Falling in Love; Rising in Love

by Marc Gafni

There is so much we do to undermine the sustainability of love. There is so much we do to murder love. We limit love. We envision love in one mode, and any violation of that mode, which is really our desperate craving for egoic validation, we label abuse.

We have forgotten that love cannot live without forgiveness and compassion. We expect love to be simple and neat when it is also messy and complex. We use the wounds of love as excuses to lash out with ferocious violence, even as we hide behind high-sounding phrases and ideals.

It is only when we take back our projections, cease our splitting and demonizations, that we might once again become the empty space between the sexually inter-twisted cherubs; the space of emptiness where the Shekina dwells.

The following short piece is an offering on one specific dynamic of love.

Falling in Love; Rising in Love

What is Falling in Love? The Greeks called it Cupid’s arrow: a blind, capricious and mischievous fate that strikes a human being unawares. Freud labeled falling in love “regressive.” Others, like Friedrich Schopenhauer, view the first fall of love as a cruel hoax perpetuated by the universe. How else, Schopenhauer asks, could people ever be tricked into marriage and procreation?

We all know however that such invalidations of falling in love are counter-intuitive; if not downright subversive. They undermine the inherent integrity, wonder, and vitality of Eros. The very rightness and even divine quality of love are ignored and effaced.

In Hebrew mystical thinking, falling in love is a moment of divinity, a moment in which the uncertainty, contingency and alienation of living are transcended into something higher. The full flush of love is a provider of inner core certainty. When you fall in love, God is opening all the doors for you.

The only problem with falling in love is that we are never able to keep falling: eventually we always hit ground. That initial high – when we find ourselves soaring through air, empowered, enlivened, ecstatic – always wears off, and we realize we weren’t flying – but falling.

It can take days or weeks or months – but the dreaded morning always comes when both sides wake up ask themselves, “What was I thinking?” Gradually or suddenly, they realize that they are still alone. The old fears and phobias still remain; the emptiness has not been filled.

The question we really need to answer then is why can’t we hold it? And if indeed it always recedes then what good was it in the first place? Indeed it is almost like a divine tease that tantalizes us with fulfillment and then is cruelly yanked out of reach.

The Kabbalists answer that falling in love is an “arousal from above.” We do not work to fall in love. It happens with almost no investment of human energy. The love granted to us is real enough; it is simply not the result of human effort. It is something aroused from beyond.

According to the Kabbalists, there is nothing malicious or even capricious about the whole enterprise. Falling in love is a gift from God, pure and simple. Falling in love is a gift from a God whose primary characteristic is love for Her creatures. God bestows upon us a gift of inner certainty and clarity.

On the other hand, the nature of such a gift is that it is too great for us to fully accept. We cannot hold the dazzling brilliance of the light… something shatters. We can touch the love for a time, but we lack the vessels to hold it.

Suddenly finding ourselves having to work for what was first experienced as a gift of magical purity can be infuriating, until we realize that losing paradise is not a cruel personal punishment: it is the essential pattern of the universe. Reality demands that the heightened perception and promise of the initial encounter fade. The pattern of all human experience is that today’s ecstasy is tomorrow’s routine.

Yet, the Kabbalists explain that in allowing us to fall in love, the universe presents us with a gift – the ability to feel a reality that is not ours by right. We are not yet sufficiently skilled to derive pleasure from the experience for we have not earned it.

Pleasure is always a function of invested effort. The ability to earn something – to make it ours by right – is the great privilege granted to us by a loving cosmos. Anything we don’t earn we do not truly enjoy. That is a metaphysical law of the universe. Yet even before earning it, we are given the gift of love, at least for a while.

The reason is that the radical clarity and certainty of this “arousal from above” then becomes a shining buoy to which we can anchor our lives. It shows us the inner nature of reality. For a short time, see the world with God’s eyes. Then our vision is clouded and we need to start to do the work of what the Kabbalists call “arousal from below.” Yet, it is only because of that light of falling in love that we can later navigate the currents of uncertainty and do the work of arousal from below.

This pattern is not only the pattern of love. It reveals a deep truth in the blueprint of reality. There are three distinct stages:

1) The initial flash of energy;

2) The loss of the initial energy;

3) The drive to re-experience, to re-access, the initial energy.

The importance of the primary flash of energy cannot be overstated. Falling in love is the initial experience that teaches us what is possible. It is the early euphoria which holds out a vision of the relationship as it could be. Without that vision there would be no reason to assume we could ever reach higher than the pain and friction of the fall; there would be no siren of possibility to lure us out of our post-fall melancholy.

Yet, this is much more than just a circular pattern. The goal of the process is not merely to fall back in love but to reach a place that is both higher and deeper than the initial flash. The energy re-formed, the primary experience re-claimed, is always deeper, more sustaining and more powerful than the initial occurrence. We fall in love, we fall out of love, we work to regain the experience of grandeur we felt at the beginning. We succeed in returning to our point of original love – yet the reclaimed love is far deeper and more beautiful than we ever imagined it could be, even in those early heady days. The pattern of arousal from above and arousal from below teaches us of the great sustainability of love.

Presented by Marc Gafni