Book: The art of love

Feeling alienated creates anxiety; it is the source of all anxiety. To be alienated means to have no opportunity to use one's human powers. To be separate from everyone means to be helpless, unable to actively contact the world - objects and people; this means that the world can crush me, deprived of the ability to resist. Thus, alienation generates acute anxiety.

How can we consider only that which can bring money or prestige worthy of knowledge, and consider love, which only benefits the soul and is useless in the modern sense of the word, a luxury on which we have no right to spend much effort?

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is a condition for the ability to love. Anyone who tries to be alone with himself will find how difficult it is.

Love for one's own self is inseparably linked to love for any other being.

Both points of view - one that erotic love is from beginning to end a unique individual attraction of two specific people, and the other, that erotic love is nothing more than an act of will - are correct. Or, to put it more precisely, neither one nor the other is true. Thus, the idea that a relationship can be easily terminated if it is unsuccessful is as erroneous as the idea that a relationship should not be terminated under any circumstances.

In essence, all human beings are the same. We are all part of Oneness, we are oneness. And if so, then there should be no difference who to love. Love must be essentially an act of will, a determination to fully connect life with the life of another.

Erotic love excludes love for others only in the sense of erotic fusion, complete union in all aspects of life – but not in the sense of deep brotherly love.

Tenderness does not mean, as Freud thought, a sublimation of the sexual instinct; it is a direct result of brotherly love and is present in both physical and non-physical forms of love.

Sexual desire requires fusion, but physical attraction is based not only on the desire to get rid of painful tension. Sexual desire can be inspired not only by love, but also by anxiety and loneliness, a desire to conquer and be subdued, vanity, the need to hurt and even humiliate. It turns out that sexual desire is triggered or easily merged with any other strong emotion, only one of which is love. Due to the fact that sexual desire in the understanding of most people is connected with the idea of love, they easily fall into the delusion that they love each other when they are physically attracted to each other. When the desire for sexual confusion is caused by love, then physical intimacy is devoid of greed, the need to conquer or be subdued, but full of tenderness. If the desire for physical union is not motivated by love, if erotic love is not yet complemented by brotherly love, this will never lead to a unity that would be more than an orgiastic transitory union. Sexual attraction creates for a brief moment the illusion of unity, but without love, this unity leaves strangers as strangers to each other as they were before.

Talking about your own personal life, about your own hopes and anxieties, showing your childishness and childishness, finding common interests - all this is perceived as overcoming alienation. Even discovering your anger, your hatred, your inability to hold back – all of this is taken for intimacy. This may explain the perversion of attraction to each other, which in married couples is often experienced by people who seem close only when they are in bed or give an outlet for their mutual hatred and rage. But in all these cases, intimacy tends to come to naught over time. The result is a search for intimacy with a new person, with a new stranger. Again, the stranger turns into a loved one, again a tense and strong experience of falling in love. And again it gradually loses its power and ends with the desire for a new victory, a new love - with the illusion that the new love will be different from the previous ones. These illusions are greatly facilitated by the deceptive nature of sexual desire.

For most people, knowledge of their own personality, as well as knowledge of other personalities, is too hasty, too quickly exhausted. For them, intimacy is established primarily through sexual contact. Since they perceive the alienation of another person primarily as physical alienation, physical unity is taken for overcoming alienation.

You get to know your loved one as well as you know yourself. Or maybe it’s better to say - you know as little as yourself.

A mother's love for a growing child, love that wants nothing for itself, is perhaps the most difficult form of love attainable, and the most deceiving because of the ease with which a mother can love her baby. But precisely because it is difficult, a woman can become a truly loving mother only if she can love at all; if she is able to love her husband, other children, strangers, all people. A woman who is unable to love in this sense may be an affectionate mother while the child is small, but she cannot be a loving mother whose job it is to be ready to endure the separation of the child - and even after separation continue to love him.

The need for transcendence is one of the basic needs of man, rooted in his self-consciousness. He is not satisfied with his role in the created world, he cannot perceive himself as a dice, randomly thrown from the cup. He needs to feel like a creator, to go beyond the passive role of the created being. There are many ways to achieve satisfaction with creation; the most natural and easiest way to achieve is maternal care and love for her creation. She goes beyond herself in the child, her love for him gives meaning and meaning to her own life. (In the very inability of a man to satisfy his need for transcendence through the birth of children lies his passionate need to go beyond himself in the creations of his hands and ideas.)