"The path that leads to an understanding of romantic love also leads inevitably to our religious nature, to the spiritual side of our being..."
These are writings and excerpts from Robert Johnson’s book ‘WE’. I think its an important concept. It gave me clues as to why the training partly appealed to me, what I was looking for. It also gives clues as to why, when we finally come to our own empowerment, we have to leave behind the seduction into someone else’s story, the seduction of giving ourselves away to another’s control and projection. First, a look at the projections of romantic love, then a look at a very similar religious dynamic; projecting our spiritual journey onto a story.
Robert Johnson, in his book “WE”, examines the essence and meaning of ‘romantic love’, using the story of Tristan and Iseult. In examining this story, he shows the unconscious beliefs about love shared by both sexes and shows how these attitudes are expressed symbolically in the Tristan myth. He then breaks down the illusions we often have of love myths in themselves and beautifully redefines what love should and can be.
The Sacred is real, and we seek it. It is a universal psychological and spiritual force which will enact itself whether we are aware of it or not. With consciousness, it can lead us to a vivid autonomous inner life which contributes positively to our own well-being and those around us. If we do not become aware of its power and correctly place it in our lives, it will keep us bound, dependent, driven and in torment. Much of the book uses ‘he’ because it is addressing the male, but this dynamic equally applies to females. With thoughtfulness, apply this knowledge to the dynamics and methods of Training in Power.
In the story, Tristan falls in love with Iseult, who is married to the King. Both of them suffer to the end of their short lives, in torment, guilt and pain. This yearning for romance is no different that the yearning for spirit, for the sacred of our life.
Excerpts, with some paraphrasing:
So much of our lives are spent in a longing and a search, for what, we do not know. So many of our ostensible “goals”, so many of the things we think we want, turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide: they are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are not reducible to physical or material things, not even to a physical person; they are psychological qualities: love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose---something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion.
We try to reduce all this to something physical, something concrete---a house, a car, a better job, or a human being---but it doesn’t work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the Sacred. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.
Sacredness is, in a sense, a feeling---but a feeling that goes to the very heart of life. It is the feeling of recognition directed toward what is great and high enough to give our small lives meaning, to put our personal journeys in a greater perspective. It is the feeling of reverence.
In the book, there is the story of White Bison Spirit Woman, who approaches from afar. Two Indian scouts see her. The wise scout senses her Sacred nature, and warns the other one to put his “bad thoughts” away. The foolish scout doesn’t listen, and approaches her with his wants, and she turns him to dust. We seem never to go searching directly or consciously for the sacred side of life. Like the two scouts, we wander in our old hunting grounds, seeking only the habitual and the known.
Suddenly we are confronted with an unknown part of ourselves. She comes walking a long way off, arrayed in white buckskin; and when she speaks, it is a voice like singing. At first we are confused: she bears the image of a woman, and we want to believe that we can relate to her as to a woman. It is hard to believe that she is not physical woman, but a metaphysical force so powerful that we dare not try to touch her physically. This is the fact that the sacred presents to us: this is how the sacred becomes one ‘person’ and speaks to us, this is anima.
Otherwise we would feel the sacred only vaguely as the “other side of life,” the “other side of myself,” that we have never touched, never known. It manifests as dreams of adventures we long for, triumphs we can almost taste, luminous men and women we meet in walking in the corridors and fabled kingdoms of our minds. Without reasoning, without thinking, our feelings pull us toward the other side of ourselves, where every image vibrates with the promise of an extraordinary meaning, experience, or sense of wholeness. This is symbolized as White Bison Woman coming to the two scouts as a stranger from a larger world outside the ego’s vision, the ego’s opinions or notions of reality.” Her reality is so much larger, so filled with potential for enlarging our lives and for giving them meaning, that the unconscious says to us, “this is sacred; this is what you must treat as sacred.” White Bison Woman makes what we call the “spiritual” side of life visible, manifest. She makes the invisible, visible.
When we treat White Bison Woman as our soul, she has the power to make the “sacred” into an immediate, direct, conscious, experience. She is not physical; she is Psyche, Pneuma, Light-as-wind, yet her tracks may be seen. She has substance; she is the power that gives the sacred world the substance of symbol. She takes it off the level of the theoretical, the abstract, the sentimental, the figure-of-speech. She renders the sacred accessible in the here-and-now: touched, felt, and experienced as though it were physical. The spirit world is made immediate and palpable through symbolic experience.
Thus, she has the power to give us psychological faith:
The faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith is the reality of the soul. Since psyche is primarily image and image always psyche, this faith manifests itself in the belief in images, the experiences images give us. Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being; an internal reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life.
Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in its darkness. (Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, p. 50)
We may come to see that psychological faith and spiritual faith intersect at the deepest level, for the early Christians knew that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”---and we find that it is in the numinous symbols, flowing through the soul to the conscious mind, that we apperceive the substance of what we hope, what we dream, the substance of what lives within us beyond the limits of this physical sphere.
It is anima---White Bison Woman---who brings to the conscious mind the evidence of realities not seen in the physical world. We seek the spirit realm in romantic love, we seek it in sex, we seek it in physical possessions and drugs and physical people; but it is not there. It is only revealed through the soul.
She instructed: “you shall go home and tell your people that I am coming, and that a big tepee shall be built for me in the center of the nation.”
White Bison Woman carries the medicine pipe. The medicine pipe is the power to contract the “other world.” This power is the conscious use of symbolism, for it is by symbolic experience that we breathe in the gods of the archetypal worlds like smoke form the sacred pipe.
The pipe has twelve eagle feathers representing the sky and the twelve moons by which we receive the power to know the totality of life, a vision which merges spirit and matter, into sacredness and ordinariness. Twelve is the number that symbolically combines the three and the four. Three symbolizes the ordered, limited, finite life of the physical world, and practical, daily existence. Four symbolizes the infinite realm of the soul where one is lifted into a vision of the limitless archetypal realm and the wholeness of the cosmos. Twelve combines these two sides of human nature in a synthesis. Twelve contains heaven and earth, both the ‘other world’ with the ordinary world, the spiritual life with the physical life. This is the symbolism of the twelve disciples who surround Christ in a perfect circle in the Christian mandala, the twelve moons of the solar year, and the twelve signs of the zodiac that mark off the revolving ages of the galactic universe.
On the other side of the medicine pipe is carved a bison calf, telling us that the earth, and our earthly human life, is drawn into this synthesis with the sacred when we approach the lady wisely.
Perhaps the deepest lesson we learn from the wise scout is this: The quality of the sacredness consists not only in what is there in the inner world, but also in the attitude we take toward it. It is made up not only of what is, but also of what one does with it. It is up to us to recognize it, to treat it as the sacred, in order to experience its power. The great power of White Bison Woman is manifested to the people only because the wise scout sees that she is sacred and gives her the respect that is her due.
She instructed: “you shall go home and tell your people that I am coming, and that a big tepee shall be built for me in the center of the nation.” For anima to bestow her gifts she must depend on someone, an individual human ego, who will open his eyes and acknowledge her sacredness. If the wise scout had followed the path of the foolish man, there would be two skeletons lying in the dust, not one. The ‘other world’ would still not be revealed to the nation, no sacredness would come to the people.
People have always believed that the evolution of the cosmos is a partnership between god and humankind: the sacred is always there, closer to us that any physical person could be, but it takes on the power to fill our lives with meaning and quality only when we open our eyes and bow down in awe. This is one of the great mysteries; it is our consciousness, our act of recognition, that has the power to make things into what they are, and to make the sacred, sacred.
Most of us are like the foolish scout, our irreverent culture teaches us from childhood that nothing is holy, that nothing deserves our reverence, that everything in life can be reduced to either physical possession or a sex act. The wise scout knows he is confronted with something that is outside his experience, something he can’t deal with by the ego’s usual ‘bag of tricks.’ He senses her sacredness and waits on her with reverence.
The American Indians, unlike us, did not denigrate the physical and the sexual. It is not an issue of sexual thoughts. The foolish scout is trying to find in the sexual side of life what can’t be located there. He is trying to turn Spirit Woman into a physical being, trying to experience her through physical contact. In psychological terms, he is trying to make her physical by projecting her onto an external woman. The results are devastating: instead of the benevolent Bison Goddess, he meets Kali, Goddess of Death, and she leaves his fleshless bones in the dust.
If there is such a thing as psychological blasphemy, it is to take what is sacred and try to convert it into something else, to try to make the sacred into grist for the ego’s mill. Psychological sin does not consist in sex nor in being physical or in ‘immorality’ but rather in calling a thing other than what it really is, treating it as something other than what it is, pretending to do one thing while doing another. This is the sin against consciousness, the refusal to take life consciously. The foolish scout’s thoughts are “bad” because he is confronted with what is spiritual, sacred, and transpersonal, and he wants to treat it as though it were physical, sexual, and personal. He wants to reduce White Bison Woman to an appendage of his ego world.
She instructed: “you shall go home and tell your people that I am coming, and that a big tepee shall be built for me in the center of the nation”
This means to make a place for anima, and a place for the sacred, in the very center of my life. It means to devote time and energy to experiencing my psyche, to exploring my own unconscious, to discovering who I am and what I am when I am not just this ego. The first thing required for a Western man is to acknowledge that the sacred world exists. He has to be willing to consider that behind his fantasy of the “perfect” woman he demands, the “perfect” way of life, the “perfect” relationship, he is looking for something that is outside this world of phenomena: He is looking for the sacred. He has to spend time and energy learning to experience these energies, which manifest in symbol and fantasy, as inner realities, as inner parts of himself.
She comes walking, with visible tracks, waking in a sacred manner. She will come to us if we prepare a sacred dwelling for her, if we will open our eyes and see her as she is. But her true dwelling is composed of the stuff of our own attitudes toward her, of our sense of reverence. The place we prepare is a place within; if she will dwell with us at all, it must be there.
The path that leads to an understanding of romantic love also leads inevitably to our religious nature, to the spiritual side of our being that we have so zealously sidestepped.
We have learned that romantic love draws on a huge power system in the unconscious, an energy so great that we can only speak of it in the language of religion and mysticism: We ‘adore’, we ‘worship’ our beloved, when we are in love we are ‘completed,’ we are ‘in heaven,’, we ‘die.’ Here is revealed the quest for the godhead, Fire from Heaven, spiritual enlightenment, meaning, consciousness of self. In the West, as in no other culture in history, this huge force is routed, not into our religion or our mystical life, but into our human loves; romantic love has become the channel through which this awesome force flows into daily human life.
Now we are asking what we are to do with this awesome force? How can we channel it correctly so that it will enrich our lives---in the realms of both spirit and of relationship---rather that sabotage them.
In the book was a universal dream for mankind. A man returns a huge bell back to a cathedral, where a special basilica had been created specifically for the size of the huge bell. The priests have been waiting centuries for its return. The man exits through a side door onto the dusty road home.
What we can do with this awesome force can be answered in clear and vivid language: “Put the divine part of yourself back into the basilica where it belongs and live the human part of yourself where it belongs---in ordinariness and simplicity.” We must take our soul out of romantic love and return it to an inner place.
The wary traveler who trudges to the door of this great cathedral is covered with the dust of a long journey, exhausted from the weight of a burden he has carried for centuries. The bell is too large and heavy to be carried by this single mortal man. It is too heavy to be carried in the personal ego life, too awesome to be put into his personal relationship with mortal woman. It is too great a burden to place on his marriage. His marriage has already snapped under the weight. There is only one structure large enough and strong enough to hold this bell: it is the basilica.
Since the twelfth century, when the first Tristan took the bell out of the temple, drank the love potion, and began to try to contain this power within his love affairs, Western man has struggled to carry the bell, within his personal life, his marriages, and his worldly empires. Now, nearly a thousand years later, he has forgotten that the bell had a divine origin. He has sacrificed the sacred to the secular, and psyche to the ego for so long that he can’t remember to who the bell belongs. His back is nearly broken and he is weary unto death with the weight; his mortal human relationships are in a shambles from the crushing burdens he has placed on them, but he knows no other way. He doesn’t remember the basilica; he doesn’t know where it is.
Like the bell, anima sends forth a voice for us to hear, she sings, and her song draws us into our inner life. Her power is to give immediacy to the contents of our unconscious, to manifest the archetypes as living, breathing images whom we experience as forces living within us.
Anima, like the bell, has the power to reveal the Dionysian side of spiritual experience, where truth is felt with the senses, felt in the images that flow from the unconscious, felt as a living encounter with inner “persons.” Indeed, the bells are among the few remnants of the Dionysus in our Western religion; they call us to music, hymn, dance, feeling---to at-oneness with the cosmic drama of sacrifice and rebirth.
The dream tells us that this bell does not belong to one’s ego; it belongs, like the sacred pipe, to an inner ‘nation’, an inner ‘Christendom.” It was known that something that belonged to all, that was the church’s duty to guard, would one day return to the basilica. In symbol this means that something that belonged in the arena of the spiritual life, outside the personal ego-life, that should have been guarded reverently in the inner world, has been lost. This is our soul; this is our psyche. Lost at first in the unconscious, it went wandering out into the ego world; through the love potion it was projected onto personal human relationships. We tried to make the superpersonal into the personal; what belonged to the unconscious we tried to make a fief of the ego. But this power is destined to be given up by the ego, to be returned to the inner “cathedral.”
It is difficult for us to imagine what it means to return a part of our lives to “the cathedral.” It does not necessarily mean to become involved with an external, collective religion. It does mean to differentiate between what belongs in our external lives and what belongs to the inner self. It means to take something that we have been trying to live through our external relationships and live it, instead, in a quiet, private, inner place---a place that exists only on the level of spirit.
Deep within each of us is such a place, a crystal chamber “all compact of roses and the morning,” a great basilica where true-voiced bells wait to announce the return of Soul from her wanderings. To return anima to the cathedral means for a man to sacrifice something on the level of his ego-life, to sacrifice his claim to live his soul by projection on woman. It means to take that burden off an external person and place it within the powerful inner edifice that was made to bear it.
Sometimes dreams are given us at a time when we must face a “death of ego”---a sacrifice of some level on which we have lived---to compensate our fears and our dismal expectations. Dreams give us a sense of proportion and lend us courage by showing us the beauty and glory of the thing we do, which we can’t see for ourselves, and the splendor of the life that awaits us on the other side of our sacrifice.
To return anima to the basilica is a sacrificial act. All of us have the option of trying to live anima through other people. To give up that attempt takes a conscious act of sacrifice; one must sacrifice a whole level of existence in order to move on to another. From the ego’s viewpoint, it looks like death. To give up living anima by projection means to pull most of the artificial intensity out of relationships; it means that things will seem quieter and less exciting. To put his soul in the cathedras and stop trying to life it through a woman means that a he removes an entire dimension of his life from his human relationship and re-establishes it elsewhere, on another level of himself---a level that he can’t live outwardly, that he must live by himself. To his ego it feels as though he is impoverishing his human relationship or cheating himself. At first he feels that half the thrills, excitement, fun and intensity is taken out of human relationship. With time he learns that his soul-life never really belonged there and that his human relationship is actually thriving better without it; but for a time, it feels dismal.
This is the feeling that this bell-carrier has, the dreamer of the dream. If he gives the bell back, he feels as though he is giving up something in his personal, ego life. It is also the feeling the foolish Indian scout suffered when we was warned not to touch the Spirit Woman: He felt that he would be giving up something he wanted, something that excited and thrilled him on the ego level.
The symbolism of the great basilica, the pealing of the great bells that have waited all their lives for the return of the sacred bell, tells us of the glory and the beauty that waits on the other side of the sacrifice. By this imagery the dream tells us that our egos do not really lose anything by putting our souls where they belong, for the cathedral is inside us, it is part of us, and what seems to be lost to our egos is not lost but transformed into something on a greater level---something with the towering immensity of the basilica, which the ecstatic beauty of the voices of the great bells.
In fact, our ego empire has never truly insulated us against the mysteries or against the call of the basilica. As we have learned, the soul finds its way into our lives through one great open gap in the ego’s armor: romantic love (or a charismatic leader who promises freedom)
This is why romantic love, this curious blend of the numinous and the deadly, has become the strongest single force in our culture: it has become, by default, the vessel in which we struggle to contain everything that has been excluded from our ego empires, everything of the unconscious---all that is numinous, unfathomable, awesome, all that inspires worship in us.
The dreamer of the dream comes to understand this. The wise Indian scout understands it in the presence of White Bison Woman. He sees that he is in the presence of something of another world, and that he must not try to keep it for his ego but return it to the place that has been prepared for it, the one place that is powerful enough to contain it.
If Tristan had had this dream, if he had understood this dream, could he have done differently with the love potion, with Iseult? Like the dreamer, he could have gone out the side door silently, anonymously. H would have left that divine part of himself in the temple, put the human part of himself in human dimensions, and he would have not mixed the two. The whole burden of this dream is to learn to differentiate the two: the divine part and the ordinary, human, personal part.
Now we have seen this as symbol, but in practice how do we do it? How do we return this bell to the temple? How do we make a new home for this divine, over-whelming part of ourselves that we never asked for, but that we always find, tucked away under and arm or loaded on our backs like the bell?
Dr. Jung used to return a patient to his ancestral religion as quickly as possible if that was possible. It can be the simplest and fastest way to return this divine part of ourselves to the basilica. But for many people this is not possible, the ritual and symbols of external, culturally transmitted religion no longer have life for them.
For such people, and there are more and more of them, there are other ways. One has to understand that the ultimate basilica, the ultimate cathedral, synagogue, or temple, is inside. What is required is not so much an external, collective religion, but an inner experience of the numinous, divine realm that is manifested through the psyche. For such people the religious life, the basilica, is found in the daily hours of solitary meditation, symbolic ritual, active imagination, interaction with images flowing through fantasy, ethical confrontation with the inner “persons”, who reveal themselves in our dreams.
This is the symbolic life---taken voluntarily, consciously, with an attitude of reverence, with the same devotion and interest that medieval Christian mystics put into contemplative prayer or the Hindu puts into the vision of Shiva or the Zen Buddhist puts into Zazen. By such a life we find our way back to the primordial ground from which all religion grew: the individual dreams, visions, and vivid personal encounters with the persons of the inner world. Before there was dogma and doctrine there was Jacob wrestling with an angel, Paul struck down on the road to Damascus by a vision of Christ, Gautama seated beneath the Bodhi Tree, seized by the oneness of the universe.
There is an inner temple, but it looks more difficult to us and it seems more solitary: one feels like the man of the dream, who, having delivered the precious burden to the holy place, lets himself out a side door into a dusty road and walks off into anonymity as far as his personal life is concerned.
This is perhaps the most moving and powerful event in the dream: the decision of this modern Tristan, not only to give the bell back to the holy place, but to give up the power, the adulation, the drama, the ego-importance he could have had from having the bell in his personal possession. His exit through the side door is a true and correct sacrifice of ego, a genuine transformation. Unexpectedly, this event reveals to us that one of the root issues in romantic love is humility: the humility of an ego that is willing to give up inflating and puffing up its ego world, its personal relationships, into a dramatic power system. A deep humility is required to return that divine part of oneself to the cathedral.
Probably Tristan could have done not differently than he did. Western man has had to drink the love potion, he has had to find his way to anima and to the gods in the only way he knows. But with the centuries behind us, he has spent his time in the Forest of Morois; he has wandered far and carried a heavy burden along countless dusty roads. He has fallen in love, and out of love; he has betrayed and suffered betrayal; he has married Iseult (of the White Hands) and yet wandered away in loneliness---always carrying the bell, always seeking Iseult (the Fair) in his loves, looking for her image in every face he sees.
If Tristan will learn today from his dreams, he will make Iseult the Fair the queen of his inner world, the soul figure who will conduct him inwardly to the presence of the gods. He will take her to the inner temple and place her upon a throne of gold: it fits her, for it has awaited her form many centuries. He will cease trying to find her outside, in a mortal woman or in external circumstances. And after Tristan slips out the side door of the basilica, he will make his way quietly home. There he will seek a chamber where his wife awaits him: Iseult of the White Hands. And as he takes her hand, he will discover a mystery: Iseult whom he left enthroned in a vast basilica has been restored to him, in a correct form and on a correct level; this simple, mortal woman, is also divine, and this chamber is a holy place.
On Human Love
People become so wearied of the cycles and dead ends of romance that they begin to wonder if there is such a thing as “love.” There is. But sometimes we have to make –profound changes of attitude before we can see what love is and make room for love in our lives. Love between human beings is one of the absolute realities of human nature. Just as soul---Psyche---was one of the Greek pantheon, so was Love: His name was Eros. For the Greeks understood that love, being an archetype of the collective unconscious, is both eternal and universal in humankind. And for the Greeks, that qualified Love as a god.
Because love is an archetype, it has its own character, its own traits, its own “personality.” Like a god, love behaves as a “person” in the unconscious, a separate being in the psyche. Love is distinct from my ego; love was here before my ego came into the world, and love will be here after my ego departs. Yet love is something or ‘someone’ who lives within me. Love is a force that acts from within, that enables my ego to look outside itself, to see my fellow humans as something to be valued and cherished, rather than used.
Therefore, when I say that ‘I love,’ it is not I who love, but, in reality, Love who acts through me. Love is not so much something I do as something I am. Love is not a doing but a state of being, a relatedness, a connectedness to another mortal, an identification with her or him that simply flows within me and through me, independent of my intentions or any efforts.
This state of being may express itself in what I do or in how I treat people, but it can never be reduced to a set of ‘doings,’ or acts. It is a feeling within. More often that we realize, love works its divine alchemy best when we follow the advice of Shakespeare’s Cordelia: “love, and keep silent.”
Love insists, regardless of our opinions about what it ought to be. No matter how many fabrications or how much selfishness we justify in the name of ‘love,’ love still keeps its unchanging character. Its existence and its nature do not depend on my illusions, my opinions, or my counterfeits. Love is different from what my culture has led me to expect, different from what my ego wants, different form the sentimental froth and inflated ecstasies I’ve been taught to hope for; but love turns out to be real; it turns out to be what I am, rather than what my ego demands.
We need to know this about love. Otherwise we could never stand to look honestly at our self-deceptions. Even though romantic love has not turned out to be what we thought, there is till a human love that is inherent in us, and this love will be with us even after our projections, our illusions, and our artifices have all passed away.
As we learn love’s characteristics and attitudes, we can begin to see love within us---revealed in our feelings, in the spontaneous flow of warmth that surges toward another person, in the small, unnoticed acts of relatedness that make up the secret fabric of our daily lives.
Love is the power within us that affirms and values another human being as he or she is. Human love affirms that person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we would like him or her to be or the projection that flows from our minds. Love is the inner god who opens our blind eyes to the beauty, value, and quality of the other person.
Love causes us to value that person as a total, individual self, and this means that we accept the negative side as well as the positive, the imperfections as well and the admirable qualities. When one truly loves the human being rather than the projection, one loves the shadow just as one loves the rest.
When love guides, it is concerned with another’s well-being, no fixated on its own wants and whims. Through love we see that the other individual has as great a value in the cosmos as our own; it becomes just as important to us that he or she should be whole, should live fully, should find the joy of life, as that our own needs be met.
In the world of the unconscious, love is one of those great psychological forces that have the power to transform the ego. Love is the one power that wakens the ego to the existence of something outside itself, outside its plans, outside its empire, outside its security.
Love relates the ego not only to the rest of the human race, but to the soul and to all the gods of the inner world.
This love by its very nature is the exact opposite of egocentricity. We use it to dignify any number of demands for attention, power, security, or entertainment from other people. But when we are looking out for our own self-styled “needs,” our own desires, or own dreams, and our power over people, this is not love. Love is utterly distinct from our ego’s desires and power ploys. It leads in a different direction: toward the goodness, the value, and the needs of the people around us, just as they are.
In its very essence, love is an appreciation, recognition of another’s value: it moves a man to honor a woman rather that use her, to ask himself how he might serve her. And if this woman is relating to him through love, she will take the same attitude toward him.
There is a difference between an ego left to its own devices and an ego under the influence of love. My ego is concerned only with itself; but “love suffers long and is kind.” My ego is envious, always seeking to inflate itself with illusions of power and control, but “love does not vaunt itself, is not puffed up.” My ego, left to its ego-centered-ness, will always betray, but “love never fails.” My ego only knows how to affirm itself and its desires, but love “seeks not her own way.” Love affirms all of life: “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things.”
This is why we have taken exception to romantic love, and this is the main distinction between human love and romantic love: Romance must, by its very nature, deteriorate into egotism. For romance is not a love that is directed at another human being; the passion of romance is always directed at our own projections, our own expectations, or our own fantasies. To be capable of real love means becoming mature, with realistic expectations of the other person. It means accepting responsibility for our own happiness or unhappiness, and neither expecting the other person to make me happy or blaming that person for our bad moods and frustrations.
A wise friend gave me a name for human love. She called it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love.
Stirring oatmeal is a humble act---not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. Like the rice hulling of the Zen monks, the spinning wheel of Ghandi, the tent making of Saint Paul, it represents the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary. Jung once said that feeling is a matter of the small.
When a couple are genuinely related to each other, they are willing to enter into the whole spectrum of human life together. Love is willing to work with the other person’s moods and unreasonableness. Human love sees another person as an individual and makes and individualized relationship to him or her. Romantic love sees the other person only as a role player in the drama. Romance is never happy with the other person just as he or she is.
We can learn much of human love by learning to look with an open mind at Eastern cultures and their attitudes. During the time I spent in India and Japan, I saw marriages and love relationships that are not based at all on romance but on warm, devoted, and enduring love. Hindus are instinctive masters of the art of human love. I think this is because they have never taken on romantic love as a way of trying to relate to each other. Hindus automatically make the dedifferentiation that we cave completely muddled in the West. They know how to worship anima, the archetypes, the gods, as inner realities; they know how to keep their experience of the divide side of life from their personal relationships and marriages. They take the personified archetypes as symbols of another world and take each other as human beings; as a result, they don’t put impossible demands on each other and they don’t disappoint each other.
Hindu love may not seem to be bubbling with enough heat and intensity to suit the Western romantic taste. But if one observes patiently, one is startled out of Western prejudices and begins to question the assumption that romance is the only ‘true love.’ There is a quiet but steady lovingness in Hindu marriages, a profound affection. There is stability: they are not caught in the dramatic oscillations between “in love” and “out of love,” adoration and disillusionment, that the Western couples are.
A Hindu man’s relationship to his wife is based on loving her, not on being “in love” with an ideal that he projects onto her. His relationship is no going to collapse because on day he falls “out of love,” or because he meets another woman who catches his projection. He is committed to a woman and a family, not to a projection.
We think of ourselves as more sophisticated than the ‘simple’ Hindus. But, by comparison with a Hindu, the average Western man is like an ox with a ring in his nose, following his projection around from one woman to another, making no true relationship or commitment to any. In the area of human feeling, love, and relationship, Hindus have evolved a highly differentiated, subtle, and refined consciousness. In these matters, they do better than we. Their children are bright, happy and psychologically healthy, not neurotic; they are not torn within themselves as so many Western children are. They are bathed constantly in human affection, and they sense a peaceful flow of affection between their mother and father. They sense the stability, the enduring quality of their family life. Their parents are committed permanently; they don’t hear their parents asking themselves whether their marriage is ‘going to work out’, separation and divorce to not float as specters in the air.
For us Westerners we can‘t go the way of the Hindus or do an imitation of other people’s customs. We have to deal with our own Western unconscious and our own Western wounds; we have to find the healing balm within our own Western soul. We have drunk the love potion and plunged into the romantic era of our evolution, and the only way out is by the path that leads straight ahead. But we can learn from the Eastern cultures to stand outside ourselves, outside our assumption and our beliefs, just long enough to see ourselves in a new perspective. We can learn what it is to approach love with a different set of attitudes, unburdened by the dogmas of our culture.
We can learn that human relationship is inseparable from friendship and commitment. We can learn that the essence of love is not to use the other to make us happy but to serve and affirm the one we love. And we can discover, to our surprise, that what we have needed more than anything was not so much to be loved, as to love. Submitted by Diane
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