Consecrate the Material
Be Graceful, Hopeful, and Wise
Live in the Light of the Spirit
Heart and Soul
We remember love in our hearts, as the thing which, in life, made our hearts glad; we long for love in our souls, as the thing that will carry us home.
This book is a counterpart to True Love: How to Make Your Relationship Sweeter, Deeper and More Passionate, a little book I wrote to teach the emotional skills for choreographing the dance of an intimate relationship. In it, I addressed the psychological dimensions of love–how to make a relationship run smoothly, and how to treat yourself and your beloved well so you can receive the blessings and pleasures of a wonderful relationship. Many people have told me that they keep it on their bedside table, read it to one another, and practice its lessons, and that, as a result, their relationships have flourished, deepened, and transformed in ways that delight and challenge them, and also bring them great joy. This of course brings me great joy.
In the time since it was published, however, our world and what we ask of and give to our loves–our intimate, caring, committed, and compassionate emotional engagements–have expanded and deepened. We no longer need to know simply how to conduct our relationships so we can be comfortable in them; we want to know the meaning of relationship itself–why we get into relationships, what role they play in the schemes of our lives, and why, in spite of the pain they often cause us, we are ineffably, irrevocably drawn to them.
We're asking, from a much deeper level, about the meaning of relationship. Whereas in the past, we asked in behalf of our emotions, we are asking now with the longing of our spirits. We are beginning to perceive that every relationship is also a spiritual undertaking, that, more than just making us feel good or rescuing us from aloneness, an intimate relationship is the garden in which our spirits will blossom, the journey through which our souls will evolve, and that love, the energetic force that drives our relationships, is really what we're trying to connect with through them. Love, our brilliant spirits sense, is really the only thing that matters in this life.
I believe we now live in a time in which we have no choice but, in consciousness, to mature our love. In such elegant maturity, love is not an option but a necessity; romance is not a passionate pastime but a portal to the profound joy and compassion that is the soul's true destination; and conscious loving is an undertaking that recognizes both the desires of the heart and the transcendent longings of the soul as properties of love. For we love in both these dimensions. If the heart is the castle of the emotions, then the soul is the towering cathedral through whose high windows the blazing sunlight of pure love pours in.
Love of the heart is love of the emotional body, an elegant dance of connection enacted in the emotional realm. When we fall in love, we are suddenly united with our purest emotional essence. We feel radiant, happy, and ecstatic; we feel beautiful, hopeful, and blessed. We are transformed not only by the possibilities of this particular love, but also of life itself. Gladness is with us and we feel suddenly illumined, and when we live in an intimate relationship, we continue this heartful journey. Here the sharing of feelings–delight and sorrow, fear and rage, anguish and joy–connects us to one another to a very high degree.
Love of the heart is an exquisite, endlessly changing tableau, the play and interplay of emotions between two human beings. But the love of the soul is love supreme. It is love in our spiritual essence and of our eternal belonging. In this deep love we ascend above our emotions–how we feel, what's troubling us–and into the realm of mystical, nonmaterial essence, the realm of the ecstatic.
For in our souls, we are all warp and weft of the one great seamless cloth, woven together of all that we have been, all that we shall be–our victories and majesties and sorrows, our tragedies and grand heroic moments. In the soul's love we sense far within us, as if written in faint, faded ink on the ancient notebooks of our genes, that we have all been all things–both male and female, parent and child, abuser and abused, villager and king. To behold one another through this great encompassing love, love indivisible, love uncompromising, brilliant, radiant, and immense, is to behold the whole of human history, the face of God, in a single human being's eyes.
This book, then, is about the interface of our heart's needs–for passion, romance, companionship, and just plain fun–and our soul's need to be united with all that is and ever has been in a state of exquisite, seamless union.
We are now actively seeking this union. For what we have made of ourselves in this world–our objects and achievements, our clever technology, our getting and spending–has not moved us at the deepest level. We “have it all” and yet are still awash with longing. Intuitively we know that it is only love and, in human experience, relationship at the intimate personal level that can chime the deep chord which reminds us of the indelible union that is not only our birthright but our spiritual destination.
This book is about these journeys–the journey of the heart to the love that flowers in joyful emotions, and the journey of the soul's deep longing to carry us all back home. These are not two separate journeys, actually, but a single, parallel, interwoven adventure. For, we are not only personalities, psychological beings with histories and emotions, but also souls who have as their ultimate longing a reunion with the divine; and it is this union for which all our relationships are a metaphor.
As we near the end of the twentieth century, this longing for union is no longer merely a metaphor, however. It is being enacted as boundaries of every kind are giving way and breaking down, both beautifully and in ways that appall and frighten us. The message in all this upsetting, asked-for and unasked-for transformation is that the boundaries must break down–within ourselves (between what we're willing to look at and what we insist on denying), in our intimate relationships (between ourselves and our sweethearts, lovers, husbands, or wives), and in relation to our spiritual essence and its true destination.
Love is the one experience of the human condition that allows us to feel unequivocally, beautifully, and deeply that our true condition is not isolation but union. In recognition of that stunning truth, I offer this book as a guide to the further journey of your love, the love of your heart and soul.
In Exaltation of Love
Since time immemorial, men and women have loved one another–desperately, madly, sweetly, with unbridled dangerous passion, with the compassion of their kind hearts, to the depth of their souls. Love knows no bounds. There is no country, province, or people to which it has ever been irrelevant, and whenever you fall in love, you join the company of lovers of all times in living out one of life's greatest themes.
What you feel when you fall in love is universal. However ordinary or simple your own love may appear to be, to your heart and soul it is a grand love. Like David and Bathsheba, Anthony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise, your love, too, is an experience of wonder and ecstatic belonging that will draw you into life's most tragic and beautiful moments. Through love you become part of a sacred tradition, that great lineage of all those who have plighted their troth, promised their hearts to one another, chosen to live and die for love, and known that love was the only thing worth living for.
We need love.
We seek love because in every cell of our being we know that love is the only thing we cannot live without. In each breath, with each beat of our hearts, we know this. This is wny no matter what else we may do or pursue in our lives, love is always our highest goal, our farthest reach, our most passionate quest.
That is because in our hearts we know that in this world of sorrow and betrayal, love is what we have to hold on to. Only love can make our hearts sing in even the deepest of darkness, can let our souls come to peace in the midst of even the most tremendous travail. Love is the only thing we will take with us when we walk out of this life.
Everything that we are–personality, body, emotions, achievements, reputation, bank accounts, friendships, trophies, Academy Awards, gold medals, houses, furniture, parents and children, memories even, and great expectations–will all pass away. Only love, the beautiful