"A man and a woman working at love are always, whether they call it this or not, working to free themselves from attachment to the illusions of 'life,' while at the same time helping each other to answer the normal needs of the embodied human self.
"The struggle of love is the struggle against making the other into the 'world,' compelling the other to give what the 'world' or 'life' promises but can never really give: absolute safety, unearned loyalty and fidelity, fantastical power, ever-ready pleasure. . . . If 'life itself' cannot give these things — and, in the deeper meaning of them, it cannot — then we have no right to try to get them from the other. I have no right to make the other into 'life itself.' How much of the disappointment with love that men and women now feel in our culture is actually a displaced but unrecognized disappointment with 'life itself'! Wisdom teaches that what we erroneously seek from the 'world' is to be found only through the process that opens us to another level of life within ourselves. It is that life, we are told, that can give us what we mistakenly seek outside ourselves. It is 'life within life' that can give what 'life itself' cannot. And it is a glimpse of that life within life that we sometimes touch when we are in love, when we experience what Stendhal called 'the passions which make for deeper joy.'
"Being in love, we do not strain for beauty, for power, recognition, safety, health. Being in love, we are for a moment, and up to a point, free from the influences of 'life itself.' Being in love, we touch complete devotion to another, and in that devotion we experience something of our truer self. Being in love, we live beyond paradox. Love brings opposites together — that is its very definition. In the universe, in nature and between people and within ourselves, love is the force that brings disparate and separate realities toward each other into fusion and mutuality. Being in love, we find ourselves in the moment we find the other; in love, we touch freedom in the moment we serve another; in love, we touch intelligence and clarity in the moment we are given to let go of thought and cleverness; in love, we become strong and safe in the moment we are given to let go of our last pieces of armor and, in an instant and for an instant, we become completely vulnerable. As was said of Baucis and Philemon: 'It made no difference in that house whether you asked for master or servant.'
" 'Life itself' cannot understand these things. In 'life itself' we live the illusion of strength, for example, and cannot see that it is weakness to be half-vulnerable, to fear and protect our inner feeling with another feeling that lives and breathes only anxiety. 'Life itself' cannot open its doors to the 'gods,' because it cannot understand the strength of love, the safety of love, the freedom of sustained love. And so it immediately strives to make love into something it can understand. This is the challenge of living together. Being in love is one thing; now we must bring what we have tasted into the arena of 'life itself.' It is now that the long work begins.
"The long work begins. Being in love shows us the power of a life within life. That is, it shows us that there is something beyond the influences of ordinary life in the world. It is here that wisdom teaches mankind to search within. Here wisdom instructs us: what we touch in love is like a sign, evidence that we are 'meant for quite another destiny than what the world around us can give. This other destiny involves the cultivation — the insemination — of a new life within ourselves. Like every embryo, this new life must be cared for and nourished.
"The work of love begins. In the midst of life, with all its needs and demands, with all its compromises and details, with all the forces and energies that the gods and devils have thrown upon this plane of being called human life, in the midst of this ever-surging flood of 'life itself,' mankind is called — two by two, as is suggested in the myth of Noah — to maintain the human reflection of divinity in a world overwhelmed by violence, confusion, and illusion."
