Nine Questions About Love: Natural History

Wednesday, October 14th, 6 - 8 PM in the yurt

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields

59 Bogel Road, East Haddam

(860) 319-1134

www.oursanctuary.org

The Sanctuary's monthly discussion workshop for individuals seeking a meaningful life. Our next class focuses on question number 7:

What does the natural history of love tell us about the meaning of our desires?

This workshop will look at the human theory of evolution and what it tells us about the meaning of love and human relationships. The recommended text for this class is David Loye's "The Ghost at the Birthday Party" (The comments section at the end of the article is a truly enlighted discussion of Darwin and evolutionary theory.) Loye is a systems scientist, Darwin scholar, member of the General Evolution Theory group, and partner to Riane Eisler (author of "The Chalice and the Blade"). Suggested donation: $15.

Nine Questions About Love: Gender

The Sanctuary's monthly discussion workshop for individuals seeking a meaningful life.

Next class: Monday, September 21st 6-8 PM in the Sanctuary Yurt, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam CT (860) 319-1134

QUESTION NO. 6: What is gender and how does it shape the ways we love?

This special workshop will explore the role that gender plays in relationships. Suggested donation: $15.

(7/14) CHI/PRANA • Love as the sharing of energy

QUESTION NO. 4: How do we steal energy from each other and how do we evolve our love?

Our next class will be examining the role of energy in relationships. Do you ever feel like your energy is being taken by someone or something? Do you every feel depressed because you cannot access the energy all around you? Do you ever feel mysteriously energized by some small thing that happens? Are there some individuals who generally give you energy when you talk to them and others who generally take your energy?

The recommended text for this class is Toru Sato’s The Ever-Transcending Spirit: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Consciousness and Development. You can order the book from Amazon HERE, or read online or download for free the book HERE. Additionally, in you want something quicker to read, Sato has recently written a short article, “The Gradual Blooming Process of Consciousness” available HERE making some of the same points he makes in the book.

Here are some quotes from the beginning of the book.

Here he raises the basic question of what the energy of love is:

“The Mohawk native North American tribe has a proverb that translates, ‘Life is both giving and receiving.’ In human interaction, we often say that we need to give and take. Sometimes we give and receive visible things from each other such as food, money, gifts etc., but sometimes we cannot physically ‘see’ what we are giving and receiving. For instance, if I say I will do our laundry if you clean our dishes, most of us would interpret this as giving and receiving. What is it that are giving and receiving (or taking)?

“In many ways it is something we seem to gain when we receive attention and something that we seem to lose when we are forced to pay attention to someone. When we receive attention from others, we feel energized and happy. When we are forced to pay attention to someone, we feel de-energized and often uncomfortable. Thus, perhaps the closest word to this thing we are giving and taking in the English language may be ENERGY.”

What is fascinating about Sato's theory is that he begins with the observation that energy level is actually relative to your perspective! Depending on their perspectives, the same individual can be energizing to one person, and draining to another. Hence the solution to energy is not to hord but to change your state of mind, from scarcity-perception to seeing abundance around you. As Sato puts it,

“The quality of our life is really just a reflection of the quality of our internal state of mind. Our internal state of mind is a reflection of where we are in our maturation process. Where most of us are in our maturation process is a reflection of where we are in the process of evolution.” – Toru Sato

NOTES FROM OUR LAST CLASS ON THE SUSTAINABILITY OF LOVE

Our conversation now has three questions in play:
(1) How can love make you a better person?
(2) Is passion compatible with happiness?
(3) Is it possible to keep falling in love with someone forever?

Our last discussion centered on the ideas of the influential relational psychotherapist Stephen Mitchell who argues that romantic intimacy often fails because we ourselves degrade it, in a self-defeating process he terms “protective degradation”. Romantic love has a special intensity for us because it unifies our two deepest primal longings: the longing for home, trust, acceptance, nurturance (LOVE) and our longing for transcendence, risk, the unknown, surrender (DESIRE). This special fusion of love and desire that makes romance so powerful and meaningful to us also makes it especially dangerous and difficult to control. In long-term relationships, the individuals involved often come to feel that the uncontrollability and unpredictability of desire makes romantic intimacy an unsafe glue for commitment. And so we try to protect ourself (from the painful possibility of our beloved’s failure of desire for us, or of our own failure of desire for our beloved) by subtly degrading the life of that romance and desire so that we will not be vulnerable to its contingencies. We neutralize the force of the fusion of love and desire by separating them – reserving love for long-term relationships and desire for fantasy and flirtation, and “segregating permanence from adventure.” But in so doing, we destroy the very thing that we are so afraid to lose, the unity of home and transcendence.

The key to sustaining romance in this perspective is also the key to living mindfully. We need to be able to desire without clinging, without attachment. We need to master our mind so that we will not undermine the life of our own life in the process of trying to achieve an impossible sense of security. Stephen Mitchell sees this as the truth behind the tragic romantic love story. In his book that we looked, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance through Time, Mitchell sums up his message with a metaphor from another searching romantic modernist, Friedrich Nietzsche:

“In his theory of tragedy, Nietzsche captures the delicate balance in the genuinely tragic, between the creation of forms and the dissolving of forms. Our individual lives, Nietzsche suggests, are transitory and in some sense illusory, ephemeral shapes that emerge from the energy that is the universe and that, in short order, are reabsorbed into the oneness. The enriching tragic in life can be missed in two ways. We can attribute to ourselves and our productions an illusory impermanence, like a deluded builder of sandcastles who believes his creation is eternal. Or, alternatively, we can be defeated by our transience, unable to build, paralyzed as we wait for the tide to come in. Nietzsche envisions the tragic man or woman, living life to the fullest, as one who builds sandcastles passionately, all the time aware of the coming tide. The ephemeral, illusory nature of all form does not detract from the surrender to the passion of the work; it enhances and enriches it.”

(6/16) Evolving Romanticism

NINE QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVE (EVOLVING ROMANCE)

The Sanctuary's discussion workshop for individuals seeking a meaningful life.

Next class: Tuesday June 16th at 6PM in the Sanctuary Yurt





QUESTION NO. 3: IS ROMANTIC INTIMACY SUSTAINABLE?

Our first two questions are now in play. They were (1) How can love make you a better person? And (2) Is passion compatible with happiness? Our next class will take up this most pertinent of questions, is it possible to keep falling in love with someone forever?

FORMAT FOR OUR NEXT CLASS ON TUESDAY, JUNE 16th at 6 PM.

We will be exploring this question through the work of the brilliant psychotherapist Stephen Mitchell. There are many theories of romantic intimacy, many of them with pessimistic views about sustaining the romantic intimacy. Freud’s theory which still influences contemporary theory on this matter, is totally pessimistic on the possibility of unifying love and desire for the same person in a sustainable way. He in fact believed that unifying our spiritual and sexual sides into a relationship was intrinsically impossible and would always degenerate into hatred, fear, loss. Stephen Mitchell’s view, as expressed beautifully in his masterful book, “Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Through Time” is the most inspiring, most optimistic book on this subject I have found. In this class, we will look at his view and try and make sense of his powerful message.

If you’d like some background on his book before class, you can read a review of this book from Salon HERE, or read larger sections of it HERE.

(5/19) AMOUR - Is passion compatible with happiness?

Nine Questions about Love (Amour)

Question No. 2: Is passion compatible with happiness? (or, Why do the lovers in classic love stories always have to overcome obstacles to win their love?



FORMAT FOR CLASS ON MAY 19th

We will begin by looking at the story of Tristan and Iseult. If you have time, we would recommend reading Joseph Bedier’s telling of the story. You can download for free HERE or purchase on Amazon HERE. You can find a good survey of information about the story HERE at Wikipedia. After discussion the classic version of the romantic love story, we will share our favorite versions of the story from contemporary film, novels, TV, anywhere. If you’d like to bring a snipet from your favorite film to view together, please do so!

To get your juices flowing, start by listening to the famous prelude to Richard Wagner’s operatic version of the story.



NOTES FOR THE CLASS

Our first class concerned the connection between love and ethics or goodness. We began with the question, how can love make you a better person? Most people have experienced and understand the feeling of how when you are in love with someone, your love and respect for that person makes you want to be a better person. But not always. If you are in love with a person who is not virtuous, their desire for you to act a certain way to please their narcosis may lead you to morally hazardous behavior yourself. So what kind of love/desire is the kind that moves you to transcend yourself, and which kind turns you into a slave? This is the topic of Plato’s dialogue on love called Symposium which we discussed in our first meeting.

Plato ultimately argues (or seems to argue) that the only kind of love that is guaranteed to lead to complete and perfect satisfaction is not the desire/love – what the Greeks termed “eros” – for a person at all, but the desire for wisdom, the desire for the Whole of life. This kind of love – literally a kind of falling in love with the world its its truth and evolutionary possibilities – is what offers true eternal bliss, because it pulls you away from the temporal satisfactions and inevitable dissatisfactions with identifying with your Ego (or someone else’s Ego). On this perspective, our eros for individuals is actually a deeper desire to identify – to find our true non-ordinary identity – in a cosmic unity with the truth of the universe. Is this an unrealistic, grandiose goal or is it an inspiring, and urgent one?

In our next class, we pick up the theme of romanticism, and the kind of love that historically was named by the French word “amour”. Historically and philosophically, romanticism rejects the ancient Judeo-Christian-Greek emphasis on the eternity and ethicality of love, and instead focuses on the beauty and goodness of the Individual – not simply as a soul but as an irreducible unity of body and mind and spirit. Passionate desire and longing for a unique individual is the key phenomenon in romanticism.

Each concept of love carries with it a basic question, a tension or a problem which shapes and gives meaning to the struggle for existence and happiness and awareness. For romanticism, the key to passion or amour is that it transcends other reasons that bound people together, such as political alliances – the key function of marriages in the medieval world – or economics, or obligation, or something external to the experience of intimacy itself. This is the significance of why the first and archetypal or classical love story of Tristan and Iseult is a tragic adulterous and politically incorrect love affair. True passion shows itself by trumping every other reason for wanting to be together with someone, regardless it seems of the larger consequences.

(4/21) EROS - How can love make you a better person?

Our first class attracted eight brave souls and generated a fantastic discussion based on the feeling, common to many, that when you love somebody, your love for them makes you want to be a better person. We pursued this idea by looking at Plato's Symposium and the argument in there that our erotic longing can only be satisfied by the pursuit of wisdom, love of the whole.
NOTES FOR THE CLASS

Our first class sets the stage for our collective examination of love this year by examining an ancient concept of love named by the word “eros.” Our presentation tonight will be based on some ideas from Plato’s dialogue called Symposium. You can read the dialogue in its entirety right here.

Each month, information, readings and other materials will be posted there. Additionally, our discussion can continue after our meeting by anyone posting comments to various texts on the bog, and anyone who would like to can post their own materials, making the content and direction of the course collaborative and interactive. Next month’s topic: romanticism and the classic romantic story.

EROS

An early recorded philosophy of love – an attempt to think about what love means – is found in Plato’s dialogue called Symposium. The work dramatizes a raucous drinking party of Athenian men who decide, in order to avoid additional hangovers (excess desire for intoxication) chose to spend their dinner attempting to put into words why love is important, valuable, its nature, risks and ultimately, what our deepest desires wish to achieve in being satisfied.

Many important and enduring questions are raised:

1. Love inspires the deepest virtue in people. Love makes you want to be a better person (in the eyes of your lover). But does it always inspire virtuous behavior? If not, what is the difference between love that does and love that doesn’t, make you a better person?

2. What does the satisfaction of our desire promise? Love seems connected to the perception of beauty, and to goodness, and so happiness. But what is the kind of happiness that the satisfaction of love imagines, and is it achievable?

3. What explains the power and ecstasy of love? Chemicals, biology, transcendence, evolution, transpersonal identification, cosmology? The ultimate conclusion of the Symposium is still subject to heated debate 2,500 years after it was written. But “platonic love” is the meaning handed down. The word “eros” which the Greeks conventionally used to mean indiscriminate sexual desire (the “zeal of the sexual organs”) is deep down a desire for ever-lasting possession of good – eternal well-being. It is spiritual, involving body and mind, and a vehicle to the divine.

Excerpts from Plato’s Symposium

1. The Speech of Phaedrus – Love as a Principle of Ethical/Spiritual Development

“First in the train of gods comes EROS. And Acusilaus agrees with Hesiod. Thus numerous are the witnesses who acknowledge Love to be the eldest of the gods. And not only is he the eldest, he is also the source of the greatest benefits to us. For I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning life than a virtuous lover or to the lover than a beloved youth. For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live at principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work. And I say that a lover who is detected in doing any dishonourable act, or submitting through cowardice when any dishonour is done to him by another, will be more pained at being detected by his beloved than at being seen by his father, or by his companions, or by any one else… Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover.”

2. The Speech of Aristophanes – Explaining the Self’s Desire for Wholeness

“And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side, by side and to say to them, "What do you people want of one another?" they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: "Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two-I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?"-there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”

3. The Speech of Socrates (channeling Diotima) – The Promise of Erotic Longing

“And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the
beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates," said the stranger of Mantineia,"is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible-you only want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty-the divine beauty, I mean, pure and dear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life-thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?"

Nine Questions