created 2025-02-20, & modified, =this.modified
rel: The End of Love - Eva Illouz Love Letters Made Easy - Gabrielle Rosiere
Why I am reading
This book seems nonsense.
The game The Sims came with a manual which outlined books that were useful in formulating the ideas played around with in it.
I love that a game can come with a reading list.
I’ll also note that there’s a playful warning: all are filled with provocative ideas; Maxis disavows any responsibility for encouraging deep thought.
I really can’t see myself ever using a book about love as a way of finding love. I don’t follow any self-help guides.
I picked to read this one because of that. I thought it’d be funny.
Foreword
Our view is that each person is an immortal spiritual being who is currently very immersed in having human experiences and that, as beings older than time itself, each of us has had experiences of perfect love. Most of these experiences were so long ago in our collective history as cosmic beings that the memories of them are buried very deeply in the subconscious mind of each human being.
Thought
Right off that bat, I’m struggling and might have picked the wrong book. I’m not sure I’m an “immortal spiritual being.” I don’t know what “perfect love” is besides something that is inherently flawed.
Finding your Perfect Love
Text says we are all Frogs (in the sense of the fable of the Frog Prince) who have love and “awesomely powerful spirits” but also finite frog bodies, which have “frog-like” limitations.
Thought
Frogs are amazing. I’d love a frog body and frog spirit.
With our deepest intimates, our mostly subconscious recognition of each other is so spontaneous and complete, that the true self, or essence, is seen by the other and responds with total enthusiasm and joy by infusing our bodies and our lives. This, in the language of the fairy tale, is the kiss between the princess and the frog.
The text introduced a Loveometer.
NOTE
While this is clearly ridiculous, in the little I’ve played of The Sims, I’m aware that various gauges float around the characters to indicate hunger, and I’d imagine love interest.
What would these map to in real life? It doesn’t seem like a linear gauge would be adequate. Nor this “FUSION” as a desired end.
Divine Love has been aptly described by Sri Aurobindo as a kind of love that can squander itself utterly, and yet never waste or diminish.
NOTE
I am being very critical of this book but also thinking if the presentation is a bit out there, are there underlying meanings that I can relate to. Thus far, I do not think so.
Above the 70% level of soul merger, couples start experiencing the extraordinarily blissful state of liquid love. We call this Liquid Love because when it happens the whole heart chakra area in the chests of the lovers feels liquid, or as if it is melting.
Text discusses something called Nectar, which is the inner core of “liquid love” and it’s an ecstasy of feelings of loneliness and isolation, melting away.
NOTE
I feel I’ve encountered this, but seldom and not with any of this meld/merge baggage. Early in love, you sometimes do feel a weight lifted. If I think to those times, maybe music felt different or I didn’t have the same concerns. Behind all of this, was the realization that those things would return and the feeling would shift and mature.
But honestly, in the right conditions I do feel I can easily sustain that feeling. There are always things to do with one another, and to create and think about. I don’t think it’s nectar or anything. It’s just enjoying time and being realistic.
When the Liquid Love experience lasts longer and goes deeper, it is possible to enter the realm of Hyperlove. This is where the merger of your etheric bodies is so complete, you can actually experience things that happen in both of your bodies at the same time.
NOTE
Hyperlove sounds hilarious.
Truly, rather than bolster any beliefs this is making me question if love is all myth and imaginative dressings.
All of these lead to perfect love, which is described by the authors as a ” the state of being so aware and so appreciative of the perfection of another person’s divine intent and beingness that you do not hold any action and /or its results against the recipient of your love.”
NOTE
So perfect love is some one-dimensional, unconditional gross thing? Maybe the solution here is to invert the loveometer and search depths under the gauge, everything to the left of “essence contact.”
Total fusion: 100%
Total Fusion is, in a way, beyond the scope of this book, since it is mostly a non-physical experience and it is extremely rare to have it as a goal while we are incarnated in a physical body. Once in a great while, however, it may be experienced for very brief instants by a few older souls. This temporary touching into Total Fusion is like a great ex- plosion of your astral energies. You know such extreme bliss and complete transformation that you can’t adequately contain the experience. It knocks you off your astral feet into a state of awe and wonderment. The radiation of love from that one fraction of a second also has a powerful impact on those who happen to be nearby.
NOTE
I’m not sure I can read any more of this.
You can’t miss and long for something that you never had - George Simon
NOTE
Yes, you can?
I stopped reading here.