The Love Potion and the Sword of Eros

[river dog]

A Jungian discussion on the blockbuster experience of Romantic Love and the Naked Sword that inevitably ends it.

 

Fascinating stuff from John Ryan Haule - for all you Romantics out there...

 

If puppy love is foolishness, a mature romantic love is full-blown madness. The lover has strayed from the highways and mainstreams of our placid and well-planned common life to build a solitary hut somewhere in the wilderness of disgraceful and deranged notions. There is no convincing the love-mad of their errors and delusions, they would rather disabuse us of ours.

This book sides with the madmen and explores their madness sympathetically: its rapture, its pain, its wisdom, its power to lead us astray, and its fiery pillar that leads us through the night of our ignorance toward a promised land that is glorious in ways we have not dreamed--but is generally not at all the way we had always imagined it would be.

 

Generally we learn the lesson of the Naked Sword only much later. It comes down with a vengeance when our beloved says, “Good-bye.” Or when we get into that fight that chops us to bits and throws us into the smallest room behind the smallest door with all the fools who’ve gone before us. The Sword brings devastation. It takes away from us the only life worth living. The hands of time move back to that moment eons ago, in illo tempore, in that eternal time before time began, when jealous gods swung the first sword that severed our spherical bodies and left us -- not in halves -- but bereft of our very selfhood. We become Heathcliff beside the fresh grave of Cathy. We want to beg for our beloved on any terms at all. Better as a vengeful ghost or a blood-thirst demon than this absense. We cannot live without our life! We cannot live without our soul!

 

link removed

[Viper62382]

Indeed. It is naked and double edged.

[river dog]

Indeed. It is naked and double edged.

 

The sword is not what you think