(Zap Oracle Card #325 ) photos and text by Jonathan Zap
Love, especially romantic love, can take us into dark places and even shatter our world. But “apocalypse” means “unveiling.” Love often wants to take us into the dark night of the soul, where truth can be unveiled. Don’t fall for the delusion that love is supposed to be warm and fuzzy. The mythologies about romantic love from all cultures and traditions that allow for it always include the descent into darkness. Two are in love but some inexorable force seeks to keep them apart, as in Romeo and Juliet; Two lovers become a triangle of conflict, unrequited love, love betrayed, the allure of temptation and becoming the betrayer, the loss of the beloved through illness, separation or death. These are not recent inventions. The soul may be seeking the love apocalypse and its truths, which can only be revealed in the darkness.
I took this photo today on Ao Nang, an island off Southern Thailand. It seems to capture the demonic side of Valentine’s Day.
Some Jung quotes on love:
“Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other.”
“In spite of all indignant protestations to the contrary, the fact remains that love (using the word in the wider sense which belongs to it by right and embraces more than sexuality), its problems and its conflicts, is of fundamental importance in human life and, as careful inquiry consistently shows, is of far greater significance than the individual suspects.”
“It is a favorite neurotic misunderstanding that the right attitude to the world is found by indulgence in sex.”
“The love problem is part of mankind’s heavy toll of suffering, and nobody should be ashamed of having to pay his tribute.”
M. Scott Peck has an interesting definition of love — “I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Someone once said that, “Love is cool, it is not hot.” It is crucial to distinguish love from passion, infatuation, codependence and sentimentality. It is also said that love is a verb, not a noun. What you love is what you spend time on.
Sometime in the Nineties an eighty-year-old woman, who was a Jungian analyst, gave a talk I attended in Boulder. At the end of her talk there were questions from the audience The first one came from a young woman. “Now that you are an elder,” asked the young woman, “what you can tell me as a young woman about love?” The elder woman replied, “When I was your age I was desperately trying to be loved. But now I know that it is better to simply be love.”
A few more love quotes:
“In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.”
— Margaret Anderson
“You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”
— Sam Keen
Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” — from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
“Love is the beauty of the soul.”
— St. Augustine
“[Love is] the fundamental impulse of Life…the one natural medium in which the rising course of evolution can proceed. With love omitted there is truly nothing ahead of us except the forbidding prospect of standardization and enslavement—the doom of ants and termites. It is through love and within love that we must look for the deepening of our deepest self, in the life-giving coming together of humankind.” —-Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man
The Western myth of romantic love has its origins in a repressed religion—Catharism. I wrote about this in No Tristan’s Allowed Beyond this Point—Rethinking the Western Myth of Romantic Love Here is the introduction:
“Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western Psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.”
—-from We by Robert Johnson
Western romance mythology centers around being in love as an ecstatic state in which we feel we have been completed, found the ultimate meaning in life, and have larger than life feelings of intensity. Unconsciously we have the expectation that our lover provide us with these feelings continuously. We also assume that our model of romance is the best and that love relationships not based on “being in love” must be pale, insignificant shadows by comparison. We are convinced of this despite all the evidence that tells us that few enterprises, besides diets, begin with such high hopes and typically such dismal results as the falling in love sort of romances. Western society is the only culture in history that assumes romance should be at the core of marriages and other love relationships and is the highest ideal of “true love.” The ideal romance, the West believes, involves the ecstatic adoration of the image of perfection in the form of a man or woman.
The Western myth has come to flourish and dominate during a patriarchal and increasingly materialistic era where the image of the divine is only rarely experienced in the context of religion. The “imago dei” has shifted from the image of God, gods and goddesses, the heavens, etc. to the romantic beloved. With religious mania and frenzy many seek to capture and possess someone they are in love with as though this fellow, flawed mortal could redeem a lifetime that is deficient in meaning. Just as those who have absolute, fundamentalist identifications with particular religions have historically been some of the greatest sources of violence, oppression and suffering, so too, those who identify absolutely with the aims of the Western myth of romance often become violent and create chaos and tragic dramas in their wake. Today’s newspaper should give you many examples of both types of violence.
Our culture does not provide us with a single ruling mythology. In that vacuum some will seek out religious fundamentalisms, and others will pursue the myth of romantic love as their religion. Still others may pursue dieting or the world view of an eating disorder as their religion, or perhaps the latest multi-level marketing scheme, self-help or New Age fundamentalisms like The Secret or other variations of you-create-your –own-reality, etc.
A person whose life is lacking in soulfulness, experience of the feminine, deep relationship and spirituality may seek to recapture all of these through the pursuit of a beloved. Such a person will say they are looking for “love,” when actually they are looking for a very specific type of deluded romance. Our whole culture tends to falsely equate romance with love when the two are quite different, and in some cases manifest as almost polar opposites. One can be swept up by romance and yet be severely lacking in love, commitment, loyalty, or even basic relatedness.
The Western mythology of romance is an atmosphere charged with sexual, emotional and mythological content that has surrounded us for our entire lives. We have breathed in this atmosphere from music, movies, television shows, advertisements, casual conversations, novels, and text messages. Just like fish might have a hard time getting an outside perspective on what it’s like to be wet and immersed in water, it is hard for us to get a perspective on this key element of our inner and outer world.
For example, can you remember when you first heard that an ideal relationship should involve “falling in love”? Was it a song on the radio? An overheard conversation? Most of us won’t be able to remember such a moment, because it is more like our psyches were booted up into a cultural operating system in which the Western myth of romantic love was a core, unquestioned element. For some, to even raise the question of the value of “being in love,” may seem an offense to rightness equivalent to questioning the value of sunshine.
The religious certainty that exists in so many about key aspects of the Western myth of romantic love derives from its genuine ability to tap into some of our deepest psychological, alchemical, social, sexual and spiritual aspirations. We are not talking about some flimsy mental construct, but a powerful mythological system that is capable of channeling our core energies.
Read more here: No Tristan’s Allowed Beyond this Point—Rethinking the Western Myth of Romantic Love