February 2010     
           Reflection                        
   
 The Names of Love

“We divide love and classify it: 
We discriminate between physical love and spiritual love, between erotic love and personal love, mother love, father love, the love between friends. But the truth is that we remain confused by it. When we are in love, we are in a tornado of forces, and all we can do is try to hold on to our chair.

The psychiatrists talk, the therapists talk, the philosophers talk, the novelists talk, the women talk, the men talk, the movies and magazines talk, the singers and musicians talk. Everyone talks about love, but the truth is that our labels are pale efforts to deal with an overwhelming force, as far beyond our control as the wind, the lightening, and the seas.

Could it be that all emotions that whirl us around in our lives are so many fractions of the force of love? Could it be that all feeling is love? That all emotion is love or a derivative of love? We talk too much about love–-possibly because we only live with half of love, no matter how we break it down and classify it. We live mainly with the half that seeks our own pleasure, or psychological security, or the begetting of children. It is this half of love that brings individuals and nations to their knees, that lifts us up and throws us down. It is this half of love–– because it is only half, and because it engages only half of the human self–-that makes our lives ultimately meaningless. There is another half of love. There is another half of human nature and there is another half of all intimate human relations. This other half is the love that helps another search for truth. What is really the missing element in our experience of love?”

–-Excerpt from “A Little Book on Love” by Jacob Needleman
pages 23-24

Practices: