 Love isn't personal. That's the main point, and that's what we keep forgetting. That's its main delusion, its main hysteria. Because it isn't yours, it isn't mine. It probably doesn't even belong to the gods. Eros was not himself a god. The notion of love is strange, very foreign to the character of a god in the Greek context. In the context of most cultures, except Christianism. That's supposed to be Christianity's virtue, its uniqueness. Christianity made love into its god. Christianity made love into its god. So to stay in touch with our culture's god, we have to feel love. Be in love, be lovable, love others and ourselves as a commandment. And then love becomes a huge problem, the main effort of therapy. So you see how the point there is that, again, the Judeo-Christian background affects even the way we regard what's really terribly important in our lives. The love problem in a Christian culture is all wrapped up with saving our souls and finding god. Even this conversation now that we are talking so much about love has us right in the trap of our Christian culture. If we could only let love alone, if we could only give it more space and less attention, it would take care of itself. It's like having a friend in the house. Don't badger him making him comfortable or a patient. Don't keep taking his temperature. If we could just get out of the way, let it come, let it go. We are always trying to direct love into channels, relating it, sharing it, doing it right. Why? So the other person says, we are afraid of it. It's ready to break out any minute, and what it wants is psyche. It's after soul. It has a job to do on the soul. I mean, love is far more interested in our fantasies, in our images and complexes than it is in us personally, what we feel and need and long for. Now that's a curious idea, because we keep feeling that our love is not, you know, the love situation you're in is not taking care of your needs and your feelings and your complexes. You're not doing enough for me. You're not this for me. You're not meeting me. You're not all of those things that we want. Love is not taken care of. But maybe the love is taking care of something. Why do you still stay hooked to that person? Maybe the love is doing something to your fantasy life, to your complexes, keeping you hooked. It's doing something to your psyche, but it's not taking care of your needs. So that would suggest that love is really more interested in the psyche than it is in the so-called ego or what you think are your feelings or whatever. So there's dissatisfaction in your feelings and at the same time you're hooked on a situation which is impossible. It's not doing what you want it to do and what it should be doing and all the rest. A curious thing. Very curious thing. And what we fall in love with is usually another person's fantasy world, or a fantasy. It's as if two fantasies fall in love rather than two people. The two people don't even know who the hell they really are and nobody knows who anybody is. But they like two fantasies that fall in love, like two cartoon characters. So we are deathly afraid. It starts all the complexes jumping. It makes our fantasies irresistible, guilds them. Golden Aphrodite they called her. Blowing, burning. But love isn't some independent force outside the images, outside the complexes. It's right inside them. I mean this is very obscure for me, but I think we try to understand what it is. The Eros is already right there inside the psyche ready to break into fire. The experience of at any moment you can catch fire. At any moment you can catch fire. The French call it the coup de foudre, a lightning flash. So at any moment it's potentially there and your psyche can be caught. The psyche is a highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos. Keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love. For me that's a much nicer way of thinking about it than thinking about you've got all this psychic material and then love comes in as an independent factor. But suppose there's the potential of being caught and burned all the time in the psyche. And so you're always trying to keep yourself under control or under wraps so that you don't go up in flames. You're always in love. And the thing you do is to keep that wrapped. And Rumi's a wonderful poet because he takes the wraps off it. Admits that the psyche is in a sense constantly in the flame of being in desire. So partly the need for another person is so that you can take the wraps off. But if you take the wraps off possibly then the other person isn't quite as crucial. That was a fastball. I don't know if I can say it again. The other person, you think the other person is crucial because you're keeping it in wraps. You're keeping the fact that you are in love under wraps, in asbestos. And so you want the other person to ignite it or recognize it or so on. But if you take the wraps off in Rumi's sense that you sense the fact that you are in love and have been in love since you were nine like Dante and Beatrice and are always in love and that your fantasies are, I mean that your psychic material is rich with, I don't know how else to say it, just being in love. Pardon? Combustible. Then the other person isn't quite as crucial. Because is it the other person or is it the fact that you're ignited that is obsessing you? And what to do with the fact that you're ignited? See, Freud was right. The content of the repressed psyche is eros. And resistance has to do with fire-resistant walls. Naturally, everyone backs off from analysis from their dreams and their figures. They are packed with love. But the way into loving isn't direct, you can't go straight at it. And therapies that encourage love, that focus on transference, make that mistake of going straight at it. At least for me the way is via the soul, the images where love is hiding anyway. Just start talking with anyone from the soul about the soul, about your fear of dying, about a heartbreaking memory, about your funny estrangements, isolation, and right away love starts happening. See, it just, it breaks out. It begins to happen. When the level of the talk is from there. Naturally it breaks out in therapy sessions, but the level of the talk is from there. So, you're not just talking about the fear of dying, but you're talking about the fear of the soul. Love is from there. Naturally it breaks out in therapy sessions, wherever there is psyche there is amor, eros, love. Love comes into therapy to find psyche, to become psychological. And it really is a psychological mistake to take love personally. Of course it feels personal because love is interior, intimate. But this innerness refers to the soul and the activation of the complexes. See, that's a hard one because when we feel something is intimate and interior we feel it's personal. And it isn't necessarily personal. Everybody feels exactly the same way. It's a completely collective event. The alchemist said that as you go on with the work, soul work, soul making, its love will increase in you. They didn't say you will love more or better. They didn't say the work will love you more, that you will find love be loved. I think they were referring to the strange fact that as you become occupied with the psyche, there is this increase. The soul grows with a vegetable love, a mineral love, and of course an animal love, which we are closer to and recognize more. But this increase is not an increase of consciousness. It's not an increase like maturation and development, the growth fantasy. Underneath these humanistic, secular ideas there is an alchemical activity going on in the plant kingdom and the mineral kingdom, as if the leaves on the trees just come out in the spring because they love to. As if rubies and emeralds grow in the rocks like drops of intense love. As if the rocks themselves are full of desire reaching towards some crystalline intensity, some luminosity inside themselves. Now all this takes heat, terrible pressure inside the tree branch, inside the oar, so we fall in love and blush red and get hot pants. That's the alchemical love increasing in you. Very concrete, very physical, because it's inside nature itself. See, it's another way of looking at why the trees throw out their leaves. That it's not just the sap rising in a biological sense because of now it's March and the sap rises in the maple trees when cold nights and warm days, da-da-da. But suppose we imagined it through the idea that the trees love to do that. Or that instead of imagining a chameleon or a lizard or a crab changing its color when it moves into a new environment, and we call that camouflage because predators would get it if it didn't do that. Kind of Wall Street fantasy that you've got to cover up all the time or the predators get you. And a camouflage theory of animal life that an animal dresses that way because it likes to do that. It likes to change its coat in order to get on with its neighbors instead of imagining always in terms of what you get with the TV about animals. I mean little crabs, for example, there are other species of crabs when they have them in one aquarium with green plants and green moss and green stuff. The crab takes all this green stuff and hides in it and makes itself green, dresses green. And they take that same crab and put it in another aquarium with a lot of red sea anemones and coral and this and that. And the crab takes off all this stuff that it has on all the sea moss and it puts on red and dresses itself all over again. If you read it through the paranoid fantasy, the crab is protecting itself from predators through camouflage. But you can also imagine that the crab wants to be adapted and live in a nice, in an environment with everything else. What motivates a lot of activity is love, not fear necessarily. Not necessarily. And then it would feel different about the way things are, you know, the symbiosis that goes on between insects and plants and the way one lives in the world that one lives in the world because you can just as well say fear permeates all things, as the Buddha said, therefore fear not. Or you can say love permeates all things. And so we are always in love.