Reflections on the Intrinsic Value of Love

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself,
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love. (Khalil Gibran)

Friday October 14^th is Marianne’s birthday.  My two sons’, Justus and Tous, birthday will follow soon, and then my stepdaughter’s, Emma.  So I devote this week’s reflection to the supreme topic of love in simple words, and will add a section in the occasion of birthday for each one of my children.   

Eight years ago, Marianne and I taught a course on “Philosophy of Love” together and since then we have numerously reflected and discussed the four loves: the filial (family), friendship, erotic (spouse), agape (divine) love.  I have come to the conclusion that these four loves are tied together.  When I learned how to love Marianne genuinely, when we stepped out of “egotistic couple’s love”, I learned and was more capable to love my family, children, friends, strangers, and God.  A genuine love opens one up to the world, expands one’s horizon, and spreads love rather than confining one in only being concerned about the well-being of the couple or getting lost in the principle of pleasure.  A genuine love is not merely the working of reason and calculation of give and take of pleasure or cost benefit analysis.  It is losing oneself in love in coming to one’s knees; it is a work of heart, a semblance of worship. 

So, Leonard Cohen’s Light as the Breeze:

She stands before you naked
You can see it, you can taste it,
And she comes to you light as the breeze.
Now you can drink it or you can nurse it,
It don't matter how you worship
As long as you're
Down on your knees.
So I knelt there at the delta,
At the alpha and the omega,
At the cradle of the river and the seas.
And like a blessing come from heaven
For something like a second
I was healed and my heart
Was at ease.

The difference between a genuine love and infatuation and/or overvaluation of the beloved is that genuine love is not only a physical binding but a connection of soul and body.  It is that kind of love that empowers and opens up the couple to the world and makes them generous and giving.  Without this essential material of love: losing oneself in love, in body and soul, the works of reason are in vain.  Mere calculations of reason and pleasure are like a sculpturist who neither has proper marble nor a vision of the statue that s/he wants to carve.  It took some time that in our love we moved to Fromm’s dictum, in the Art of Loving, that: I need you because I love you, not that I love you because I need you.  A difficult stage to pass.

[Today is Nov.14st and Justus's birthday.  I decided to add a piece devoted to the birthday of each one of my children, as the occasion comes.  Now it is Jusuts's turn:  

He calls himself "sensitive", probably he heard it from his mom or grandma, but I call him “wise”.  I told him: "look, your teachers say you listen well and express yourself clearly.  You don't follow the crowd but make your decisions in class.  Everyone call you "wise".  His soccer coach wonders how relax he is in the field, not competitive and mostly has a taste for learning techniques.  He has developed a wonderful language skill.  As a teacher of Critical Thinking, I pay attention to how he uses quantifiers and how he qualifies his arguments.  I find it delightful and instructive that he carefully refrains from hasty generalizations.  If he is about to say "all" students like soccer, he immediately corrects himself to "some" or "most".  I have checked him on this point, hasty generalization, and to my surprise, he qualifies most of statements and descriptions.  One time he was upset about what I told him and I was frustrated and complained: “every time I tell you something, you get hurt”.  He asked me to say something to him.  I wondered what?  He said: "something about Pokémon."  I said: "you like Pikachu Pokemon, don't you?”  He said: “yes, but did I get upset?”  I told my student how he caught me on hasty over-generalization.   

Justus is the joy of our heart and the light of our eyes, this is what I tell him.  I tell Marianne: “children think we take care of them, but indeed they take care of us.  Where were we without the beautiful childhood and adulthood of Tous, Emma, and Justus?  Childhood is the most beautiful, as life is so fresh then and the soul is so transparent.  However, our love for our children doesn’t mean symbiotic relationship or need.  With children as with all variations of love, the mature and the most ethical comes from: “I need you because I love you, not that I love you because I need you.”] 

The love of family, friends, people, and God also has to go through this transformation: I need you because I love you, not that I love you because I need you.  Parents, children, family, friends, people, and God want to be loved for their own sake, for their intrinsic value, not only for symbiotic rationales (mutual needs and nihilism of evolutionary biologists: survival of genes).  It is not surprising then that all religions, from Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Religions of the Book, Socrates, Plato, and to some extent Aristotle’s virtue ethics, and Kant’s “always treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end”— hold onto one major ethical impulse: We do good for its intrinsic value, not only for its utility or consequences (against Mill’s utilitarianism and hedonism).  I love you for who you are, I see you and myself as a shadow of God.  So the ethical has a spiritual direction: whatever I do, I do it to my soul.  The way I love you carves my soul.  The way you love me affects your soul.  This is sometimes called the law of Karma.  Whatever good you do, you do it to your own soul (the Quran).

Is intrinsic value of love pleasure, peace, and joy?

One might argue that if we want love for its intrinsic value, not for its utilitarian consequence, then is not love itself empowering and blissful and so we want it for its consequences?  Is this not the extrinsic value of love?  What if love gets tough and doesn’t give peace and happiness to one?  What if one has to suffer for love of parents, family, people, and God?   Ought we still to desire it for its own sake? 

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears. (Khalil Gibran)

Love is not an insurance company.  In any genuine sense of devotion and love for people and God, one has to be ready for difficulties.  If one is not ready for tumultuous moments and love the beloved only for the ataraxia of joy, then one has not yet understood the intrinsic value of love. In a soul and body connection, we embrace all moments, as the richness of existential unity lightens the dark night of the soul.  Love of course is a two-way street.  Love is mutual, but it doesn't mean that it is simply symbiotic.  The problem with symbiosis is that if you momentarily don't serve me, I have no deeper reason to commit myself to you.  But while love is two-way, it is based on commitment.  What does it mean?  It means that we give and take in love but it is not going according to strict cost benefit calculus.  We stay by the beloved as long as possible, and the limit of possibility is unfathomable.  Love encourages us to step into the dark and meet ourselves, to embrace all our experiences in order to grow.  And always growth goes through intervals of pain and agony.  In standing by love in the moments of fear and discomfort, one loves in integrity of one’s conscience: to know the stains of heart to heal oneself better.  And God is the ultimate Love, for whom all suffering is a reward and in the depth of misery and loss of Job, there is no other way but God, because in escape from the darkness of misery, all other routes end up to the atrophy of soul:

“When love beckons to you, follow her,

Though her ways are hard and steep.

And when her wings enfold you yield to her,

Though the sword hidden among her pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you believe in him,

Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.

Even as she is for your growth so is she for your pruning.

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn she gathers you unto herself.

She threshes you to make you naked.

She sifts you to free you from your husks.

He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant;

And then she assigns you to her sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.” (Khalil Gibran, I alternatively changed pronouns to female and male)

We have to learn to love for its own sake not for its result. If it was for the result, then why should I go an extra mile for her or him? This is an old expression but says a lot about love. In cost benefit analysis, I may go an extra mile for you if it is guaranteed that you will go two extra miles for me later. In love these calculations are mute. I go an extra mile for her because I enjoy going extra mile for her[1]. The joy of love includes enduring suffering for love. Love is a completely meaningful paradox and an alchemy to life, because in seeking the intrinsic value of love I become one body and soul, in conscience, in words and deeds, in thoughts and hearts, in suffering and joy, in ethics and spirituality, and in expansion of my love from egotistic couples to all living beings.

[Nov. 22^nd is my older son, Tous’s birthday.  Tous was blessed with a calm and non-contentious composure from childhood.  I remember when he was just a few years.  Lying down on the ground, he used to look at the blue sky for long.  I could see peace and content in his face, and it kept me from intervening in his serene mood.  Tous grew up with me, when I was lost and searching the most.  I remember myself in those years, the dry skin of disconnect and discontent and the pressure of anxiety attack in my eyes.  I was studying philosophy and considered myself a Foucauldean-Nietzschean person.  It took years for me to realize where atheism goes wrong. But meanwhile I was tainted and affected by following my own desires and whims.  I divorced my family to “find” myself, indeed to experience pleasure and women, but nothing could satisfy me, because later St. Augustin made sense to me, whom I ridiculed before, that our heart is restless for God, for connection to our source.  Rumi has the same theme in the first verses of his Masnavi:

Listen to this reed how it complains:
it is telling a tale of separations.

Saying, "Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed,
man and woman have moaned in (unison with) my lament.

I want a bosom torn by severance,
that I may unfold (to such a one) the pain of love-desire.

Every one who is left far from his source
wishes back the time when he was united with it.

In every company I uttered my wailful notes,
I consorted with the unhappy and with them that rejoice.

Tous witnessed my wavering life.  I divorced his mom and never forget how it hurt her and Tous, when she took him in her arms and came to my apartment, both crying.  I was blind.  I used to drink and smoke weed daily, devoting myself to philosophy and searching for love and sexual experience.  I never left Tous after divorce.  We had joint custody and enrolled him in piano and martial arts classes.  I spent every week with him in the piano practice room.  He was tender and so understanding.  I was not a believer to be grateful for this. He grew up abiding and wonderful in school, piano, and martial art.  But after divorce both his mom and I were restless to find love and pleasure.  I never left him but I wasn’t fully present.  He had to see my transformation and transition from one house to other, from one girlfriend to another.  So much happened that I don’t want to discuss it in the celebration of his birthday.  

He was inquisitive in different ways.  However, he had a spiritual quest.  I remember the days that he came to me and said: "we are eternal".  I just tried to change the subject.  It took years I came to the same conclusion, but what could I do for the time that I misled him spiritually and exposed him to my consumption of alcohol and weed?  We all pay the price.  He suffered a lot, and I suffered consequently.  My love to Tous was the hardest test of love, and I have to admit that I failed here and there, and I will never never forget.  I never forget that I failed to love him always in a devotional love.  It was hard and inconvenient.  I was weak and frail.  I violated my conscience and escaped.  And something inside me broke forever, I was shocked of the effect of fleeting in the face of bad faith.  I loved to read Camus' The Fall when I was teenager, and I was startled to see that I fell almost for the same reasons that the protagonist of Camus fell.  I could feel it ingrained in my blood, the love of my son, and I could completely experience it shattered and shattered me, when out of hopelessness and recklessness, I found myself desperately incapable of helping him.  But God helped me.  But God guided me.  God guided me by the law of karma, by letting me suffer from the consequence of my behavior and spiritual downfall.  I was lost and prayed to God: teach me love, teach me love.  I am grateful to God for all the suffering through which God taught me how to love.  And God put me in situations that I saw the sickness of my soul, the unbearable truth against my self-satisfaction.  However, I persisted and Tous persisted.  We never left each other, we endured and learned to love each other.  We went through the fires of difficulties, both burnt, and came out safe.  We both have scars of love on our soul.

Tous has black belt in Kung Fu but except for one time in self-defense in high school, he never fought with anyone, as much as I know, and it wasn’t out of fear.  I have to admit that in the course of his adulthood and growing up, I admired his courage and endurance.  He has seen things in life that, one day, I hope he will write about them.  Most people haven’t seen, experienced, or endured, what he has gone through and came out—thanks to God-- stronger.  He is my hero.  I believe in him.

Tous is a pianist and received a Silver Medal for his piano performance in 2004.  He has a strange taste in music, for example he practiced day and night numerous variations of Bach’s works.

Tous has taught me more about love—filial love—than anyone else, and our love is growing stronger and stronger, while we both learn to see and forgive our mistakes.  He is now a man, stronger in spirit and with a lot of experience.  I have no doubt that he is a hidden treasure, a subterranean stream of ingenuity and creativity.  I am waiting for the time he himself fully realizes this.  Now I can say: I need you because I love you, not that I love you because I need you.] 

[June 6th is the birthday of my stepdaughter Emma.  I have been thinking how I can depict this love.  She is my stepdaughter.  I entered in her life or she entered in my life when she was 12 years old.  Now she is a 21 years old beautiful woman in body and soul.  This is a strange love, as one learns to love a blooming girl through time.  When I moved in with Marianne, my first decision was not to be intrusive in her life.  I didn’t want she feels that now another ‘adult supervision’ is added to her life.  She was observant of my passionate love for her mother; I was witnessing a kind of gentle opalescent love between Marianne and her.  The afternoons that they cuddled and in a ceremonial way, like Japanese tea ceremonies, polished each other’s toes and fingers seemed surreal to me.  It felt like I was blessed in watching a Gustav Klimt or Chagall’s painting. 

How should I love a blooming stepdaughter?  I had to learn her moods, her shyness and sensitivity, despite my rough and straightforward demeanor.  I had to dull my edges and learn to be gentle, as if I was a tatarian maple tree in front of a daisy or petunia flower.  When I got into my pseudo-philosophical lectures for her about existence and Socratic “unexamined life is not worth living”, with her usual good humor she resorted to her mother to save her.  Emma is gifted with a grace that creates an ambiance of friendship and calm around her.  She lacks malice even if she tries.  I used to call her my little Buddha, but stopped, because I was afraid she takes it as naivety and immaturity, while I was giving expression to my enviousness to her luminescent fitrat (divine essence).   The youth want to look experienced and this is the beginning of acting crazy and leaving scars on their souls.  Given my own life journey, years in prison, being an immigrant, throwing myself from the top of valley of despair to know myself, I wondered and worried what Emma would bargain for her Buddha nature.  I was lost and in the path of finding myself through philosophy and religion, I met Marianne, who was somehow on her way to find herself too.  Emma met me while I was walking through the mist of philosophical nihilism to religion. 

In her own way, Emma taught me love, because her love is pure and simple.  I felt like receiving the warmth of a blue affection from her, her care about making a meal for me or being worried about my health.  I felt I have a daughter.  She was curious about my prison experience and made a short film interviewing me about it for her class project.  No wonder that now at USC university, majoring International Relations, her job is to listen to interviews of survivors of genocides and write report about them.  Since she interviewed me, I have changed drastically.  I am happier and more connected to my divine source.  I quit drinking and smoking cigarette and weed.  I feel a joy that even the word ‘high’ used for drugs is improper to explain it.  I told Emma, I wish you interviewed me now.  She said I wish I were a better film maker then.  It took a while but I was observant how my eyes and heart changed gradually to see her beauty in body and soul, as if I am seeing my own daughter.  As I told Marianne recently, it is difficult not to love Emma. 

 

Now Emma is twenty-one years old.  Happy birthday my beautiful step-daughter.  You are kind, socially engaged, thoughtful, and perceptive.  You have your own journey to go, but I am always there for you.  I just want you to know.  I was listening to Kugo-Ka by Akira Ifukube while writing this happy birthday note, and I dedicate it to you (even though I know my taste in music is weird to you).] 

  

Concentric Condense Contagion Oneness of Love

There is a relation between the ethical, the spiritual, and four loves: filial, friendship, erotic, and agape love.  Mara’s seduction is to urge us to disconnect these elements from each other: to separate the ethical, “how should we guide our lives?” from the spiritual “What is the meaning of existence, our longing for the source of our existence?”, and to separate these two from our love for our family, friends, people and God.  Love thus has to be intact in its intrinsic value.  And if God has invented love, mercy, and compassion in all these dimensions to be cherished for their own sake—for their intrinsic value, then God also wants us to see the interconnection of all these in the ladder-spiral movement from each segments of these loves to God, so that we drop the veil of ignorance and ego and realize the already presence of divine in each one of the four loves.  

God loves us for our intrinsic value and God wants to be worshipped for God’s own sake, not for any hope for reward or fear of punishment.  In this way all variations of love, the love of parents and children and spouse, the love of people and all the living beings, and the love of God are one single intrinsic condensed immutable love.  Indeed, this ladder to God, is a spiritual journey within us to polish our soul, to lose our blindness to see God already in each act of love and in the mirror of our own soul, and from there come down from the ladder and stay centered in the first room and see God with our own eyes everywhere.  

And in this path, we must be ready for suffering as well as for joy, because this purification has to be attained in between chaos and conflict.  This love is a pearl hidden in the mesh of bodies and muddled waters of opposites.  This love is to be discovered and conceived in the dust of flesh and cries of soul.  This love is in carnal pleasure and self-mastery.  The world and body are the domain of examination and cultivation of this love.  And the divine direction is to walk on the razor edge of love in seeking its intrinsic value in this precarious life, in fear and agony of survival and death.  Thus to learn to say: I need you because I love you, not that I love you because I need you.    

Amidst all temptations and miseries, passing through the pathos of despair and animosity, God cultivates us to grow and to see the invisible God, paradoxically, with our own eyes, to hear God with our own ears, to feel God in our own touch, to smell God in our own nostrils, to reflect God in our own reason, to love God in our own heart, in oneself and in every being.  This absorption in body and mind, in reason and heart, starts from loving the beloved parents, loving siblings and family, loving our spouse and children, loving our neighbors—in strict Jesus’s Samaritan sense, the strangers near and afar, animals, trees, and all living beings.

Love of God and Sacrifice 

When I was atheist, I wondered what people mean when they say “love your God with all your heart”.  How can I love the invisible God?  

    

There was a time that I couldn’t see a purpose in life but hedonism and humanism.  So I saw all practices of the self upon the self, at best as an “aesthetic of existence”—to sculpt one’s self as one is standing in front of a canvas and painting one’s existence, the so-called “self-creation”.  It took a long time, unfortunately, that I understood that the kernel of this outlook is nihilism and despair about human capabilities.  In despair, this view sees us as being confined to sex and pleasures.  In vain, we try to push the limits of the sea, to discipline ourselves for God.  The point of “discipline” then became one of these three things: 1) family and societal “discipline” for “normalization”; 2) fictitious and delusional religious disciplines against pleasures of body; 3) Imposing discipline on oneself as a work of art, aesthetic of existence, or the so-called “self-creation” for “common good” (Chomsky) or for "rational egoism" (Ayn Rand).

This bowing down to the corpse, to the hedon as the ultimate god is the destination of modernism and postmodernism, to see oneself in despair, in disbelief, in being disenchanted, in seeing ourselves as contingent and accidental blub of the universe—hence “pleasure-serotonin-dopamine” is the ultimate meaning of life.  Only in encountering the divine, through thousands of years of religious experience, one can experience an exit.  In fact, the impossible is the limit of our imagination.  And when I hear the songs of despair in seeking pleasure and hedonism—at best at the disposal of human species—I know for sure they haven’t yet experienced the impossible so that to pass the limits of their imagination.  Only when I was startled and shattered by breaking down the limits of my imagination—confined to sex, pleasures, death, and disillusioned about eternity and the divine direction of the soul/body—I devoted my whole attention and concentration and desire to God and experienced what was unimaginable to me.  Only when I experienced faith in God, the walls of my imagination collapsed.  In this light, the seed of love of God grew in me, and this love set a new meaning of discipline and practices of the self upon the self for me: to polish my “self” to deserve the divine encounter—the beloved.

The difference between couple’s egotistic love and devotional love is that in love my pleasure doesn’t precede my beloved.  We seek it together or I let go of mine for her.  And in this letting go, in this detachment from myself, in this “sacrifice”, I learn and experience the true meaning of the joy-pleasure of love. As Socrates said: “S/he who from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that [divine] beauty, is not far from the end.” (Symposium)  

The joy of loving God is not seeing God as only our reason can see, but to be absorbed into the immense gravity of the white hole of love.  We can’t attain this absorption and this exuberant and joyous gravity if we don’t learn how to apply the antigravity drive of detachment from our own petty pleasures.  By detaching ourselves from mere egotistic love, from being lost in lust and desires of body, being lost in desires of addictions (serotonin, dopamine), one learns the joy of love of the Other: and the love of God resides and starts there.

On the other extreme, those who wish to attend God might be willing to get rid of pleasures of the world so that to concentrate only on the Source of existence, so they wish to stand outside existence, in non-existence and deny all the good pleasures of life (conjugal love and simple pleasures of body) along the bad pleasures (seven sins) and become hedonophobic (fearful of pleasure).  I have come to the conclusion that this escape from the two opposites (body/soul)—embedded in us by God to experience God deeper than angels—is an aberration.  The way is the mastery of pleasure to the extent that one learns to have them by will and to stop them by will at any time (even in the peak of making love).  This self-mastery is more difficult than complete abandoning of pleasure.  As always balance is the guidance and the mastery is formation of habit/character/ethos of the Golden Mean.  The will learns hence to make seemingly impossible possible: not to abandon pleasure but master it completely at will, to stop it at any time by the divine law of “detachment-attachment”.

Only in the dialectic of this “attachment-detachment” one learns genuine love: neither escaping from good pleasures, nor staying in any pleasure—but ecstatic standing-in-and-outside.  We oscillate between these two extremes, but the point of divine compass is detachment-in-attachment: 

To learn to be in chaos and stepping into order,

To be in disharmony and stepping into harmony,

To see the horrors of the world and creating hope and beauty,
To be amongst evils and doing good,

To be locked in the body and attending the spirit and soul,

To be an ego and having a divine-self-which-can-overcome-ego,

To be-in-the-world and losing oneself in the omnipresent Being-God,

To have a choice and choosing love. 

Sacrifice is a vague and mysterious concept coming from ancient times to us.  We have gone through centuries of interpretations and excess to understand the symbolic meaning of “sacrifice”.  God gave us a choice: the choice of sacrifice.  One has to have something worthy of sacrifice, otherwise sacrifice has no meaning.  And we are free to choose something worthy to sacrifice for the soul or to sacrifice the soul for the pleasures of the world. 

Reflect: the very pleasures that sustain us can ruin us, the very self that saves us can destroy us, the very sacrifice that is a guidepost to divine can turn into a devilish egotistic destruction.  The self-mutilation and destruction of oneself and the other in the name of "sacrifice" is devilish.  Dionysian unleashing of ritual madness and fertility, orgies and drunkenness, revenge and cruelty, is self/soul-destructive.  As well, extreme asceticism and denial of the world in the name of sacrifice is misguided.  Our soul (Ruh- divine spirit [in the Quran] or “image”, tselem, God formed (vayyitzer) human [in the Old Testament]) is embodied-in-the-world-and-is-otherworldly and we escape from the soul to body and from the body to soul.  But in doing good and being ready to suffer, to sacrifice if needed, we keep our body and soul in balance, without escaping from one to the other, because love occurs in the hiatus between body and soul.

Sacrifice: to sacrifice my own whims and desires for the beloved, to let go of my comfort for the comfort of the beloved, knowing that in saving others I am saving myself.  This is the meaning of intrinsic value of love.  I ought not to sacrifice an animal or another person, but my-self and my riches.  And this sacrifice is not self-immolation, but the discipline of holding onto the integrity of conscience—after the deconstruction of false consciousness and blindly following social norms: “Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these.” (the Quran: 17:36) 

This sacrifice is not killing for the sake of proving anything to God.  The “killing” of the son in the story of Abraham is a metaphor.  God never asks humans to kill people just for the sake of proving their faith to God—unless they are unjust and aggressive, even then there is a choice for forgiving if they change their ways.  And God tells us that the direction of evolution of human beings in sacrifice is to be merciful and compassionate.  

And I beg you to give me guidance, wisdom, and courage to understand that you have set me in the body of nothingness and I have no escape from it, but you gave me the spirit (Socratic daimon) to learn how to control myself and how to sacrifice.  You set me in fear and ask me to be courageous, you set me in desire and ask me to tame it, you set me in pleasure and ask me to choose between good and bad pleasure, you set me in the humility of the non-existence of a bubble and ask me to experience God in love, you set me in opposites and ask me to balance it, you set the mirror of divine self within me and ask me to polish it:

It is so close to me, know.

I can see it clearly condensed from the time immemorial.

From the first particle and first star,

To the supernova implosions and expansion of the universe,

Happy birthday Marianne,

In my chest wiggling in shimmering clinches of ineffable guidance,

In doubt and despair, it passes words, sounds, eyes, thoughts,

And sits straight in my head, heart, waist, legs, feet

And takes me out of the abyss of despair,

Happy birthday Justus.

Holding me onto the sun,

Where chaotic thoughts melt,

Where the temptation and fear evanish,

It doesn’t speak or show me anything,

It just moves into my head and heart and quenches me in a golden vehement arrest,

And sets me straight.

Happy birthday Tous.

Beyond the limits of my logos or image,

I can see the whole process close in the crystal palm of my hands,

I can see the evolution of love through survival and fear,

To the first spark of innovation and the first expression of awe,

Happy birthday Emma,

I can see that you happen instantaneously and simultaneously,

In each act of birth and growth,

In the future, present, and the past,

In each kiss and beam of light,

In each love drenched in tears,

In travelling the limit of death,

I can see you as the end,

I can see you as the first.

*********************************************************************************

[1]

We are unable to understand the intrinsic value of love if we don't pass this dominant nihilistic argument about "egoism":

Premise 1: As a matter of fact, we all follow our self-interest, or our self-interest is our first priority.

Premise 2: As a matter of fact, even when we help others (altruism) we take the satisfaction of helping others, so it is also for our egotistic impulses to be altruistic.

Conclusion: Therefore, it is natural to be egotistic

This argument is fallacious.  Why?  Review these videos: