I have been thinking about love lately. More importantly the question of the love relationship, which is one of the aching questions of our time. It came for me from personal experience, like most of us have. But also just looking at people there seems to be no way of understanding what it means to love and stay in love--to stay with love. We all understand about falling in love. We all understand the passion. But [there is this] whole idea of what it means to maintain a relationship. Everybody I know is suffering in one way or another from that. So my question was: "Can the great teachings of the world throw light on that?" And when I looked at them, all the great ideas about divine love and spiritual love, they didn't really throw that kind of light on that. There was still something unrealistic in them. I'm a human being. I'm not a saint. We have bodies, we have needs. At the same time, we don't want to just have a life that is passively enslaved by our passing desires and physical needs and ego. So it seemed to me that there must be something in between, some intermediate bridge. And to me it became very clear, and it's not anything you will find explicitly in the great traditions nor in any of the psychological or philosophical literature that I know of. They are seekers. And what human love can be with two people together is to somehow support each other's search. To me that became like a revelation. That was where the bridge was. It wasn't saintly love. It wasn't just merely physical or egoistic love, but to love another person, to support their search for meaning in some way. And that was what I suddenly realized I wanted and what I wanted to explore. Okay, I think that I should lay of the booze for a bit and get the f@ck out. But let me end this with a great quote from one of my favorites.
"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down."
- Woody Allen,
