Falling in Love: Part Twenty Six: The Wonder of the the Law: Marc Gafni

Dedicated to the Law, the way, Halacho and to Chief Justices wherever they might be…

One of the great moments of ecstasy in modernity was the drug culture of the sixties. While the culture has faded and we are left with drugs as just one more form of addiction, it left us with much wisdom. Timothy Leary, one of the important reflective voices in the drug culture, describes the mystical magical quality of the psychedelic experience thus:

“All the harsh, dry, brittle angularity of game life is melted. You drift off — soft, rounded, moist, warm. Merged with all life…your individuality and anatomy of movement are moistly disappearing. Your control is surrendered to the total organism… Blissful passivity. Ecstatic, orgiastic, undulating unity… All is gained as everything is given up…”

Or in another more succinct version by Sidney Cohen in his book Beyond Within:

The Ego is Dead
Killed during its last hysterical ravings
To become we

Both are descriptions of ecstasy.

Add to this Aldous Huxley, who, in his wonderful book Cleansing the Doors of Perception, talks about finding love and enlightenment only when we are delivered from the “world of selves.” (Leary guides the traveler in the psychedelic realm to use the moment of ego-less-ness to achieve love).

All this is true and real, but by itself, it is not the path to love traversed by the Hebrew mystics. In fact, even as the kabbala seeks ecstasy, it seeks no less our simple world of separate selves. It is only as a separate self that one can act with dignity in the world. We cannot love unless we retain our personhood. When the beloved says I love you — it is the ultimate statement of personhood. Interpersonal relationship is possible only from matrix of the separate self. This is why we have to Fall out of love.

In falling out of love we reaffirm the boundaries of the self as significant in our lives. Those boundaries are what create responsibility. You are responsible for that which takes place within your borders.

So we fall out of love in order to assure the separate integrity both individuals in the relationship. To insure our individuality, the universe is built in a way that the extended suspension of normal ego boundaries would cause us to go insane. Try and imagine an orgasm that never stops and you will get what I mean. We would not be the human lovers we were meant to be if we lost our individual integrity. So we need to fall out of love and come back to the world of personhood and individuated existence.

Love requires the affirming of the integrity of other. That is a withdrawal of self which creates boundaries. At the same time, love is about the melting of boundaries, the absorption of the two into a higher one. If love misses either of these it is overwhelmed by shadow.

marc gafni
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