On Love and Recognition

There is a third world, a human one, the world of another person, which proved the most disorienting threshold of all. More disorienting, in some ways, than the out-of-body journey at eight years old. More disorienting than the elemental kingdoms or the hospital ward.

I am speaking of encounters, and they are not numerous; in a full life you might have three or four, in which the soul of another person is perceptible directly, not through the mediation of behaviour or words, but simply, immediately, as a fact.

Recognition is not familiarity. It is something prior to familiarity. It is the soul knowing, before the mind has gathered enough information to form an opinion, that it is in the presence of something significant.

Plotinus understands all souls as having emanated from the same source, having therefore a shared origin the material world separates but does not sever. When two souls encounter each other with genuine attention, that shared origin is briefly perceptible, like two rivers meeting that both carry the same water from the same mountains.

Love, perceived clearly and without the usual consoling distortions, is not a solution to anything. It is an opening, to more reality, to more of what you are capable of.

The practical implication is not a prescription for how to conduct relationships. It is an invitation to bring the same quality of honest attention that contemplative practice trains you to bring to everything else.