“I do what I do because I love love. I love the feeling of being in love, I love the feeling of people being in love with me, and I love the feeling of helping other people succeed in love” said Arden Leigh in her blog, A Weapon of Mass Seduction.
And what does Arden do? She is a professional seduction instructress. Yet few equate her profession with love. I think most think of a highly skilled sexual technician incapable of intimacy.
As 5% od internet searches relate to sex, no philosophy of thenature of love and lust can ignore our biological instincts.
However, Arden explains that “love — romantic love — is pretty much the driving force behind my life. It’s my calling. I’m good at being in love, I’m good at embracing love, I’m good at loving someone I choose to love.”
Now, I admit I have never been inclined toward seduction training.
However, discovering Arden’s words was fortuitous for me as I grapple with loves contradictions wijh what I call The Seven Colours of Love.
For me, love is like light that can be broken down into a spectrum drawn from an infinitude of experience. Perhaps this is also the problem. Love (do owe even agree on what it is?) – like G-d (whatever that means) – is infinite.
If G-d is love how come there is pain? If love is so good, how come it huts?
I’m talking religion here – however, in grappling emotive questions religion and love seems to cross over at times.
The mystics describe finding G-d as a giant orgasm. And I once heard a Buddhist abbot admit that as a passionate young man, he discovered that in meditation he could get more bang than in the bedroom.
Love – like light – is visible because it reflects off something. It is visible because it reacts with another – a person, an object – even an illusion.
Light becomes visible in through the dust in the door ay and love is revealed in the scattered memories of experience.
I appreciate love through the filters of my past, just religion describes G-d with metaphors of a cultural past.
But then sexuality celebrates the beauty of difference – and thee intrigue: of chase and being chased, perusing happiness outside of ourselves and of the joy of just being – of being male and female and discovering within both masculine and feminine traits.
While light needs an object from which to reflect –it’s still there, even in the darkness of space. Love is also there – deep within, waiting to find an object to reflect it.
Our entire ability to perceive the world is coloured by the past.
No wonder Russian philosopher N. Chernyshevsky said we find beautiful everything that in a way resembles .ourselves. In love we seek beauty and embellish the object of our adoration with artistic superlatives.
It follows that the greater our experience more we are able to understand another’s worldview.
However, in the Western pursuit of things, we constantly expand outward forgetting to turn around and look with in.
“So much of our lives is spent in a longing and a search – for what, we don’t know” wrote Jungian Robert A. Johnson.
“So many of our ostensible “goals”, so many of the things we think we want, turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide; they are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger.”
What we love in another we love in ourselves. Yet, from the tradition of knights and ladies, love is painted as unattainable and external..
So then why is it that we at least on one level seek someone opposite to yourself?
The purpose of relationship is to learn to love ourselves. Lovers have a nasty habit of bringing to the surface our shadow self that we have pushed under the carpet.
Then you fight, your opponent is really yourself. So when we embrace ourselves then we can love others more fully.
It is when you learn to be able to look within that we appreciate the symbolic values in life.
“When we “fall in love” we feel completed, as though a missing part of ourselves has been returned to us” said Jungian romance expert Robert Johnson.“Life has an intensity, a glory, an ecstasy and transcendence”
Johnson argues that the West spends so much time chasing the external that it forgets to turn around and look within.
If we do not understand ourselves, delightful as love may be, it may bring more destruction than happiness.
What we are seeking cannot be reduced to a person, or a thing, but “psychological qualities; love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose” that we find empowering said Johnson.
“Without realizing it, we are searching the Sacred. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.”
The peak intensity of romantic love brings to focus our internal opposites and in thea rms of a lover symbolizes that these are really only two opposites of the same coin.
It forces us to experience our inner world while we are enamored with another. To succeed in love he cannot live entirely in the outer world – not if he seeks a true loving connection.
He must learn to know the love within so that there resides inside something that the light of his lover can shine upon.
These shattered memories coalesce as we reach out and touch – and are touched by another. .
Used well, this can empower transformation.
However, “our culture trains women that their role is not to be human being but to be mirrors who reflect back to a man his ideal or his fantasy” said Johnson.
“ This is why men and women put such impossible demands on each other in their relationships: We actually believe unconsciously that this mortal human being has the responsibility for making our lives whole, keeping us happy, making our lives meaningful, intense, and ecstatic!”
I believe that this illusion has the greater purpose of discovering ourselves. if we begin to really study our lover, we reveal more of ourselves. What is behind you seems distant in a mirror. The further you study your lover, the deeper you reveal yourself.
As a mirror of our soul, experience, and especially the intense experience of Romance, can reveal our core values.
When two lovers know there priority of values, they are able satisfy their desires in ways that excite their beloved.
Arden Leigh describes wanting “someone to want to make me happy, someone to care whether I’m happy, and to care about whether what he’s doing is making me happy” and “to the plate and take responsibility for the way he makes me feel.”
However, Arden had any was kind enough to email me in preparation for this article.
She has no “little interest in discussing love in the abstract” she said “Love is useful when it can make two people feel good. It’s about bringing pleasure (both physical and spiritual) into our lives.”
As she wrote in her blog, seduction allows her “make someone I care about smile a little brighter during the day, blush in a brief retrospective of our last shared night, get excited wondering what surprise I might have up my sleeve next, and perhaps most importantly, know that they can rely on me to do my best to make them feel good.”
I believe that when we learn to focus the power of sexual tension and romantic love it can transform our lives.
“Sometimes we seducers don’t want the object of our seduction to feel good – we want them to feel nervous, or worried, or jealous, or confused, or frustrated. But the difference is that we only arouse those feelings in order to make the relief that comes afterward that much more powerful” wrote Arden.
We throw in a few lows just so that the highs aren’t taken for granted. We’ve all felt how good it feels to find our house keys after the thirty minutes we spent in panic looking for them. We know how much better it is to feel that relief and that comfort right after we feel that it might be taken away from us.”
Of course, Leigh is here talking about ” a bit of cheeky trickery that come before the light at the end of the tunnel” that makes the agony even more rewarding.
However, I believe as a mirror of the soul, love and life can empower us when we know our core values.
Love flirts with us, teasing us to go beyond, to find our soul and to recreate a better world.
To that end, in the next post, we will discover the values in your life. Then we will reveal how your highest values can mutually empower the values and desires of your lover.
Nietzsche said that we should live every moment of our lives as though we were sentenced to repeat it over and over, forever and ever, for all eternity. We should live each moment as though we were creating an eternal, unchangeable work of art.
So why not live by a philosophy of love?
