I have just had an intense experience of falling in love with a beautiful woman. Her kiss is still on my lips. I am relaxed and melting into the feeling. It feels precisely like every other time this has happened to me – the same sense of youthful joy, of unlimited possibility, of new beginning.
Who is this woman? She is me. It was all a dream. And yet, having woken up, she seems just as real.
Needless to say, I would not have expected such an experience; although with hindsight it feels very natural. It got me wondering, for the first time, what actually the experience of falling in love consisted in, what was necessary to it and what was not, and what role the other really plays in an experience which clearly can be generated purely by oneself, for there can be no clearer case of projection than a creature generated in a dream.
So I went on line, imagining I must find something intelligent having at some point been said by scientists about this universal and tremendously important human experience. Now, I only did five minutes of research, so I may well have missed something, but I was very surprised to find so little, and in particular nothing which recognized that this experience could be entirely self-generated. It seems to be a commonplace that all kind of feelings become mixed up within falling in love, which may distort or denature it, and which are explained by the individual’s personal history, but everyone who has written about it seems to have been tenaciously attached to the idea that the core experience went past the self, required and was shaped by the other, and therefore that it had meaning in relation to that other. I see now that this is wrong. Yes, it goes past the normal boundaries of the self; but it does not require the other in anything more than a numinous sense, and clearly has implications only in regard to the self, implications moreover which are unanchored in time and space.
All I found on Wikipedia was a reference to one Francesco Alberoni, an Italian popular philosopher with whom I was already a little acquainted, but unimpressed by. According to that article, falling in love “is a process of the same nature as a religious or political conversion”. That seems to ring true. Alberoni emphasizes the power of the experience to dismantle the previous boundaries of the self and to remake them around a new (and social) project with a new sense of meaning. However he goes on to plunge into a long recital of his own metaphysical preferences, the self-indulgent character of which is patent. It seems to me that the boundaries of the imagined collective he refers to are just an attempt to salvage the lost sense of self – and, if successful in this project, they result typically in distorting, perhaps violently, the same sense of others – or ones own sense of reality. Rather, it seems evident, both existentially and philosophically, that beyond the psychic borders of the self, there is no collectivity. In that place, there can be only compassion.
Another thing I’m conscious of is the autoerotic character of the dream. It was erotic in the true sense, not attached to any fantasies of form, and it felt and feels very much like it was of a single piece with the wet dreams I would have as a young adolescent. The same energy and striving is present, only the projection is much more concrete, in that it feels really like another person entered into my life in that moment – perhaps not to stay, that doesn’t matter: but certainly to change it.
And so falling in love is a faculty of my self momentarily to allow its frightened borders to dissolve and to reach out into the space it naturally occupies. Falling in love is recognizing ones own nature as love, whatever the contingent factors, the congruency of drives and interests, which may, at a particular moment, open the door. But falling in love is also to become aware of ones insecurities and the immense weight of aspirations dammed up behind them. In such a moment, it quite literally feels like everything is possible, but one scrambles, in a frantic and chaotic way, to make sense of it all, to cash in on those possibilities, and to create an external world in the image of ones soul. When we see the light, the first thing we look for are sunglasses. And this is understandable, but it is not the summit of the experience. Rather, falling in love is just succumbing to the desire to become oneself. It is just being woken up by something important and primal enough, within oneself, to overcome ones ego defenses.
As usual, of course, Osho has had something to say about it in which I can recognize my experience.
Love is the shallow space in a swimming pool, for those who cannot meditate. But that is the place to learn meditation. And it is the same pool, it is the same water, it is the same kind of phenomenon. You are just unable to go deeper because you have been made afraid even to enter into it. The shallow part has been condemned, and you have been told to jump into the deeper part without knowing how to swim.
So they disturbed your love life by condemnation and they disturbed your meditative life by sheer strategy: because you don’t know swimming, you cannot go so deep. And you don’t have any experience of silence, peace, sheer joy, a little bit of ecstasy, something orgasmic — these will give you the hints how meditation is not a myth. You have tasted it a little bit. It is the same energy field, just you have to go deeper into it.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS when one couple moves into the realm of orgasmic experience? What actually happens? Every point has to be understood. Time stops. For a moment the pendulum does not move, and that single moment seems to be almost eternity. The two persons are no more two — for a moment. They have melted into each other. There is no thought in the mind, for a moment. It is all empty and silent, and these are the things which have to be deepened in meditation.
And once you have tasted them, you will be surprised that it does not depend on the other person. Something happens within you. Something happens within the other person. But it is not dependent. If you can sit silently, if you can manage, by watching your thoughts, to bring a gap, a stop, you will suddenly see time has stopped again. And now it is in your hands, not in the hands of biology. You can keep this time stopped as long as you want. And once you know the secret key….
The key is: no thoughts, no ego, no time — you just are.