Question: Serge, you talk a lot about the need for love and its many spiritual and transformational qualities.  What about Romantic Love? Do you see Romantic Love fitting into this category? Can you say a little bit about how you view it?

Serge.  Certainly. I see Romantic Love as being a deeply spiritual kind of love, one that holds extraordinary transformational capabilities, if, that is, we allow ourselves to understand it and relate to it consciously, and, very importantly, desist from allowing ourselves to be consumed by it. (We see the tragic consequences of this, for example, in the great love sagas of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida!)

I think Romantic Love gives us glimpses into a sacred world as few other experiences do and that if related to with wisdom and awareness, can be an enormous source of liberation and may serve as a springboard to propel us more fully into "the divine’.

And this is so important, living as we do in a materialistic culture where spiritually, we can be so bogged down and where so few openings exist that, as it were,  ‘give us permission’ to 'let go' and 'celebrate being our true ecstatic selves'. In allowing us temporarily to transcend our mundane reality and experience enchantment, Romantic Love is one of the few pointers towards the divine that is available to people who otherwise have little interest in ‘higher things’.

When Cupid's little arrow first flies home, we are reminded of certain great spiritual truths. The first is that nothing needs changing and that everything is perfect the way it is - at this stage, we love our beloved quite unconditionally; secondly, our egoic boundaries of limited and separate self-perception, begin dissolving. The result is that our perceptions of ourselves and our world become temporary transformed. Something ‘bigger than us’ carries us along; we are under a magic spell!

However, here is where we can ‘hit’ a problem. The truth is that the initial onrush of bliss does not last. The spell always breaks. And this is because Romantic Love is just a phase, a stage in the great adventure of loving. It is not designed to last. It only points the way; it provides a powerful experience of unity but not the wherewithal for its embodiment. I think the work of learning truly to love another human being only begins after the romantic phase  - where we do not yet love that other person for who they are – begins to fade. Here, we need to understand that what we fell in love with was a projection of some aspect of our own divine self that we have not yet owned and therefore that has lived in our Shadow. In the case of a man, it is often his own inner sacred feminine, and with a woman her sacred masculine.  Unless this is recognised and the projections withdrawn, difficulties will inevitably arise as we were not born to carry others' unreal fantasy expectations of us.

If, at this stage, we can desist from de-idealising our lover and for feeling betrayed because we are awakening to the realisation that they are neither a prince nor a princess, but, just like us, full of blemishes, then the possibility for something much subtler and deeper, can beckon. To move towards this deeper love, therefore, must accompany the realisation that we have in fact, ‘fallen in love’ with our fantasy picture of the other, and that the good feelings that we experience when we are with them and which we think only happen because of them, actually live inside us!

It is therefore at this stage that our real challenge begins and where new possibilities for loving another human being in a much more real way, may begin to open up. A key question we may need to ask ourselves here, is: are we going to continue demanding that our lover carry our projections or are we willing to re-own them and try to integrate them into our daily life and therefore risk the possibility of real intimacy developing?

Indeed, if we are willing to do this and not try to hold on to ecstasies that were, or fantasies that might be, extraordinary new possibilities can open up for us. In consciously choosing to release some of our Narcissism and egocentricity (interestingly, in the romantic stage we are much more interested in having our lover make us ‘feel good’ than in really caring for their deeper being) a space can open up allowing us to be much more grounded in our spirituality as we may begin to love the other - warts and all!