Transcript
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Tetragrammaton. In romantic love, there's this a longing for an ideal. And when I say ideal, I'm not talking about something that is meant to dissipate. We talk about contemplation. Really. Contemplation is a word that says you're going to make a template of heaven here in your own body and your own life. That's a religious falling in love. So to keep the ideal, but to allow the ideal to have its own life so that it can change with you. It's almost always larger than you could ever imagine when you first started. And in many ways that's the same. It's the same dynamic that we have to follow when we're in love with a person. You do fall in love with an ideal to begin with, and rightly so. You need to be taken away from your non idealistic, unimaginative self. But if you have any maturity about, or you're granted maturity in the path ahead, you're given to understand that this ideal you've fallen in love with has its own life, actually this person. And so there's a wonderful phrase from Simon Weill, the French philosopher. She says, what we love in other people is the hoped for satisfaction of our desires. We do not love them for their desires. If we love them for their desires, we should love them as ourselves. And so what you've got to fall in love with is the desires that are in the world, that are in the person you've fallen in love with. And you're being invited along that fiery path. There's beautiful lines by Pablo Neruda about him falling in love with poetry and with the world that poetry has the power to articulate. So he says, and something ignited in my soul. Fever or unremembered wings. And I went my own way, deciphering that burning fire. And I wrote the first bare line. Pure foolishness, pure wisdom of one who knows nothing. Yes. And suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open. You hear it in Spanish and you can feel it in the body. I algo galpuiabe en me al ma fierdides que friendo a che ace madura escrebi la primera linea Vaga vagas in cuerpo por trontaria, por sabadia del che no sabinada I vi di pronto. El cielo descranado e habiato. It's just incredibly grounded at the same time that he's taking you out of your present body. So the powers of romantic love are to do with subversion of your present identity. And I mean, we actually know from research that your brain functionality actually changes when you're in love, thank God, and you can't see straight. You're not meant to see straight. You'd never leave your present life, your present house, your present circumstances. Logic has to be put in abeyance. Logic will be brought back in as a good servant to the relationship. But to begin with, we raise our house down to the foundations and hopefully the other person does the same. And we build from that meeting. This is a piece called Second Sight. Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before painted through an evening sky. Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before painted through an evening sky. Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom. Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom. Sometimes you need only that first shyness that comes from being shown things far beyond your understanding so that you can fly and become free by being still and by being still here and then there are times you need to be brought to ground by touch and touch alone. To know those arms around you and to make your home in the world just by being wanted to see those eyes looking back at you as eyes should see you at last. Seeing you as you always wanted to be seen. Seeing you as you yourself had always wanted to see the world. Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before painted through an evening sky. Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom. Sometimes you need only that first shyness that comes from being shown things far beyond your understanding so so that you can fly and become free by being still and by being still here and then there are times you need to be brought to ground by touch and touch alone. To know those arms around you and to make your home in the world just by being wanted to see those eyes looking back at you as eyes should see you at last. Seeing you as you always wanted to be seen. Seeing you as you yourself had always wanted to see the world. And I think that's what we see in the lover's eyes is ourself being seen as we had always imagined we could possibly see too. At the same time. And this is also about, you know, in romantic love, there's this powerful physical relationship to the gravitational field of longing what's physically pulling you. It has a sexual power to it, but it's beyond sexual. At the same Time, it takes the forms of ideal notions of living together, of sharing a life together, of going beyond yourself. But first of all, you have to shape this kind of invitational identity. And the interesting thing is you're also inviting someone else to invite you. So it's this mutual invitation and this mutual vulnerability you look at vulnerability. It comes from the Latin vulnu, meaning wound. So when you're vulnerable, you're open to the world and you're open in a way where you have no choice. That's just the way you're made, actually. So in meeting another person in love, you're. The way you're made is meeting the way the other person is made. In a proper love relationship, you can say I love you and the other person can say I love you. Yeah, but really it's, we love us. That's what's being said, we love us. That would be more accurate.