal couple,

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the only one worth being involved in, the one one has been longing for . . . as if it were, for eternities.

Romantic love is a creation of the psyche cooperating with affectivity, not of the total self in which knowledge of life and wisdom also exist. Romantic love can nourish longing better than all other forms because it takes in the smooth and the sharp, the high potentials as well as the lower ones. But it cannot form couples in which each partner is fulfilled altogether for it remains at the psychic level and thus susceptible to becoming love-attachment which denies to the other the right to one's full life. The longing for a perfect unity once again commands one to move away from the other. Romantic love can extend beyond love-attachment, however, and need not remain within the bonds of the psyche and affectivity. It can become less and less romantic by being less and less concerned with an ideal and more and more concerned with the other, as the other is.

In terms of energy, what romantic love teaches us is that love as a functioning of the self has access to enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, it serves to separate love from other functionings of the self, and to show the co-presence of love and energy as one of the ways of working of the self. Through this process the self pours itself into some of its attributes and functionings so that they become manifest at their highest level.

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Love and Sex For most humans love is strongly associated with sex, so much so that many students of love have taken one to be the other.

There are clearly all sorts of love relations and no one has a monopoly on stating that only such or such a form is true love.

Still, it seems necessary to explore the area of love and sex, the area in which hundreds of millions of people everywhere on earth are active at this hour.

Because men and women are of the four realms, they have at their disposal what has been successful in each of them. Sex appears in plants. Sexual behavior is lived also by animals as the most reliable means of reproduction. Men and women too use sex to produce offspring that perpetuate the species. But men and women have also known, in addition, that sex is not only for reproduction. They have indulged in it by choice, to know it, to use it for other ends than procreation; in particular, to know pleasure. The pleasure that sex provides is so acute that it is compared to toothache though on the positive side of the scale.

So, man has separated sex both from the biological — by not using it for reproduction — and from love, by indulging in sexual intercourse with anyone and having ends other than love in mind.

What matters here is that this has been possible.

Man knows that the energy he owns can be used for what he wills. In spite of the hanging taboos used by the older generations to regiment the younger ones, in all lands and

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cultures, love as energy has been a freeing force, one the self selects in order to breakthrough the restrictions that come from obscure sources and are held by tradition as the way of life.

Homosexuality is not universally praised, but its practice is and has been current everywhere and for a long time, even if not all books guiding societies in their course, speak of it explicitly.

Homosexuality in humans is another statement of the fact that love and procreation do not fully overlap.

Once men and women recognized that not only sex but love and sex together transcend the perpetuation of the species, they gave themselves to this new phenomenon and it became a center for aesthetic expression, for exploration, for experimentation and for study.

The reality of love-and-sex has fired the imagination of many artists: writers, sculptors, painters, musicians. Involving people meant involving their soma. To the artists this meant that they create the visual symbols of love, and try to depict love-making or the preparation for love-making in their works of art. These aesthetic attempts provided a stress that may not have always been intended. Eroticism could be projected on images which may have been intended to trigger the feeling that love was their origin. An exaggerated form of this projection is evident in what is called by some, pornographic or obscene material, even though it may have been an original artistic expression.

In literature the medium of words, which is much more flexible than canvas and paint or stone, allows us to give our readers the atmosphere we select to create in order to convey certain

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specific features of love. Literature is the medium most adequate for the expression of all the categories of love that man has conceived. The theater and movies can take them to larger audiences and attempt to display vividly how man lives love in its spectrum. We can say that though love is the most researched subject by mankind it still is the least known. It escapes being treated as a known entity, and it asks to be lived in its singularity, its intimacy, its uniqueness. For this there can be no rehearsal, no repetition. There are only original first trials in every case and for everybody. Nobody can love for someone else, and no one can love again in the same way. Our experience of love does not represent accumulated experience. The truer the love the less like the one before even, and at times more so, with the same partner.

What man lives in love-making is not the behavior that can be described and be stereotyped but the possibility of the expansion of the self in contact with someone who offers to be known in a way that includes the concentration of all the mystery of being, and the giving up of all other concerns so as to be given to the beloved one without reservation or restrictions.

The self and its energy are one in those moments, and the only thing to know is that two people are together in the gift of themselves to each other, only concerned with living that time at the peak of their potential.

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Love-Making During one life we have to learn everything about love-making, and it is rarely easy. Because of our sensitivity to energy impacts and our state of being, it is possible that in the first love encounter we miss altogether the discovery that there is a master lover in us. Hence it is of utmost importance that we learn to give our attention to knowing that our first entry into love-making is made neither casually nor in apprehension.

Instead, if we go into it through a confident, conscious relation with someone who cares and is concerned in making that first encounter into one that will have many successive ones, then each of these would be more conscious, more integrated, more complete. In such relationships both lovers would be aware that their coming together is a meeting of wills, of sensitivities, of presence, of hope, all of which express a growing maturity of both in each encounter. Love-making is neither mating, nor fornication, but a live work of art as new each time as painting can be which nourishes on the inner climate of the painter and the circumstances in which he paints, producing a different vision of a varied landscape. The partners in the couple as equals, are equally responsible and do not shift to the other, through expectation, the responsibility of being this or that.

Together they create their fulfillment. Together they know that each has to be new to meet the reality of the other in the present circumstances which only from outside seem to repeat themselves. If love is the guide, if love is present, each in the couple is as attentive as can be to where the other is at this time and what will be right at that moment. Otherwise the dictate of love is to abstain from love-making and to express differently one's affection, one's care.

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People concerned with sex only cannot take care of such demands from love and, instead of seeing the benefit of being human in love-making, recommend techniques and devices to generate interest in mating. The self of anyone would know the difference between love-making guided by love and a sexual intercourse resulting from an opportunity that offers itself. The education that goes with love-making is one that reaches the awareness of oneself in love and involves the whole of oneself in giving oneself and receiving another. This education must be different in at least one respect for the sexes, simply because the male cannot become pregnant and can cause pregnancy.

The male, as the member of the couple who is somatically endowed with the capacity to inseminate, owes it to the couple and, through it, to the other member, to think implicitly that love-making may have consequences out of proportion with the act, and therefore must live at a level of somatic awareness which permits the will to postpone ejaculation indefinitely.

Since science has made known what happens in the female cycle to the single ovule which can be produced every month, the male can learn to live at a level of awareness that allows him to be a responsible lover, everyday of every month. And the female does not have to consider her somatic endowment as an obstacle in her involvement in love-making. She need not cope with her somatic condition by taking the total responsibility of either abstaining during the few days of fertility or adopting chemical or physical measures. By such precautions she only obliges the male to live at a lower level of awareness in love-making than can be his.

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If the will could not intervene, if one’s education could not produce the state required in order to restore equality to the two members in the couple, then such proposals would seem arbitrary and idle. But human love is human and that means that the full self is present, with its will and all the sensitivities, permitting one to be in the act as totally given to the other so that one neither pursues pleasure nor attempts to reach the end, but is engaged in knowing the other as intimately and as fully as this special instrument of the self permits.

In the animal kingdom or the “third realm� a male finds himself endowed with a penetrating part in his soma and a female with a receptacle that can receive that part. In mating, which is a practice carried over from the third realm, a man and a woman use these parts as animals do, to take the seeds to the place where they can meet the female ovule with greater probability.

But in love-making which is a human activity, the opportunity for somatic acquaintance makes its appearance. The couple may notice that the woman cannot know with certainty those areas of her cavity which can be reached by the man penetrating her. If she considers herself as the one who has sensitivities to develop in those areas because of her state in love-making, she may give herself to this awareness and learn to be as consciously present there as she is at her fingertips in her caresses. If her companion knows how not to be totally taken by the pleasure derived from the cutaneous sensitivities of his penis, he may place his consciousness on the perception of what those sensitivities transmit to his self and live the contact with his partner for what it is, a way of intimately knowing her, and letting her know herself.

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The main difference, as I see it, between human love-making and prehuman intercourse is in this presence of consciousness.

In the first, the consciousness is given to feel more intimately close to one’s partner. In the second, it is primarily given to the pleasure accompanying the act.

Joy is the name given to what can be experienced when one loves without a polarization towards pleasure. Pleasure is a special way in which one’s psyche experiences the energy placed in certain areas of one’s soma. Joy is what the whole self knows when it functions as a whole and at its peak. Joy is of a lower potential than pleasure, but joy lasts while pleasure is shortlived. Often followed by other psychic manifestations, pleasure isolates one who receives it and estranges the one from whom it is procured. With pleasure as the focus of one’s consciousness, the other is not the concern but a target and a means.

Joy is what true lovers experience in love-making and their embrace can last for as long as they wish. This is never the case when pleasure is the end, for then, the sudden energy expenditure produces such a drop of potential that it leads to a need to recuperate and therefore to abandoning the partner by falling asleep.

If an education for love were to be considered here, it would be the education of one’s awareness involved in feeling one’s partner rather than oneself. Its aim would be to learn: to recognize the intrusion of pleasure and its possible replacement by joy; to maintain oneself in the state of a gift to the other; and, to receive the other not as the source of pleasure but as the

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recipient of one’s love, one’s tenderness and affection, as one who is made more perceptible in the profound embrace that reaches the center of the other given to one’s lover.

What has been called physical love I name somatic acquaintance, for that is what it is for true lovers in a couple. It requires that one transcends prehuman behaviors and learns to be in a state in which all love-making is deeply felt as joy, as making a gift of oneself, and as receiving the gift of the other.

This may be the price in terms of growth, and of disciplining by the self of its energy.

One learns to achieve this transcendence through making love as a conscious member of a couple. But it may also be reached without going through any practice. When one’s awareness of oneself permits an entry into the functioning of the psyche having as its object pleasure, and into what the self does for creating joy for itself, then one is ready to be transformed in the light of this awareness. The evolution of one’s self may suffice to make one into a potential lover. An evolved self does not need apprenticeship in love-making to be a true lover in all encounters with the beloved.

Human love may be manifest and found by lovers in a couple as the most immediate response to each other provided the mind does not arrogate to itself the direction of the encounters, thus letting the imagination play havoc with the truth of being in a couple. Quietening one’s imagination, one’s thought, is part of human love-making. Free from one’s own wandering thought and imagination, the self is closer to the reality of the other and

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therefore lets the other guide one to knowing in surrender the truth of their togetherness.

Surrender to one’s lover or the beloved has little to do with passivity. Passivity on the part of either one in the couple is fatal to their encounter and for both partners. Surrender of the male to his beloved manifests itself through an integration of powers that conflict in prehumans: being erect without excitement, remaining erect without desire, and actively using the channel that links him to the core of the somatic woman he is loving.

Thus he receives something of her not received otherwise. Lovemaking in surrender is a total encounter, without distraction from thoughts, images, sensations. Man and woman in that embrace, are beautified innerly by having in them the unique, the intense presence of each other as a guide for how to know joy now and without any mortgage or any commitment to anything else.

If all this seems rare in one’s experience, it tells that there is much more to seek and understand in love-making than one has found so far. There is a world unsuspected, but existent and real, inviting one to a spiritual journey. One has been so far only clumsily exploring a complex field related to the whole of cosmic evolution on earth. Now, human love-making can be the universe to enter in, at first carefully and tentatively and, later, as one becomes educated, with as much determination as is required by what comes. The activity of surrender — that takes one beyond prehuman contradiction — then presents itself in circumstances which make two people able to know it at once. In the couple, surrender is one, but its expressions are many. In surrender there is no need to plan, explore, project. But gates 33

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open up, yielding secret after secret, the greatest being that there is no end to what can come one’s way.

In surrender, a new kind of knowledge makes its appearance. It can be associated after the event with what one already knows, but is truly sui generis. We may still want to call it acquaintance, but its name matters little. The fact is that in surrender concepts stop, past experience seems remote and possibly is presented only in what it has done to one’s self, to the levels of the thresholds of one’s sensitivity as they can now be made to function. The main “activity” of surrender is to lower the fences built around one’s sensitivity, and to allow one to receive and receive, acknowledging it by finding oneself more capable of receiving more, of what the other brings in his or her being, in his or her gifts present in the caress, the kiss, the intimate contacts. In surrender, one can give oneself as well as receive the other. Surrender guides the pressure of one’s lips, of one’s fingertips, of one’s penetration or depths to be penetrated, or collaboration at the many points of contact. Because of surrender love-making becomes human. Sometimes one of the two in the couple can live it when the other is somewhere else. It does not matter, for surrender is a state and not part of a contract between two people who decide to love in a certain way.

Through surrender we learn to take the other in, to be with the other in the most conscious way.

But love does not necessarily express itself in the form of lovemaking. Even between people who could have become a couple in the fullest terms, there may be circumstances in which one of

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the two does not allow a hint to reach the other of being ready for it.

A delicacy of feelings may, for example, stop a woman who feels love for a man, to declare herself when she knows that he and her sister are to form a couple. To feel love as the prime mover for her total acceptance that it is not for her to enjoy a certain kind of coupling with that man, and still to know that love is active in the relationship, we call her sacrifice. This places her among people who know human love.

Friendship Love can take the form of friendship. In this form of love there is no desire for the other even when there is keenness for the presence of the other, the care, and the expression of interest in the other. In fact, in friendship the relating is enhanced because both friends are dedicated together to a third element, linking each other deeply. Friendship, because it is love, presents features similar to the ones found in love with regard to the total acceptance of another person as she or he is. Rather than want to change a friend, one enjoys the distinctions between the two and attempts to change oneself in order to meet one’s friend on terms acceptable to that friend. In friendship tastes become similar, interests differ little, visions of most important areas tend to be close. Differences in the areas where one is not actively involved may be as great as they can be, but they do not affect the ties of friendship.

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Friendship develops mainly in adolescence. At this stage in life a young man or woman is overwhelmed by the demands of the awareness of the functionings of affectivity, and needs someone like oneself involved in meeting similar challenges, to look together at the swell of emotions, the mobility of affective energy, and at the simultaneity of demands which come from the many directions and which one has to learn to cope with. At adolescence one needs someone like oneself, in order to live in contact with the unknown. The polarization is towards not being alone when facing the pressures of an exalted inner life. Finding someone who faces similar demands is a prerequisite for the building of friendship. While often the body-image guides people in being attracted physically to each other, it does not affect friendships. The interests of two selves in the exploration of a field of experience placed outside them is by far the strongest cement. Adolescent friendships have been scrutinized through diary confessions which confirmed that, for a few years at least, they were full of love and free of physical desires. Later they might change character and involve sexual relationships, often homosexual. These late developments may have prevented a clear understanding of the springs of friendship which we see in the bonds developed by a need to know together what comes one’s way, bringing a sudden shift of interest in the affective life of adolescents and overwhelming them.

The vision of the world for pre-adolescent boys and girls is the one of the absolute of action. With the advent of adolescence it is transformed into the one of the absolute of sentimentality. It is possible to meet this transformation alone. But most people do not choose that route, and for two or three years in many, many lives, the cultivation of friendship seems more important than 36 Â

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the exploration of the new powers brought about by puberty.

Adolescents can clearly distinguish behaviors that are part of their day, and not mistake the isolated exploration of the newly acquired sexual powers for their sentimental life in company, at first, of just one person, usually of their own sex, who has the same penchants and interests and who is as willing to share as they are. Adolescent friendships are the most important school for love in many environments.

In friendship, for the first time, someone from outside one’s immediate group is selected to be entertained consciously in one’s inner life. We learn to be concerned spontaneously, to value listening and being listened to, to value symbols and symbolic language, to work together and to do it consciously. In the friendships of adolescence we learn the significance of the presence of another in our lives, and we learn to acknowledge the special quality it gives to our own lives. Above all, we learn about spiritual life. Our sensitivity expands into sentimentality.

We recognize that the world of feelings is immense and fascinating. We throw ourselves in it and let it take precedence upon all other pre-occupations. We become openly irrational in that we wish to cope with the here and now that is in constant flux, and to state as true and real what is striking us right now, but may vanish the next minute to be replaced by another inner upsurge as compelling as the previous one though possibly unrelated to it. A friend in the same turmoil lends much more reality to this way of being than either the younger ones around us (who are absorbed by the absolute of action to the point of being blind to sentiment) or the older sedate ones (who have lost contact with the flood of feelings and only remember that it soon passes.) A friend is welcome in this state of affairs and 37 Â

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most of us seek one and find one simply because there are others who have the same need. Once this other is found, the dynamics of friendship take over and very quickly two strangers become very close and share their secret inner lives with each other. These, no calculating person would ever share with another person since they can be used to pressure one into doing what the other wishes. But between adolescents such secrets are cherished as the basis of their friendship.

In this trust, openness, this act of sharing and holding sacred what belongs to both or to the other, in this exaltation of intimate, private matters, inner life develops towards deeper layers and prepares one for the encounters of love as we looked at earlier. Friendship is the builder of the framework for the relationship of love via the channels of mutual trust, openness and confiding of one’s inner life. Because of these earlier friendships later love relationships consider as an attribute of their reality, the expectation that trust and openness be part of them and, indeed, become criteria for their sustenance. With trust goes hope. One believes that one’s love will affect the beloved one and generate behaviors that prove that he or she cares enough to change in order to comfort one. Such beliefs become the fabric of love and one lives with the illusion of a belief, rarely seeing it for what it is.

For our purpose here, to see friendship as love and as contributing to one’s evolution in life means that through and in friendship certain features develop which later on become the forms love takes in couples. Indeed, caring for another belongs to friendship. One can conceive of love not requiring the explicit expression of care for the other. When one is concerned with the 38

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evolution of relationship in the couple just formed through a sudden infatuation, it is possible to find that what matters for that couple is passion and its expression at its peak. The members of the couple in infatuation disregard sentimentality and ask for the presence of the other in order to be fed by the contact with the source of one’s inspiration. Both may want to appear to be caring only to please each other. They may not wish to convey that they are preoccupied with something other than caring. Or they may simply not wish to be caring for each other.

Indeed passion can live without sympathy, attention, caring; in one word: friendship. With friendship passion becomes a more complete form of love, perhaps more satisfying for sophisticated souls, given to deeper feelings. Without it, it can occasionally survive long enough to show that it is a form of the human love that can be developed per se, because in the complexity of human beings dedication to any project in exclusivity is possible. This is possible if one is prepared to pay the price.

Friendship, when it exists in a couple, generates a sweetness both find worthwhile and worthy of maintenance. It differs from affection in that it includes a vector that places both partners in the presence of other contents of life, beyond the calm and smooth feeling for each other that we called affection. In love, friendship is needed to act as a prime mover towards taking the couple out of the schizophrenic position that reduces the world to them. The individual breaks through individuality through love. The couple breaks through the couple’s boundaries through friendship. The world is seen filled with an attractiveness which goes beyond a life together as a couple.

Because each friend enjoys the unique presence of the other in explorations, excursions or incursions into the inviting world 39

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out there, they remain knit together as a couple and, through sentimentality, events in their lives gain a dimension which would not be there if each was on one’s own.

Universal Love Men and women the world over are brought to enjoy activities which, while involving each individual, place the stress on the collectivity or at least on the fact that one is linked with others.

In such activities — of which group dancing is an example — one merges into the group and learns to subordinate individual whims to collective performance. This discipline is part of the functioning of love extended to involve many more than a couple and is to be associated with a “good” represented by the harmonious performance of several people merged into a new unity.

Team performance, no doubt, requires that each participant considers others and forgets himself for the purpose of contributing something to what all want to achieve. The returns for the individual are as much from the task well done as they are from participating in a way that one forgets oneself and discovers the more complex entity of the group welded together with oneself in it, stressing not the individual contribution but the group-performance. Besides using the disciplines of subordination and integration through participation, if one feels for the others, one discovers friendship extended in a new manner. Increased awareness of solidarity and caring for the higher levels of responsibility are obviously part of friendship

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but with the creation of this new layer the couple has vanished and has been replaced by the group which forces a certain abstraction upon the relationship. Still, it is extremely concrete for every one in the well-orchestrated activity which absorbs everyone.

For those who are conscious of the dynamics of love in friendship and of the characteristics of friendship in love, and who have seen the extensions of friendship in the direction of integrating more and more people in a larger scheme involving oneself, another breakthrough can present itself, and this is known as universal love. In it, the returns for oneself are indirect. One is no more there to ask for the feedback that the gift of oneself is received. No longer is it permissible to show favors to particular individuals and to pursue a separate adventure of one’s own. Instead, one’s sensitivity is freed from the links which trigger mechanisms right for love in couples, and is connected with all the new ways of being which make one impervious to individual attractiveness. While being of service to all, one does not generate in others the feeling that one is available beyond what that service represents.

Mankind has toyed with extended loves which remained open to the formation of as many couples as was possible, making one a sort of universal lover, always available to love passionately a new person. This, symbolized by the character of Don Juan of the Spanish drama, and potentially by Goethe’s Faust, has remained an example of the work of psychic love, halfway through to the human love that can become universal in a Jesus Christ and some of the Christian saints. Mankind has toyed with the Don Juans because of the intimate knowledge that almost 41

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every human being can love more than one person, and has examined the dangers, the traps, the drawbacks in society, of the realization of this possibility by taking it to the extreme.

Prehumans are unable to harmonize in their self the tendencies which accompany psychic love and social fears. For this reason they produce plays (dramas) for themselves which allow them to live by proxy the conflicts instead of transcending the limitations of psychic love. Playwrights attempt to dramatize any aspect that attracts them. And when the author of a play is a cleric, one can expect that such a hero as Don Juan must pay for not being content with one love. Still, the attraction over centuries of the characters of Casanova and of Don Juan must be accounted for by accepting that they represent a way of being of men and women in society. Whether imprisoned in the psyche and its constant suggestion that a new partner may be better than the one one has, or liberated by the concentration on the challenge of knowing where one stands in such matters, mankind is stating that it considers love to be much more important than the socio-biological functions it is supposed to perform in the abstract. Psychic-love and conflicts seem closely associated in the general public’s view of love relationships. But the temptation to enter into a new love relation when infatuation strikes remains as strong whether one heeds the warnings or ignores them. And for modern man, temptation is no longer the work of the devil, but only of one’s psyche and one’s affectivity, and so he can indulge in letting a vision take its course. The consequence of one’s actions may lead to complications and to deep regrets, but the motive for acting is not less real. It must be taken into account if we want to understand love as the existential phenomenon it is.

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The Spectrum of Love What makes love, a human creation, become only the work of the psyche? Is psychic-love an unevolved form of love and the currency among prehumans? Or is it a phase of the movements of awareness when engaged in that field, a phase that can be gone through triumphantly to arrive at a full human love?

Again, because of the complexities of the fourth realm which can only be known through observation of human beings going through their unique and varied lives, there is not one simple answer to such questions. To meet them in reality is to become as flexible as one can and to stop judging and condemning. Facts are the real raw material. It would not help very much in the understanding of life to deny to facts their quality of facts simply because they contradict a principle held a priori. Love in humans is a field. Human love is an achievement of evolving beings. Humans bring their uniqueness and singularity to the field of love. To place it arbitrarily as an ideal at the top could only prevent us from seeing it as it is. To try to tally the various expressions of love with a rigid classification will not do. Each of us can bring, may bring, a new and significant addition to the field by being genuinely oneself and allowing one’s self to contribute its unique vision and evolution to the spectrum already available.

Psychic-love too is one aspect of the spectrum. What makes it psychic is the predominance of residual energy in its unfolding as compared to a predominance of free energy in the development of human love. Because residual energy is to a

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certain extent bound, psychic-love tends to repeat the past in all couples and therefore seems to deny what could be thoroughly new in new relations. But even a repeat can generate a sense of newness if what is perceived now was not noticed before. A prehuman life can be a very rich life even if misery dwells in it.

Psychic love can be very attractive and is sought after eagerly by many. What can be stressed in it is infinitely varied and can inspire exploration and realization by the participants. Those who participate in psychic love discover variety and novelty, originality and excitement in it. Thus they justify to the psyche and through it to the self their maintenance on that track.

What keeps nagging the psyche, however, is a suspicion of the self that there is more to oneself than meets the “psychic eye.”

And the psyche becomes affectivity at that point where the awareness, the glimpse, makes its appearance. Longing for knowing and living more than what one has known and lived by remaining psychic, essentially gives a chance of freeing the ties, the bonds, and to come closer to being freer in love. This is essentially the vector of evolution which I call vertical as against the horizontal that takes a realm, a species or a person to the impasses which constitute the ends of certain evolutions.

In love, to evolve vertically may again mean a variety of things. To know love as not having anything to do with the soma and the psyche (as so many religious leaders from the remotest past have known), is one way of transcending the dominance of the psyche under which most of us live. The lives of even obscure monks and nuns prove to us that love can be lived within affectivity, oriented towards areas of being that do not immediately call in one’s past, one’s psychic and somatic 44

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endowments. The love of a Saint Vincent of Paul cannot be understood if the psychic forms closer to the soma are the frame of reference. But it can become clearer if his charity — which is his form of universal love — is perceived as operative in him, making him give all he had and was to the poor, the orphaned, the neglected, the abandoned. Charity embodied in him, was clearly an active universal love at work. It is psychic only in that it had to become deeply involved with its own objectivations in actuality. But because of it being spiritual in its origin it did not lose any of its inspiring powers.

Moved by charity St. Vincent acted in certain ways. Seen from outside his actions could discourage the onlooker because of the state of affairs in the world of the poor at his time. But the public could also perceive love at work in his actions. It is this, a special gift for love, that inspires people. Inspiration is a spiritual movement because of which the self can use its energy to nourish its own endowment. Witnessing St. Vincent’s acts of love makes one want to reach the sources of love with which one feels endowed, and express love in a similar fashion in one’s own life. This aspiration is evoked by the inspiration from him.

Together the two generate admiration, a mental movement which places the source of inspiration above oneself. The dynamics of their conjunction are simultaneously 1

at the level of the self which provides the needed energy to enter and stay in the new universe revealed by the source of inspiration;

2 at the level of affectivity which sees one’s love affecting here-and-now the people to whom love is extended;

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3 at the level of the psychic which makes possible a reduction of the wear-and-tear caused by difficult circumstances and hard work, while it lubricates the functionings it is in contact with, on behalf of the self.

The nuns of the order of St. Vincent of Paul are still inspired by their patron who gave universal love a very concrete form in the service of the poor and the disabled.

In contrast the missionaries who took themselves to parts of the world remote from their native land, may believe that they too are concerned with universal love. Often, their love is to be classified as psychic for they only take others into account with respect to whether they can change them so as to make them agree with their own vision of the world.

To make people into what one believes they should be is clearly to satisfy oneself and not to leave them to be as much themselves as they can be. Hence love is not at work here. If the missionary adheres, say, to his fear of hell, and sees that unless people join his church there is no salvation for them, and if he sees himself as the agent of their salvation, it is difficult to find love at work in this situation. Whatever he does is psychic because of his adherences. His convictions seem to produce a twist on his intelligence, because otherwise his intelligence could have shown him that life in such places has been going on, perhaps going on even happily, before he thought of bringing himself to them. Missionaries may think that they are right, that they are being helpful to peoples they see as deprived of what they have or have access to. But they cannot say that love is

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moving them unless it is love of what they adhere to and love of themselves.

Strictly speaking, missionaries are not the only people responsible in such transactions. The recipients of their indoctrination are also responsible. Without their cooperation nothing could happen. But this is another matter that may be left out in a study of love. What is of interest to us here is that with our criterion, that is, for love to exist it must take the other into account as the other is, we cannot endow missionaries with love, even if in their own terms they forget themselves in the acts of living and give themselves fully to those they want to save. What we could say is that missionaries love their mission more than the people they want to convert to their religion. They love it and get returns from it; they are moved by it and by their projection of their ideal upon the concrete situation they meet.

Those who benefit from their gift may love them for it, and a kind of give-and-take is established that gives the appearance of love and justifies in the eyes of superficial observers that all is the work of love.

But psychic love is still love, as is love-attachment, and because of the love qualifier the missionaries can give themselves to evolve and let their love be transformed into what we call true love, by being respectful of the total freedom of those they intend to serve in love. Any time one demands the change of the other as a condition for the formation of a relationship, love loses some of its reality and becomes a functioning for which perhaps another label would be more appropriate. Albert Schweitzer, in spite of his glorious reputation, has perhaps missed knowing love in the way Mother Teresa of Calcutta 47 Â

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knows it. One can serve communities and not know how to let the persons in that community be themselves and acknowledge them as full persons beyond all their cultural conditionings.

Falling in Love This leads us to ask the question: “Does one love someone because of the desirable attributes of that person?”

The first answer that comes to mind is “No” simply because in all languages either “one falls” in love or “love happens to one.”

This tells of the immemorial observation that love has been seen as surprising the one who knows it as an unplanned happening, as an inevitable state once it occurs, as not allowing a choice.

It is also clear that not everyone generates in every one of us the state which tells us that perhaps there is something at work in us which makes the falling in love possible only in some cases.

Would it be our body-image? This image is formed in the prenatal phase already through the most primitive brain and serves to keep the self constantly linked with every cell of the soma so as to be informed of any change in the soma’s relationship to the environment. This image makes us know ourselves from within and affects our perception of others according to whether they spontaneously agree with it or not.

Could it be that it is the body-image which generates a frame of reference for the attractiveness of those others with whom we fall in love?

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It may be that we filter impacts. It is easy to accumulate evidence to this effect. Humans have formed couples with people who are as different from one another as could be. Blind people fall in love without the overall guidance from their bodyimage. People who look alike may generate a liking of each other but not necessarily love for each other. Love grows between people joined in a pre-arranged marriage. Love can be sparked after a sudden perception of the other in a new light when none existed before, and so on. We can see then, that love between two people is mainly what they meet in themselves after they have found themselves and once they become a couple. It is likely that what triggers the move which leads two people to form a couple involves many components of the self at the moment of the encounter, and that what maintains the couple in love has little to do with that beginning. One reason for this is that acquaintance takes place after the encounter and with acquaintance go the multiple deepenings of perception of oneself and of the other in a relationship.

Relationship and acquaintance are reciprocal. They give each other the elements that meet the questions which arise between the two individuals in the couple until individuality vanishes and the couple reigns. There are questions because of individuality, because of what one perceives of the relationship at this moment.

Like all things human, the fact that relationship and acquaintance are in time creates a tension between the perception of their permanence as a possibility and the reality of our ignorance. We can stress permanence and be shown it does not exist, we can stress ignorance and find we still have some 49 Â

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access to the other, some glimpse of what he or she is. Therefore we need acquaintance as a “permanent� corrective of the course and content of relationship. We need to discover that acquaintance is a continuous process that does not lead to a final form which permits a perfect relationship. We need to know that our ignorance exists at the same time as our approach to the other and that, because of it, every movement towards better acquaintance does not reduce the mystery of the other, of being, of being in relationship.

Only because we fall back into egocentric preoccupations that occupy the totality of ourselves, do we leave this contact with the mystery of others and of relationship and are surprised by what comes. Being with acquaintance means that we still have somewhere to go to meet more of the other, more of our self in relationship, more of how to function through acquaintance.

In fact if relationships can be improved there must be 1) a way of entering a relationship and knowing what it is and 2) ways of transforming oneself to become truer to what one has found.

Acquaintance is the name we can give to the first, and evolution to the second.

Acquaintance, as a way of knowing others, is the instrument the self gives itself to meet the challenges posed by individuality and ignorance. Again, being in time, to imagine that it can finish the required job sets it outside Reality. Acquaintance can become more refined, more easily set into motion (and therefore is linked with vulnerability and sensitivity) and more at peace with

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being in contact with ignorance and with the fact of not managing everything. For acquaintance to function as a way of knowing the truth of a relationship, it must remain in contact with the will which makes one yield as well as take steps. Also, it must remain in contact with intelligence which illumines the mind once perception brings in the raw material.

Acquaintance acknowledges that there is oneself in the relationship. Through acquaintance one also sees that one has to know what is not oneself, but which happens to be a part of the relationship. One’s intelligence tells the self that acquaintance is needed but it may not be sufficient. One senses that one has to deepen acquaintance and that it may remain insufficient to get more of the other in one’s perception. If more is required to make the relationship as full as the two partners can make it, then something other than acquaintance is needed. One may have to work on oneself in new ways to discipline oneself differently, to make oneself vulnerable by lowering thresholds of sensitivity, to accept perhaps, that one has to give up reaching a desired level of acquaintance and be at peace with what one can reach.

It seems possible that through evolution one’s means of being acquainted in relationship affect one in any or all of the following three ways: 1) a relationship can exist which fulfills both partners, 2) in it acquaintance works smoothly and proves at every moment that the relationship is involved in the lives of the two individuals in the couple, 3) evolution is made more conscious. Three components of life, namely, the relationship, the process of acquaintance, and evolution, work together, sustain each other, exemplify how we can work creatively when

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facing the huge challenges of understanding life and of living it fully and in a manner which keeps us in contact with truth and reality.

Complexity and Relating Indeed life is not as simple as the unrolling of a map which brings to the surface a new area already planned according to how it is conceived to be. Full of contradictions and mystery, life does not have a particular form. It is too complicated and complex because of the four realms, because there is a past, because there is ignorance. To see in it the predominance of the order that chronology brings with the passing of everyday, to see it as being written in advance, allotting such an amount of comfort and such an amount of pain is to have a distorted view of life. To see it as directed towards a goal which requires such or such a balance of effort and success on the one hand and on the other, of patience and acceptance of delays for one’s fulfillment, is an over simplistic view. The fact is that our attempts to understand life are accompanied by our inevitable ignorance all the time.

Relationship between human beings, in its reality, asks for vigilance, alertness, sensitivity, surrender and a readiness to recast the knowledge acquaintance has provided so far. Because of ignorance and the mystery of others (or for that matter of our self) acquaintance has to be dynamic and not aim at producing a final picture of anyone. “I shall never know you; you will never stop surprising me” are more correct renderings of the reality we

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come in contact with than the illusion that “I know you as well as I know myself” (which may mainly be true when what I mean is that I do not know myself) or “You can be read as easily as an open book.” For some superficial purposes the latter may be acceptable. To become foundations for a relationship, for a couple, they are not.

It is true that we are not omniscient. The fact is that we live in ignorance and that life is too complicated for anyone to attend to everything consciously and properly. A realistic approach to all the challenges life brings to us, tells us to learn to live with the mystery of everything and never to lose sight of our ignorance.

This applies to relationship too. Being in relationship asks for this truth to be acknowledged by the two partners in a couple.

We can know it through our own involvement in our evolution, and only to a certain extent. The extent varies according to the giveness of ourselves to the improvement of acquaintance as our way of knowing the others. The reality of a relationship will change the other qualities of that relationship and this in turn reflects itself in the quality of acquaintance as used to transform the relationship.

Outgrowing Egocentricity Individuality establishes for each of us at the onset of life, a movement which brings to one all that which one needs to process and work on. Later on, if the ego assumes the place of ultimate tribunal to assess everything, this original movement becomes egocentricity. If individuality needs to be broken

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through in order to produce the couple, egocentricity needs to disappear for relationships to be genuinely formed. The difficulty humans meet in creating true relationships comes from the movements of individuality turned egocentricity. We nourish certain movements that serve specific individualistic purposes in life but they hinder relationships. Also, the difficulty in creating true relationship comes from the fact that most of us see relationships as personally useful rather than as an expression of life at a wider level of awareness, as a higher level of one’s evolution. Relating without being given to acquaintance of the other could scarcely be called relating, but it is common place. Somehow if individuals come to see that it is in their best interest to get into a relationship without exploiting it for their selfish ends and without using it for some personal advantage, the spiritual side of man can then be met. The motive for personal advantage itself can serve to illumine a prehuman mind absorbed in its own existence. Indeed, if we dwell for a while on the possibility that someone would let us take advantage of their situation in order to alter things for us, and if subsequently we see that that which was not, now is, i.e. we are allowed to be in a sort of relationship when none existed before, moreover, if we notice that we have a role in the relationship, our individualistic perspective may force upon us the realization that we are something more than an egocentric individual. Once this is realized, we are equipped to take it a stage further and see our moves in the relationship as contributors to it and not the exploiters of it. If this dynamics is not exhausted at that level, and we remain in the relationship, we can perceive our new opportunities and see in them not only gratification but also growth in awareness of ourselves and possibly of others. Here we meet acquaintance as referring to oneself at first. We have

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known something of ourselves in an objective manner, we have found in ourselves some dynamics for change, for illumination.

Simultaneously, we find the dynamics for entering into movements that can lead to our participation in the growth in other peoples’ awareness. We can see that other people are accessible; that some can return to us what we offer them of ourselves; that acquaintance can be extended to include others and can educate our sensitivities by making us more vulnerable.

If our temperamental makeup is such that acquaintance, as a way of knowing people, is not given a chance, we may find that our best interest — which includes valuing a more abundant life — will make us entertain relationship and acquaintance per se.

For those of us who are lucky enough to make this discovery at some stage in our life, acquaintance and relating gain in importance and we give ourselves to understanding both. By itself this produces the dents in our egocentric tendencies. By itself this gives chances to evolve while we are generating a new world for ourselves and perhaps for others.

Although all of us long for love, not all of us see clearly that we must give time and attention to the ways in which we break through individuality and egocentricity. That is why most of us are clumsy at relating and miss chances of becoming more intelligent at it. Since relating is an expansion of one’s self to include others, only through relating do we learn about relating.

The huge struggles between the demands of a new way of being and the demands of routine, and the inertia that preserves the status quo, may not be welcome by all. Quick discouragement, early giving up can be rationalized and made acceptable. But they can also be counted and replaced by a genuine search for 55

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what one is meeting and how to integrate it. Even if it is clear that there are a number of ways of encountering the opportunity of one’s growth in relationship, the general schema established in the chronological unfolding of our life does not guarantee a profound interest in acquaintance and thus increased chances of proper relating. Complexity is the climate even for simple people. Each of us puts survival ahead and above awareness of true relating. We conclude from our life experiences that very few people are indispensable. We may not apply this to ourselves, but we apply it to others and produce only temporary relationships and with this, only temporary commitments. For a transformation of the temporary into the everlasting, we need to evolve beyond the barriers of time, of death, and see ourselves involved in giving ourselves an education whose effects may be taken in a future life. The acquaintance with oneself for the evolution of oneself to this point may be beyond the stage of evolution one grants oneself. The vision that to learn to relate properly may require so much of oneself that it cannot be aachieved in one life, may provide discouragement to some, but for others it may be an incentive for plunging more deeply into it. The vision that one may not have prepared oneself in this or previous lives to encounter the considerable demands accompanying the movements of true relating may stimulate one to do now some of what is required. This we call paying the price for true relationship.

Love is part of the supporting dynamics which produce relating as much as relating is the dynamics for love to be born and prosper. Both may take turns to make the functionings in the self produce the steps required to be taken by each of us. In the true dynamics of being we learn what all this means. Some of us 56 Â

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learn faster than others, some immediately and some never, even if they are totally dedicated.

We can look more closely at how we have individually done the job. We can also enquire from those who visibly have achieved it, and find out how. In both cases it is possible that we learn nothing or little, for it is a life lesson and has to be lived in one’s flesh and not as a rote lesson which allows us to gargle with words and give the impression we know something when the first challenge would expose us as having pretended. But we may also prove that we have been capable of handling the opportunities of enquiring and learning from others, to our benefit. All this needs to be kept in mind because of human complexity and the complexity of life.

A way of relating which has love as its foundation at once shows some features acknowledged by the members of the relationship. One is that neither wants more from the other than what one is given. It is neither being content with little nor not knowing that one can receive more and give more. But it is a state of not asking and of giving thanks for what actually is offered at the same time as one makes available to the other what is required on the spot for the particular end and activity which involve both. This way of relating tells at once to the participating beings that love is present, that one can count on the other and on his or her availability. Both find themselves to be engaged in the concrete-ness of the relationship as it is and give of themselves freely, willingly and to the extent required, to the activity involving them.

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Love-Relations Similarly, when love is the object of one’s perception, relating can be found to be there contributing to the enrichment of love.

As we say this we see that we are clearly allowing ourselves to use the expression love-relation beyond and besides the words love and relation. With this perception a new and distinguishable entity comes into being.

A love-relation can have as many faces as life permits. Between lovers it may co-exist with a perpetual longing for the presence of the other, with the feeling that one has lost the sense of living when one is not seeing the other, when one is not involved in the witnessing of the other. And all this longing is quietly lived, it does not become impatience, and is balanced up by a gratitude to life for having permitted the birth of such an easy and full relationship.

A love-relation, in which the lovers know that there is room in the life of each for other love-relations, can be free of stress only if both lovers have known the truth of what goes on between them and live outside the prehuman components of competitiveness and possessiveness. Lovers who have evolved personally to the point that they neither want to be fools and prefer to ignore what the other is doing, nor see that in their circumstances each exists only because of each other, nor contemplate an inner move in one that will produce a desired shift in style in the other; such lovers can give each other a love honored by both, valued by both, cultivated by both as an extremely precious gift from life. When together, these lovers

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live at a level of consciousness foreclosing the interference from the other loves and their evocation, for whatever purpose, by one while the other cannot join in, and permitting their open admission if required. Such love-relations have a large component of friendship in them which makes them healthy and lasting, sweet and precious.

A love-relation can exist entirely absorbed by a total dedication to truth. Both lovers, worshipers of truth, would not see as possible love without truth. Striving to bring themselves to the level of being in which truth is the backbone of the relationship and love its form, they know each other as the perceivers of truth in everything, therefore also in love. They are the devotees of a love which is naked and open without any other movement in it to cast a shadow, a doubt. Truth transcending the couple, love being lived by the couple, the manifestations of truth in that love are what is visible, what makes them what they are in that relationship. Love serves to particularize the pair that went to form that unique couple given to truth in life and the realization of each other in the light brought by the constant working of truth in that relationship. Such a love-relation is not for everyone. Its demands are such that only the most dedicated people can attempt, through and in their being a couple, to be given to its realization.

This may be dreamed of by many but there is little chance that the demands of truth can be stood by anyone who holds alive an atom of pride, an atom of egocentricity, an atom of selfpreservation. Whoever does live in such relationship is free of all prehuman remnants in the self, has cleansed his or her psyche of the moves that make one fear exposures. In such a 59 Â

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relationship there is no appeal to forgiveness, to compassion, to sympathy. Truth is the guide and weaknesses are to be acknowledged as such and taken care of.

Such love-relations are for heros, superhumans. They belong to legend more easily than to earthians living in ordinary circumstances, but are not less attempted by the worshipers of truth, devotees of love of whom there may be many among us.

Started in adolescence where all spiritual feats appear as possible, they can only be maintained by those individuals who would not be attracted by lesser peaks of living. Searching for the companion in the wilderness who will deserve to be met and will give what is seen as possible, may remain a lifelong longing except for the very lucky ones. One’s soul vibrates incessantly in response to the signs which must prove to be genuine before the relationship is established. A love-relation of this kind appears worthy of waiting for over several lives.

The great loves of literature are kept in circulation among us because of our capacity to live by proxy, our ability to learn from others, our certainty that our affective life is much, much broader than our practical life. If we cannot be a Tristan and an Isolde, and Abelard and an Heloise, a Dante and a Beatrice, a Radha and a Krishna, we can still contemplate in our inner life the moves that would make us grow enough to enter into such relationship with some beloved one yet to come. Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry can serve as the steps to the temple of love, beauty and truth, where we are in our evolution as lovers. From the climate in that temple we extract a guidance in the recognition of who will be our partner. However long it takes to be visited by that beloved one, we find ourselves ready. Age does 60 Â

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not affect our power of expectation. Outer appearance is not a decisive factor. Inner beauty exists and becomes the important one when outer beauty has been buried behind the signs of age.

Love is not only for the young and the vigorous. In fact, as one sails through life and learns more about oneself, about others and about what happens to one in the world and in one’s inner life, more and more love gains its real faces, its real meanings, its reality. That one knows more when it seems that one can do less, is only true superficially. With age it is possible to sift many unnecessary acts that come by themselves earlier and are now kept in check and reduced to their proper proportions. One no longer stresses the opinion of others, and the rules of society imposed by prejudice are considered superficial. Instead, one’s sight gains depths, one knows what is significant in a relationship and enters it for itself and for what it does to the members of the couple.

But of course, growing old being the result of the rotation of the earth and not of accumulated wisdom, secures not for all of us an outlet in love relations which corresponds to our experience of all that goes into having authentic relationships. Old people whose life has been exhausted mainly in going through the efforts to survive, may find it easy to dream of love and give it the attributes that fill their inner life, but may not have access to a companion with whom to realize that dream. What one gains from such dreams is difficult to size up since all these dreams are secret and often go unsuspected by outsiders. If they are free of nostalgia they can affect one’s evolution in this life and refine the residual energy which remains in the psyche and affectivity in contact with one’s soma. Perhaps such evolution will prepare 61

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one better for one’s return in the human condition and the subsequent use of the opportunities of life.

A Dimension of My Self Once we take on the perspective of one life and of that life related to the succession of lives, it can be seen how the evolution of love takes place in one individual’s life and how he or she relates to love over the years.

Although the lover in me is known to me, I know that I was not aware of being a lover before my adolescence and my exposure to literature. And, I knew myself as a lover even before I knew I loved someone, simply because I recognized love as a dimension of my self, a new awareness of myself in my self.

Looking at babies, including my babyhood, taught me what the difference is between receiving love given to me by those around me according to their lights, and my conscious move as a lover of later years who returned affection, care and attention to those in my household. I cannot say that I loved my mother unless these words mean all the feelings of respect, reverence, tenderness, affection that she evoked in me by her being, perceived by me as a boy. I am sure that I could have said the words but certainly the gradual awakening of my awareness of love did not begin in my home where family-affection was considerable and permanent. My mother never asked me if I loved her. She had all the evidence she needed, to be certain that

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there was never the slightest withdrawal from her of my affection. On the contrary, in so far as she was to give any signs of having noticed my love, she would stress my devotion to her as the years of adolescence came nearer and set in. Conscious of my duties to her, to the other members of our large family, of my responsibility for the well-being of others, I found these social components of love first. Such was my perception of the kind of love I could live in my home, as a growing boy.

I began to be preoccupied by love when as an adolescent I discovered that I was now acutely aware of feelings. My love experiences started with my knowing the sweetness of friendship. The importance of friendship became alive when one schoolmate of mine became important for me. To him I opened up as I never had before to anyone although I had had many playmates for years at school or in my sprawling family (that counted about fifty members of one generation.) My propensity for introspection made me value more particularly the moments I spent with that friend when walking the streets or along the seashore, whispering to each other what seemed to us so important at that moment. As a boy I had been a mixture of a loner in my dreams and virtual actions, and an organizer of all sorts of games on the school playgrounds and the city parks, among schoolmates, relatives or young dwellers in our apartment building. All these involvements were intense and they served the individual in me, making me more competent in the field of action. I can say that I loved that life, but it was a life where conscious love had yet to make its appearance. And friendship was the first sign which signaled that it had arrived.

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From then on I moved to the great sentimental books of the world of literature. How my breath was caught by the story of Tristan and Isolde, I cannot tell. It was clearly a turning point in my budding awareness of love. I was not yet pubert and I was deeply touched by chivalrous love. “The lady” now gained a special meaning for me which never changed: a person worthy of love, a love profoundly tinted with respect, consideration and attention.

Later, when I succumbed to social pressure to visit prostitutes, I must have been considered a real fool for I could not bring myself to use them. My peers did not believe me, and I soon stopped doing what seemed to assist other young men in their growth into male adulthood. I must have missed that growth since I still feel the presence of “a lady” in every woman and never feel that any of them is an object for my pleasure or simply a sexed creature there to be used.

The adolescent in me is alive, I know. It is the special sensitivity belonging to adolescence which has prevented me from adopting the crude language being used around me, although I know it. It is this which has remained vigilant in me to put the lights on my path and has repeatedly told me that love is better than all the paraphernalia that goes with it for so many.

When all my mental powers became fertilized by my affectivity I knew that I had to give myself to love, to that love which transcends the forms made current by the stress on the soma or on the social components. This meant that the act which satisfied my requirements the most was to join a monastic

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order. The stricter the better. In my life universal love preceded my love for a woman, but it followed friendship. It made me aware that love was a gift of oneself, an unconditional gift, without counterpart to be received except by grace. All these perceptions of love were never discussed with anyone, they were never debated. They appeared as obvious and obviously true.

They remained as the first intuitions of a life that could be dedicated to love.

But the course of events differed from the vision. I did not become a monk. I experienced three times as an adolescent, intense but short lived infatuations for three young ladies who found the offering of my love peculiar, grotesque and amusing, and returned it in the form of full contempt for my daring. How could one be as serious as I was, as inexperienced and as dedicated as a Don Quixote, a Cyrano de Bergerac — my alter egos? I still think my alter egos and I knew better and got much from our love for our ladies, even if the amounts in return look nil on a balance sheet.

However much experience one may get in love in a life, the truth about love is that it remains a quality of the self and not a quantity to be added to. What happens with age is that the experiences of the other functionings of the self become additionally available to one. This allows one to see how one’s intuition at the moment when one is most vulnerable to love, impregnates the rest of one’s life. Because of the years of contact with love, with oneself in love, with oneself making love, one can reach an acquaintance of oneself which permits one to remain close to the truth of living love, and to control the impacts of

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psychic creations and thus know that one is not fooling oneself, that one is truly living one’s life, one’s love.

The multiplicity of forms that love takes in the multitude of lovers must remain one of the facts that no one can capture, conceive, classify. Writing about love is in fact, writing about what one knows and has lived. If readers find an echo in themselves, as I found in myself of the literature I read, it is indicative of the fact that love has done its work in them as in me which was to break through the isolation of individuality and to allow me to be related to others.

The fact that we belong to the four realms provides us all with some common basis in chemical and biological terms. But this basis gets lost in the fourth realm, the one of human uniqueness, where love originates and blossoms. In as much as I have managed to be with love and its truth, I have found in my other functionings the means to express myself in terms of love, and to live my perception of love in the ways which state what it has made possible for me.

As a baby and a boy, I learned to receive love. As an adolescent I learned to make a gift of myself in love, as a man I gave of myself as much as life allowed me. As a human being I know that love makes all the difference in the world and that it is the greatest creation of my self. With love as an instrument, I have been able to deliberately enter my evolution and break through individuality, break through the couple and find myself one with human evolution and with the renewal of the cosmos.

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If in the lives of many of us love can be known to be of immense significance, and if it can place us at a point from which we can receive much and give as much as our ongoing evolution permits, then mankind has at its disposal the means to generate humanity and take care of the future.

Love, as the instrument of the self, pinpointedly guides energy in the day-to-day processes and brings to a stop the chaos which creates a kind of man who is lived by chemistry and conditioned by random stimuli. There cannot be chaos everywhere if love exists in one. There can be chaos only in a loveless world. If love is constantly evolving in one, and if one’s being in the world of action is in love, then one can see it at work in others, and together with them one can create order in place of chaos.

Love frees because of its truth.

Love makes us intense participators in evolution.

Love puts in our hands the tools that can take care of the distortions which have been into circulation due to carelessness and which were heeded because one was not prepared to present oneself in one’s nakedness and on the strength of one’s sense of truth. Love allows nakedness without inhibitions. Love gives the intelligence necessary to see through the fallacies of our chemistry as the ruler of our actions. With love nourishing it, our intelligence pours the required energies through our psyche, our affectivity, our soma, into our social functionings which produce social changes along with personal changes.

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What we need now is an education for love which integrates all the components of the complex beings we are and extends to as many as possible the benefits of being aware of love as a power our self gave itself to humanize the world.

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Glossary

1

Self

What every one of us meets when asking the question: “Who is the “I” that has always been me since I was conceived, has experienced all that I am aware of, and can become aware of all that will come my way?”

2

Energy

Known physically in actions. Also when impacted by sound, light, pressures on the skin, it is known by the self intellectually first as work, then as heat and as transcending the many forms it takes in the cosmos, plants and animals. It can be known directly in one’s muscle tone and in the inner dynamics that move images and ideas. It is what composes emotions in the here-and-now. The self is energy but must be considered as free so as to meet the unknown every time it presents itself, and that could be all the time.

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3

Awareness

An attribute of the self given to itself so as to keep the presence of the self in all its manifestations. Presence of the self known to the self as such.

4

Will

An attribute of the self which relates it to all the energies found in every one of the components of the self: the soma, the psyche, affectivity and the intellect. As a channel of the self to obtain the responses it wants in the here-and-now, the will is a major attribute of the self involved all the time in all acts of living.

Some of its functions such as variations of muscle tones, can become unconscious though the self can always couple will and awareness to produce conscious activity.

5

Psyche

An accumulation of the energy left in surplus (also referred to as “residual energy”), to take care of the dynamics of the locked up energy so as to cope with local demands when they appear. The psyche is part of the self because it is formed of its energy and remains linked to it in a number of ways. The psyche’s functionings are mostly unconscious though reachable by the self.

6

Affectivity

Residual energy in contact with the objectivations but turned towards their use in the present and for actions that can extend over some time, thus justifying linking them to the future, the

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Glossary

immediate future. Emotions created on the spot to take care of the self’s encounters with reality are part of affectivity which is seen as the accumulation of residual energy over the years. The fact that this residual energy is effective in the present and is projected in the immediate future distinguishes it from the psyche.

7

Feelings

Energy in the states which are recognizable by the self as those out of which emotions arise. Each feeling is found in a class of emotions whose energy content can cover a wide spectrum. A feeling is not an emotion but is concomitant with emotions as an awareness of what links these fleeting coagulations of energy.

Because of this, feelings are associated with emotions although they are known as the states of energy rather than amounts.

Feelings are to be counted as part of affectivity.

8

Sentiments

Recognized as attributes of feelings which can be isolated from them by the self and known to be related one with the other.

Because of this recognition, the self finds that it creates a third tier within itself, wider than feelings and more abstract, since it requires feelings in order to exist. Such broad entities as: honesty, honor, integrity, etc., include intellectual components in order to operate with extremely small amounts of energy. Other examples of sentiments are: patriotism, devotion to ideals etc.

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9

Ego

An aspect of the psyche in which additional energy has been partially given a locked up property through adherences. The ego is experienced as if it were the self because of this excess of energy derived from the adherences. The ego as psyche can be unconscious, but as part of the self it is accessible to the self.

10

Soma

The live set of cells, tissues and organs enclosed in one “bag� and animated by the energy of the self. It is considered by the self for what it is at every moment. The presence of the energy of the self separates the soma from what is called body, which it becomes when considered as part of the material universe.

11

Qbjectifications

Energy locked up in somatic forms; in any one of the automatic aggregates: cells, tissues, organs; in the automatisms which are the functions of the tissues studied by physiologists; in the retained impressions; in the thoughts, theories, models we entertain; in the ego fixations we produce as we grow up unable to handle all that comes. They are part of the self because they are formed of its energy.

12

Prehuman

The label adopted in the human universe to describe the state of a human being who wants to become different from what he or she is.

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Glossary

13

Consciousness

A state of awareness feeding back to the self that it is present; in association with any other functioning of the self it yields knowing and, if retained, it yields knowledge.

14

Bag

The container formed of the skin enveloping our body. This is what we refer to as “us” at any age. This is what we take around wherever we go. In our bag are placed our bones muscles etc., as well as our feelings, thoughts, experiences.

15

The Four Realms

We call “cosmos” the universe where particles, atoms and molecules are all that is being considered. We call “vital” the universe in which molecules are organized in cells that can look after their complex chemistry. This realm includes plants and animals. We call “animal kingdom” the universe in which forms made of organized cells produce specific constellations of behaviors. We call “human” the universe in which a number of sets of behaviors can be replaced by others when willed by the individual.

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Further Readings:

The Adolescent and His Will

1971

Conscience de la Conscience

1954 & 1967

The Mind Teaches the Brain

1974

On Being Freer

1975

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