Enjoy, Comprehend, Love. Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love - Yury Tomin

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to Sigmund Freud

      Metamorphosis of the Self

      Falling in love with another person means going into a state that is revealed by a new quality of inner sensations and perception of the outer world. This new state, a different reality of the Self, penetrates and captivates the lover. All our mental processes (sensations, perceptions, thoughts, decisions, behavior) are revitalized, filled with high energy, break through the usual boundaries, expand their horizons and enter new orbits. In this state, we notice more and rediscover ourselves: we involuntarily feel a change in our inner tone, we are surprised to discover new features in ourselves, we carefully listen to the emergence of something unusual and at the same time joyful, and with satisfaction, we plunge into previously unknown bliss.

      The sensation of new internal processes and the discovery of previously unfamiliar qualities in ourselves can fleetingly or more permanently form into a single picture so that we, as it were, begin to look at ourselves from the outside, benevolently contemplating our new incarnation and at the same time we were not quite sure that this everything happens to us. Such an unexpected gift of falling in love – a breakthrough into a parallel contemplative state – is similar to a state achieved in the process of meditation, although you experience it not in solitary silence, but in a seething accelerated flow of life.

      In those moments of falling in love, when our consciousness acquires lightness and airiness, we can also feel the fantastic plasticity of the external world, because, under the influence of our thoughts and will, it transforms in the way we want. Unfortunately, we cannot stop these moments – they only slightly open the curtain of the possibility for the innermost desires of our soul.

      Spaces of desires are materialized by the field of deeds.

      It is difficult to predict what will be the result of the process of our inner transformation launched by falling in love and changing our position in the world around us, but it can be assumed that success will depend not so much on our initial abilities to live and love, but on adherence to such a surprisingly opened image of our boundless Self.

      The phenomenon of going beyond the boundaries of one’s own personality is a surprise not only for the lover but also for those around him – his behavior is so unusual, mysterious, and inexplicable. Only a few of the inner circle and sages can take to heart and share what happens to a person when he is in love. It is even more difficult to describe it in words or convey it in clear images. Let’s try to take a closer look at the description of Vljublennost’ or The State of Being in Love by Vladimir Nabokov in the poem of the same name. This poem is remarkable in that the author, having composed it in Russian and passed it on to his beloved in English translation, comments on what he wanted to express in “philosophical love verses.”

      The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal with her actual, unique traits <…> My instrument, however, was still too blunt and immature; it could not express the divine detail, and her eyes, her hair became hopelessly generalized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes <…> On the night of July 20, however, I composed a more oblique, more metaphysical little poem <…> The title of the poem <…> – Vljublennost’, which puts in a golden nutshell what English needs three words to express.

      We forget that falling in love

      is not just the facial angle of the loved one,

      but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars,

      a swimmer panic in the night.

      While dreaming, dream of being in love,

      but do not torment us with awakening,

      and reticence is better,

      than that chink and that moonbeam.

      I remind you that being in love

      is not sheer reality, that the markings are not the same

      that, may be, the hereafter

      stands slightly ajar in the dark.

      – … What does it mean?

      – I have it here on the back. So it is. We forget – or rather tend to forget – that being in love (vlyublyonnost’) does not depend on the facial angle of the loved one, but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars, “a swimmer panic in the night” (here it was possible to convey the last line of the first stanza, “nochnaya panika plovtsa”). The next stanza: While the dreaming is good – in the sense of “while everything is fine,” – do keep appearing to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost’, but do not torment us by waking us up or telling too much: reticence is better than that chink and that moonbeam. Now is the last stanza of these philosophical love verses.

      – These – how?

      – These philosophical love poems. I remind you, that vlyublyonnost’ is not wide-awake reality, that the markings are not the same (for example, a ceiling striped by the moon, a lunar ceiling, is a reality of a different sense than the daytime ceiling), and that, may be, the hereafter stands slightly ajar in the dark. Voilà.

      Looking into himself, the young poet discovers that being in love is not only our fantasies about the merits of our beloved, but first of all, it is a special state of our Self and, in addition, a reality of a different kind, which is terribly unreliable, but attractive for its infinity and mystery.

      The fear of the young poet and his unwillingness to look into the opening crack of the future is quite shared, but not obvious. What can a lover really be afraid of? Not infernal darkness at all, as one might think, but the collision of the Self transformed by love with the bounding carnal reality, the premonition of which brings gloomy tones to the vivid picture of being in love. The poetic metaphors of Vladimir Nabokov’s Vljublennost’ accurately expressed the main directions of a deep comprehension of love.

      At almost the same time, Ortega y Gasset published his studies On Love, in which the philosopher presented, based on keen reflections on the nature of love, his understanding of the core content of love as going beyond one’s own Self.

      In the studies, he sets out to define and understand what is love between a man and a woman “in itself as such.” What filled the theme of love at the beginning of the 20th century, he considered unsatisfactory. On the one hand, these were numerous “love stories” where the essence of love was blurred by various circumstances. On the other hand, there were obvious mistakes in the “theories of heart feelings” created by the great philosophers. The settled reduction of love to “desire, attraction, striving for something” (Thomas Aquinas) cannot act as the main content of love, since desire dies, and “love is eternal dissatisfaction.” Also, for love itself, one cannot take its positive emotional manifestations, such as “the joy of knowing the object of love” (Benedict Spinoza), since love happens to be sad, hopeless, causing torment and suffering.

      Ortega y Gasset sees a completely different core in love and concludes: “In an outburst of love, a person breaks out of his Self; maybe this is the best thing that Nature has come up with so that we all have the opportunity to overcome ourselves to move towards something another.”

      Having defined the primary content of love, he emphasizes its essential qualities. The feeling of love “in its innermost intimacy as a manifestation of inner life” is:

      – active emotional practice, caring;

      – continuous spiritual radiation emanating from the lover and directed to the beloved, enveloping him with warmth, tenderness, and contentment;

      – invisible connection, where hearts beat nearby at any distance;

      – life-affirmation, creation and nurturing the object of love in the soul.

      Ortega

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