The common wisdom goes like this: that the myth of "some enchanted evening," when all is awash with the thrill of connection and the aliveness of new romance, is actually a delusion... a hormonally manufactured lie. That soon enough, reality will set in and lovers will awaken from their mutual projections, discover the psychological work involved in two people trying to reach across the chasm of real life separateness, and come to terms at last with the mundane sorrows of human existence and intimate love.
In this case, the common wisdom is a lie.
From a spiritual perspective, the scenario above is upside down. From a spiritual perspective, the original high of a romantic connection is thrilling because it is true. It is in fact the opposite of delusion. For in a quick moment, a gift from the gods, we are likely to suspend our judgment of the other, not because we we are temporarily insane but because we are temporarily sane. We are having what you might call a mini-enlightenment experience. Enlightenment is not unreal; enlightenment -- or pure love -- is all that is real. Enlightenment is when we see not as through a glass darkly, but truly face to face.
What is unreal is what comes after the initial high, when the personality self reasserts itself and the wounds and triggers of our human ego form a veil across the face of love. The initial romantic high is not something to outgrow, so much as something to earn admittance back into -- this time not as an unearned gift of Cupid's arrows, but as a consequence of the real work of the psychological and spiritual journey. The romantic relationship is a spiritual assignment, presenting an opportunity for lovers and would-be lovers to burn through our own issues and forgive the other theirs, so together we can gain re-entrance to the joyful realms of our initial contact that turn out to have been real love after all.
Our problem is that most of us rarely have a psychic container strong enough to stand the amount of light that pours into us when we have truly seen, if even for a moment, the deep beauty of another. The problem we have is not that in our romantic fervor we fall into a delusion of oneness; the problem is that we then fall into the delusion of separateness. And those are the romantic mysteries -- the almost blinding light when we truly see each other, the desperate darkness of the ego's blindness, and the sacred work of choosing the light of mutual innocence when the darkness of anger and guilt descend.
Marianne Williamson will delve deeply into the romantic mysteries in her February 17-19, 2012, workshop in Los Angeles called THE ENCHANTED LOVE WORKSHOP: Building the Inner Temple of the Sacred and the Romantic. Live streaming available. Go to www.marianne.com for details.
Follow Marianne Williamson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/marwilliamson
Illumination brings deep connection, and that's what we're all yearning for - I love it! So excited about your Enchanted Love Workshop - hooray!
With love and deep appreciation,
Ande
The giggley, smiley couple discover their mate ALSO gets morning breath, releases stomach gas around the apartment that's built up during the day (usually outside the confines of the bathroom), leaves the sink full of hair, et cetera, etc. The little nuances build until one or both are no longer head-over-heels in love but burdened by such close and steady contact! Plech!
I can't buy into the spiritual aspect of loving someone - I go in for the realities of it all and I'm satisfied living life as a single...REALLY satisfied!
Well, good luck.
I know that of which the author speaks. It is my hope that each and everyone of you knows it also at least once in your lives. This is why we're here. This is what makes us human.
Great article. Looking forward to more from Marianne. Kudos and accolades.
Blessings to you,
Russell
I'm not talking about raw sexual attraction but I do mean romantic attachment. It only seems like a state of drunkenness because we have seldom touched the fundament, the ground of reality, so directly. So few people have the good sense to maintain this type of connection and cultivate this fertile ground. The consequence is to have it die and, once it is gone, you can never get it back.
to wish another happiness and success, perhaps to your own detriment, is the real deal. filial love is cake, romantic love is icing. a cake with only icing has little long term appeal....
...I think I'll try to remember that perspective again just to see what happens :)
Thanks for that Marianne.
The fact is the spiritual stuff takes a lot longer and lacks the biological urgency of our hormonally-fed desires. How one rides that wave of hormones will have a lot to do with how the spiritual connection develops. Our lustful urges for each other are just as strong, and valid, as our spiritual yearnings in forging a lasting connection.
Respectully, you seem to me to be sadly looking in the wrong way and wrong order if you think most people can meet someone and immediately have several weeks of passionate sex, then expect love to be the result. Sex may be intensely lustful without love, but it is not passionate. And sex and love have no equivalence whatsoever.
Passion, in the sense of connection with love, is a very strong feeling, a powerfully intense feeling for the person, not for the act of sex, not for his/her body. You cannot have such a powerful feeling for a person you don't know. If you did, it would be a fantasy, because it has no knowledge on which to base any reality.
You can have powerful lust, but not powerful love in the beginning.
You have the order backwards. Lasting love for most people includes lust for the beloved, but it is the love that comes first that makes the lust last. If you have nothing but lust to begin with, it won't last. It can't stand the ups and downs of a long relationship and the flaws of the desired.
Like all those corny psychologists and advisors tell us, friends first, lovers second. Or it's unlikely to last more than a couple of years at best.
If you want to see "romantic" attraction beautifully employed in "spiritual" teaching, look to the "beloved"-besotted poetry of Rumi, who used it as an analogy for devotion to guru and ultimately for ecstatic union with/as the absolute. What is so called romantic love's "spiritual" significance? Like a good number of other sensory-psychological phenomena that human flesh is heir to, it's a clue, a hint, a "pointing" away from the ego's persistently preemptive priorities and toward discovery of who and what we actually, essentially are.