Читать книгу Enjoy, Comprehend, Love. Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love - Yury Tomin - Страница 4

The immense spaces of love are gradually covered somewhere with already well-trodden paths, and in some places with only barely noticeable lost paths. There is no and, perhaps, there will never be highways. You can learn how to navigate here by studying ancient myths and legends, getting acquainted with fascinating stories about journeys to the love land of experienced writers, or referring to modern popular guidebooks that guarantee an easy fun ride on the boats of love along the turbulent currents with steep rapids and sharp turns.

Lost in the spaces of love, sometimes they resort to the help of a stalker, in the role of which acts as a psychotherapist. Well, one intuition is good, but two, of which the second with a scientific background, is better. And yet all this way or more each part goes alone, learning from their own mistakes, finding a way out of a deadlocked relationship, making their own fundamental discoveries, or accumulating solid baggage of small but hard-won life lessons to that time when the path has already led to a quiet and cozy harbor. Since ancient times, travelers to uncharted lands left behind maps, so that those following them could see the whole picture of the path, calculate their strength, learn about the dangers that lie in wait, and not go astray at the forks.

In thinking about love, there are two main directions. The well-known of them incorporates a huge variety of works of fiction and popular-science literature, united by the theme of love stories. A striking representative of modern adherents of this path the Russian writer Mikhail Weller speaks with his personal book About Love and the historical one Love and Passion. Love stories are a fascinating genre. In our youth, we delightfully plunge into the dramatic fate of the heroes; we empathize with their quivering feelings and put off in our minds images that excited us. In adulthood, we can already understandingly sympathize, but with constant enthusiasm follow the vicissitudes of love destinies.

The desire to find some patterns in the variety of love stories gives us a more modest set of works representing one or another classification of love relationships like descriptions of causality and dynamics of feelings experienced by lovers, typification or logical schematization of love. The invasion of reason into the realm of love was not easy. And in our time, there is a myth that the analysis is killing to love. Someone even appeals to the authority of Leo Tolstoy, who said that “every reasoning about love destroys love.” But even with the naked eye, you can see that behind the descriptions of love in Leo Tolstoy’s novels there lays deep reflections on the nature of this feeling. So, this biting quote is quite applicable to the clarification that these words should be understood “exactly the opposite of how they are usually understood,” said by him about a statement that “you should not marry out of love, but certainly with calculation.”

At the beginning of the 19th century, taking on the courage bordering with insolence, a French writer Stendhal published his experiments On Love. He foresaw the difficult fate of this “ill-fated book” when ten years after its publication found only seventeen readers. A hundred years later, the laws of love outlined in the “experiments” were chosen as a starting position, the erroneous conclusions of which was to identify and fix, to create insightful studies On Love by a Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. By this time, the “ill-fated book” had become one of the most widely read books. The author of the “studies” notes that it not only “read with ecstasy,” but is also an element of the boudoir entourage of the “marquise, the actress and the lady of the world,” indicating that “they should understand love.”

These centuries-long immersions in the nature of love form two poles of intense intellectual effort, two bright spotlights that pierce and shed light on the territory of love space available to us. It is possible, using a well-known aphorism, to say with confidence that all subsequent theories of love are notes on the margins of the “experiments” and the “studies.” With a few exceptions. One of them is represented by an insightful reading of Plato’s dialogues devoted to love – Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium – by a Russian philosopher Alexey Losev. Another exception is by and large a tribute to the special cast of the modern mind, which cannot do without scientific evidence of one or more other considerations based on laboratory experiments or the results of field experiments.

In this regard, food for notes is rich and varied from observing facial expressions, measuring the physiological reactions of lovers and large-scale interviews of men and women about their intimate life, to analyzing love hormones and brain scans of experimental subjects in different stages of love relationships. At the same time, one can hardly talk about any fresh discoveries made in psychology, ethology, social psychology, and other scientific disciplines that have turned to the study of love, because love is as old as the world, and much has already been saying.

The achievements of the sciences have so far been reduced mainly to giving us the opportunity to talk about love in a more modern and sterile language in the hope of understanding and formulating more clearly the long-known intimate mysteries of love. But it should be borne in mind that in modern psychology, you can find a fairly wide variety of approaches to determining the fundamental foundations of love.

Generally speaking, when going on a journey through the spaces of love, one should be prepared to talk about it in different languages. Scientific concepts of the psychology of love often stem from philosophical ideas and run into metaphysical insights. Literary images of love are expressed both in the language of common or refined prose and in chased formulas of poetic inspirations. Poetry, in turn, is often elevated to philosophical generalizations. Perhaps, only by adjusting yourself to the entire diverse linguistic palette, you can prepare yourself for passing the winding routes of conscious love.