[Music] Love's thousand names [Lucia Helena Galvao] Hello, it's nice to see you again, it's been a long time, hasn't it? We're here today for another of our philosophical chats so enjoyable for me, I hope for you too. Today we're going to talk about a curious subject.
I called it the thousand names of love. Although they're not exactly a thousand, but I think that if we go out looking for all the languages it should be well over a thousand. The idea of doing this chat came from a year ago when I read a report by a British linguist called Tim Lomas.
He's not just a linguist, he's also a psychologist, practitioner of a very new line of psychology which is positive psychology, a very interesting branch. For those who are interested, I invite to learn more. And linguist, that is, that science that studies the evolution of languages, both spoken and written, the comparison between languages, i.
e, a very interesting science. And he said in that article that he had found more than 600 names for love in different languages. But he had summed it up to 14 meanings and wanted to talk about them.
Well, when I read that I thought it quite interesting, also for the reasons he himself gives. He says that these shades of love are like flavors. And when you have several flavors, you can have well-seasoned food, can have a reality that is seen through several prisms.
It's not just Dr Tim Lomas who talks about this subject. Of course, Plato talks about the degrees of love. Plotinus talks about the two Venuses.
You'll see Gibran speaking masterfully about love. This idea of defining love goes back a long way. Even Lewis, the one from the Chronicles of Narnia, has a book called The Four Loves which is also very interesting.
So Dr Tim Lomas idea, updated to the present day, he gives it an interesting twist. He goes on to say that when we developed a language that covers all the meanings of love, it's also easier for us to live these meanings of love. I mean, if I know the name of this feeling that I have now, I can reflect on it, I can dig into it, I can experience it with much more awareness.
In other words, you increase the range of your emotional perception. He's going to give this a quite interesting name, which is not a name he gives; there is actually such a thing in neuroscience, there is this in linguistics itself, which is granularity. He's going to say that when there are words that denote aspects of love that have not been offered by our culture, who have been neglected by our culture, it gets complicated to experience all these multiple aspects.
When we know how to recognize all the many facets of love, the many facets of this complex feeling, it becomes easier to experience it in depth. Here's the thing about granularity: It is said that the more the human being is able to name their feelings and emotions, more deeply he lives them. This has to do with emotional intelligence.
So I perceive, and I label, and I'm attentive to every emotional movement within me. He even works within positive psychology in order to develop more perception to our positive emotions, to what brings us a state of serenity, happiness. It's quite an interesting vision what this new line of psychology offers.
It's no longer about running after recognizing and naming pathological phenomena. But name the healthy phenomena. In other words, states of happiness, of balance, of harmony, so that man can understand them and seek them out more easily.
And what does granularity mean, from a linguistic point of view? A language sometimes has a lot of resources so that you can express many nuances of feelings, many nuances of thought. There are languages that are extremely rich.
And that helps, from the point of view of expressing feelings, to have an adequate vocabulary. It's interesting because today, when we look thinkers like Shakespeare, who expressed love in an impeccable way and so many others who have used the English language to do so, gives the impression that English is the language of love, but Dr Tim Lomas himself speaks it very well: English is one of the least granular languages there is. In other words, it doesn't have much nuance.
An extremely simplified language. So if you want to talk about many nuances of love, you'll have to create a prayer with a lot of descriptions and it's still not clear. In other words, it's a language that, as the philosopher Helena Blavatski said: It's difficult to bring things in, for example, from Sanskrit, India, or any other ancient language highly complex and granularized, and translate that into English.
English simplifies everything into one concept that doesn't cover all the facets that are there. So he's going to use Greek. He says: There every feeling has its own name.
Greek is very granular. I mean, it's too broad to express all the shades of human emotion. Just imagine, it seems that the previous languages were even broader in this respect.
That always catches my eye, because we've advanced, from a technological point of view, from the time of classical Greece to now in an unthinkable way. But our languages have regressed. For me, that's a good description of the cycle we're living through.
Where we want to take care of things. That the technical language for dealing with things is very diverse. But the language for dealing with human feelings has become extremely reductive, poor.
And it wants to cover many realities with a single name. Now, you'll see that this idea of naming things being one of the most important elements was present in India, it was present in Egypt. One of the elements of Egypt's negative confession is this.
I know the Name, I know your Name. I know the name of the God. To know the name of a God in India, in Egypt, meant you knew a little bit about the attributes of this Divine being.
To be close to him. To be able, in some way, to get close. All these ancient traditions coincided in saying that knowing the name of something gives you power over it, brings you closer to that.
If we go back to the tradition of the Egyptian Caibalion, you remember that at the principle of the vibration it is said that each name has its own vibration. And those names that come closest to a higher, nobler degree of consciousness, more human, are names that have a more subtle vibration and that just knowing them and pronouncing them man already tends to bring his conscience closer to the degree of vibration they offer. I always explain to you about music, for example, how it is a call to consonance.
She vibrates in a certain dimension and she calls you to be in harmony with her. So this question of vibration, this question of the power of the name of things was always very important in ancient times. And here, this current Dr Lomas is defending, which is not limited to him, begins again believing in the need to name things as descriptively as possible.
So the word is vibration and it helps us raise our vibration. And the idea of positive psychology on developing a rich vocabulary for that which stabilizes man, for what ennobles him is quite interesting. Instead of just dissecting the negative, dissect the positive.
Instead of just dissecting and calling all the details of the pathological, dissecting and denominating all greatness of what is normal, of what is balanced, of what leads us to to identify with that state of normality, of balance, stability and even happiness. One of Dr Tim Lomas' works even deals with the word happiness. And it's very interesting.
Well, realize that this is all a new study, but at the same time old. Because we see that. Plato already talks about similar things.
It's like a resumption of a knowledge that the past has already experienced very deeply. But then Dr Lomas. .
. he takes 14 words in Greek. I'll follow the meaning he gave them.
Although some of them I knew different meanings, but I'll go with what he said and lay it out for you, and at the end I'll add a few more old meanings, such as the degrees of love for Plato, as, for example, Plotinus' The Two Venuses. So let's go! The 14 words he separates You see, he says, these are flavors.
14 flavors of love. If you want to make well-seasoned food, you want to make a well-seasoned life, you would have to understand that you have all and that they are sometimes present in relation to the same thing. Different angles, different moments.
How exquisite the feeling of love is. How rich he is! Human love has many angles.
It's like a big prism and it's important to understand them all and use them all consciously. He divides them into three categories: The love for places, objects and activities; the second category: love between people and for oneself; and the third category romantic love. Let's see how we do a well-seasoned emotional life?
With all the flavors? The first flavor he proposes is Eros. The Eros we so often know as romantic love, or sexual, erotic love.
He's going to define Eros in another way. He's going to say that Eros is the love we can feel for objects or concepts that cause admiration or desire. For example, a work of art, a beautiful piece of literature or a beautiful painting.
And it's interesting because there's a certain moment in the Banquet that Plato says something very similar, exactly about Eros. He's going to say the following: Eros promotes knowledge and remembrance of the beauty of the Soul. He says: When you look at a beautiful object, for example, a work of art, the correct thing would be that it doesn't provoke desire, but nostalgia.
It's as if this object reminds you of a world which is also all Beautiful and to which you once belonged. So, a beauty spot is a passport for you to remember the beauty of the soul. To remind you of the world of ideas to which you once belonged and to which you intend to return.
Then the beauty that human beings are capable of creating, when it is legitimate, when it carries this power within itself of raising consciousness, it is a passport for man to see himself through her. Then he'll define Eros that way. Not erotic love, or sexual love, but love as admiration for beautiful things.
For works of art, for beautiful buildings, for a work of nature. In other words, love and admiration for objects or concepts too, beautiful ideas. A beautiful idea, a beautiful literary work could also provoke Eros.
I mean, think about that beautiful book, that beautiful song that when you want to raise your consciousness you go there to listen, to read some more? That feeling you have for these things which for you are a passport to raising your consciousness that's Eros, according to Dr Lomas. An aspect, one of the flavors of love.
Shall we go for another? Then he'll talk about Meraki, which has to do with taste. Translated from Greek into English meraki is precisely flavor.
He'll say it's a love for actions, experiences and living. In other words, experiences that somehow, don't necessarily elevate you but that relax you, break your stress, That give you a state of serenity. So, if you take care of the garden, gardening, if you love it, that's a form of meraki.
Not love for flowers or plants, which is something else, but love for the act itself. Who likes to travel is a form of meraki. Actions like cooking, for example, who likes to cook is a form of meraki.
Wow, that tastes so good to me! I like to make crafts sometimes, messing around with little things, crafts and DIY projects. That's great for my conscience, it's all there.
It's a great way to combat circular mental forms. That's a kind of love, meraki. Love for simple but giving activities a very good state of well-being for you.
In other words, one more taste, one more thing reconciled within the richness that is the feeling of love. And that we have to take possession of all its aspects. The other form of love we're going to talk about is Chorus.
What is Chorus? Chórus comes from space, circle. Chórus is love for a place.
For, example patriotism. Love for your land. And also a deep-rooted feeling which is the love of home.
The feeling of home. It's that psychological comfort that that small space that we recognize as ours, gives us. The idea of home is a very powerful idea.
You may have seen that sometimes people come from wonderful trips abroad, but often when the plane lands back home, in their country, they applaud. And the personality really feels relieved. It's as if she's found a cradle, a place where she can relax and be at peace.
And exactly at that moment the personality is at peace, is a moment when the soul can be freed the most. And to digest everything that has been seen, to dedicate oneself to reflection. It has a lot to do with Plato's divine leisure.
I mean, divine leisure, in a way, were related to Chórus love. Create a space where you make the personality be at peace, don't make noise. And where you can dedicate yourself to freeing the soul and letting it travel.
Let it process everything you've lived through. I mean, another interesting element that adds to all this. Feeling of home, feeling of being in the place where you are at peace.
It's another kind of love. Further on, another of the flavors in our recipe. Let's have a delicious dish with that, shall we?
The other flavor is Storge. Storge is above all affection for family. It was considered one of the purest feelings.
Plato said that the feeling between parents and children, for example, is very pure, because it doesn't demand anything in return, it doesn't expect anything in return. A father who loves his son expects nothing else but not for him to grow up healthy and happy. If he expects anything in return, it's already contaminated and mischaracterizes this storge love.
He says that this is one of the most beautiful traits that all love should have: To expect nothing but good from the loved one. In other words, it often relates to people in the family, and even Dr Lomas will say that sometimes storge is mixed with philia which is the love of friendship, because sometimes we have friends who become family. They make such a deep bond that we know we can always count on that person.
So sometimes philia comes to storge. Storge then is above all the feeling of family love, filial, paternal, in other words, the feeling of relationships we know that they're not going to dissolve. Or normally they shouldn't dissolve.
That's another very interesting aspect. Imagine if we could combine all this into one feeling. Because we're seeing angles of this great prism.
But it is one. A feeling that has all this richness, that is capable of creating bonds with everything it touches. An activity, a place, a family, a friend.
He's able to give everything a different color. That's the greatness of love. He goes on.
After storge he's going to talk exactly about Philia, which is friendship. Linked to love, to companionship, to friendship. It has no link with Eros.
I mean, no kind of carnal, intimate connection. It is intimate in the sense that the two share their hearts. One pulls the other up.
But a love devoid of carnal aspects. That's philia. For one person, but also many times in history, for a concept, an idea, a discipline.
So Pythagoras will use philia love exactly to say that he loved wisdom. As if this wisdom was the greatest of all his friends. Philosophy is exactly love of wisdom, philia plus sophos, or sophia.
It's interesting that aspect that the great philosophers have always had. The greatest of your friends is wisdom. Gandhi himself, I recently gave a lecture on him, he said that the greatest of his friends was the truth.
A similar conception. That is, taking concepts, taking attributes, taking values in such a concrete way that you consider: there's your best friend and advisor. This is how philosophy was born.
Philosophy is philia + sophos or sofia, wisdom. One more angle, right? Let's go!
Then he talks about Philautia. Philautia means, at first, in Greek, friends, is actually friendship for its own sake. He defines Philautia as self-love and caring for oneself.
That strange thing that can't or shouldn't happen of being able to do so much for others and nothing for ourselves. This feeling of respect for this vehicle that nature has given us. Of wanting to look after it, preserve it, because we know how valuable it is.
How much it allows us to act in the world. It's like a person who owns a car that serves him for work, serves him to take care of his family. And take care of that vehicle.
No matter how simple it is, it's a vehicle that allows you to carry out your duties in the world. This here is a vehicle that allows us to carry out our duties in the world. We should treat it with care, it's not ours.
It's a loan from nature, one day it will have to be repaid. And that self-respect, that care, this affection for this vehicle that humbly serves us so well, that would be another form of love. Recognizing the respect we owe ourselves.
Dignity. This was called Philautia. Another important flavor.
Notice how love is multifaceted and covers every angle of life. Moving on, let's go! Epithymia.
That does sound like what we understand of Eros. Epithymia is sexual love, romantic love, sexual attraction. That if no storge or philia develops behind it, often epithymia is diluted, goes away and nothing remains.
Epithymia is closely linked to passion. It has a cycle. It necessarily runs out.
It's nice, passion is like chocolate. But it ends. And if there's no food behind it to keep eating for the rest of your life, you won't be able to survive.
So epithymia is like a pleasant taste, but fleeting, which has a cycle. So it's linked to passionate love, sexual love, romantic love. I mean, it would be more that than the Eros one.
Epithymia would be this sexual love. What else? Do you realize that you're not excluded?
Passion is gone and behind it you may have built a love, you may have built a philia, you may have built a storge, may have built something else. And it must. So that passion doesn't leave you empty-handed.
Because it goes as fast as it comes. It follows a cycle, like the cycles of nature. Paixnidi is an interesting kind of love that we know we have.
Sometimes you see that cute little puppy at your friend's house, you want to hug it, you want to squeeze it. Paixnidi is tenderness, that thing. .
. Wow, how tender that is, how it makes you want to cuddle, to give affection. It's another aspect of love.
He'll say that it makes things. . .
receive affection, receive tenderness, it cozies up beings. It's a concrete aspect of love that makes people exchange affection. And not just people.
As I told you, there's nothing to be more Paixnidi about than a beautiful pet. Cuddly, puppy, that willingness to cuddle. That would be a form of love.
It even gives you agony, wouldn't it? Our hearts ache a little. That's a demonstration, it's one of the facets of love.
Paixnidi. Very common, for example, in tender beings. In little puppies, in that feeling of being unprotected that they pass on to us.
And the willingness to cuddle and protect. It's another aspect of love. It is also equally valid and necessary.
Nature has not created any aspect of love in vain. They are all necessary. Pragma.
Pragma, which from the point of view of the word means, in Greek, thing, pragma is linked to that which is practical. As the name implies, right? In other words, it speaks of a love that lasts, that is sustained by an act of will.
A relationship that lasts a lifetime. There can be fluctuations in passions there. There could be a lot of things going on there.
But behind it, in the background, there's a love based on mutual respect, on the commitment to walk together, to be an added factor in each other's lives. That solid love, that circumstances cannot shake. Then he'll say that the willingness to build a life together, for example, is totally based on pragmatic love.
A love that doesn't go through phases. Relationships, living together, go through phases. But pragma is sustained by mutual commitment, mutual respect, and the will to honor this love they have assumed to cross their entire lives together.
Of always being accessible to each other. So the basis of many relationships is pragma. It's based on commitment, on will, and in that deep respect that you acquire as you walk alongside someone.
A very interesting aspect. A love, as Kant would say, built and sustained by an act of will. That he says only this has moral value.
The others are more the merit of nature than of man himself. Understand that. Think about it.
Ours is an age that fears commitment. So everything that comes from it is rejected. One's own coming out of ignorance and into wisdom, can only be achieved through commitment.
Commitment to our own self-improvement. The most worthwhile things in life are built on serious commitment. Commitment to self-improvement, commitment to our self-transformation.
And through us transforming the world for the better. One more flavor: Anakê. Anankê is known as love at first sight.
Its meaning is necessity. That love you bat your eye at and feel that that person and you have something in common. You have a need for mutual experience that if they were together one could help the other.
It is often associated with unfortunate love. It's Romeo and Juliet. That love that you feel at first.
This person has something important for me. But life circumstances sometimes don't allow that to happen. It's a love that's almost based on intuition.
I have something to learn from this being. This provokes attraction. The mutual need for experience.
But that doesn't always come true. Unlucky loves are all Anankê. This aspect of love is also quite interesting.
Agape is one of the most beautiful forms of love. Agape is related to charity, compassion, desire to do good. Agape love is closely linked to the idea of devotion.
Devotio, tending towards something divine. Wanting to be a factor in the world. Wanting to add value to the lives of others.
In other words, a tremendously altruistic love. It's the love of generosity. The love of wanting to give and also knowing how to receive.
Establishing a flow of energy and life with the people around us. I mean, Agape is merciful love. Compassionate love, the love that seeks the realization of the good.
In other words, a very important aspect of love. Koinonia. It's interesting and very valid too, which is love for the collective, for society, for a group.
You belong to a group of friends who get together every year. Let's see, the group of people who graduated from college with you. There comes a time when that group is so consolidated by Phillia, which is the love of friendship, but it also creates love for the group, which often even generates the possibility of personal sacrifice.
In the name of a group. In the name of a religious community. On behalf of a sports community.
I mean, any group that unites around a collective idea. We're from such and such a city, we're from such and such a, I don't know, trend, preference. .
. and this group unity generates in each of its members an ability to sacrifice the personal for the benefit of the whole. So you'll see that this often leads to societies, groups throughout history having done great things.
People are capable of sacrificing themselves for this idea because they feel that idea is valid. Almost as if it were a collective personality. Love for the collective, love for the group.
That's another form of love then, it's called Koinonia. And we live it too. One of the most beautiful.
which is Sevomai. Sevomai is the love of God. It means "I respect".
Not only God, but what you believe in metaphysically. Love of mystery. This prostrating yourself before the Mystery, that we know today is physical anthropology has found this even in hominids.
Some were able to put one stone on top of another and through that symbol revere something they didn't understand, but that they felt existed. The mystery of the universe. Recognizing that this has a logic, it's not chaos, it's Cosmos.
There is meaning in all this. Life has meaning. And revere that Great meaning that I don't understand intellectually but that from my heart I feel the need to serve him.
To add value, to add to this sense, which is the only valid meaning for life. I mean, Sevomai love is reverential. It's another aspect that characterizes well the division of human love from any other kind of love.
Recognition of the mystery and the ability to serve it, to place oneself at its service. Understanding that life has laws. It has an order that is far beyond what our senses are capable of grasping.
Which is a very big difference between any animal group and a human community, however primitive. That's why he has to say that man is not homo sapiens, but homo religiosus. It is precisely this love that characterizes homo religiosus - Sévomai.
What else do we have here? Then, finally, he adds two addenda, which is Mania. .
. Mania, which is nothing more than mania, it's that obsessive love that can stampede, and usually does, to the pathological. Dependence, possession, anxiety, manipulation of the other.
Wanting to have the other. This is a degradation of love. That can generate mania, as we say, the maniac.
That situation which veers towards the pathological. Sometimes even tragic. It's the lack of maturity to have a healthy love.
These are called two immature loves. So much mania, it's already a love that borders on imbalance, and Ludus, which is already a Latin word, not a Greek one. Ludus is flirtation.
This playing at love simply to feel loved, to feel cherished, to feel attractive. That thing that's a bit immature, but that we sometimes drag around all our lives. We, in general, lack a great deal of emotional maturity.
We live in a world where reason advances and emotions stay behind. So we're still flirting with things, without commitment. Simply to feel alive, to give our lives a little extra flavor.
I mean, it's an immature treatment of love. It's flirting. So those are the aspects that Dr Tim Lomas is going to address.
Notice the possibility of putting all this together and understand this power that exists within you. That creates links with the world. Which, as the great philosopher Sri Ram said, recovers unity in multiplicity.
That love is nothing more than that. It creates bonds so that what is divided becomes One again. Because according to all the traditions of humanity the reality of the universe is the One.
The truth of the universe is the One. And love recovers this truth in the midst of illusions. It unites what was apparently separate.
It removes the illusory border. It makes what seemed many become one. That's his job.
Hesiod says, when he speaks in his Theogony, he already speaks that when the universe divides, Eros the Ancient is born. The oldest of loves. Precisely to make that which has been divided come together again at some point.
Love is nothing more than the search for lost unity. And for that he creates ties. In every way, in every direction.
And save the so-called immature loves, all other loves are precious possibilities of the human being. That we should understand and practice. Continuing, I brought you something that I find quite interesting.
Plato's banquet, which even Dr Tim Lomas quotes from time to time it has something quite interesting, which is called Scala Amoris. The scale or ladder of love, where Plato shows how love running after beauty, that love has a great affinity for beauty. No wonder Aphrodite had Eros by her side, or Venus with Cupid.
Love and beauty go together. Somehow beauty is able to awaken and encourage and motivate love. So he says that a first step of the human being is to seek a beautiful body.
Which is in no way linked only to instincts. You realize an animal isn't looking a female to breed only if she's beautiful, it doesn't even realize that. It's much more than procreation.
It's ultimately a search for something deeper, for harmony that man wants to achieve and that beauty offers. Only it doesn't offer it simply by joining physically to a body. That's always a bit frustrating.
As it says in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. You knock against the bars of another's body and penetrate no deeper. Physical love alone doesn't make you possess beauty.
But it's man's first impulse. To run after a beautiful body. At a certain point he begins to realize that the beauty of the forms does not belong to that single body.
He begins to notice beauty in all the bodies that exist on Earth. And appreciate and feed on that beauty. One more step, he will realize that none of these bodies retain beauty.
The beautiful and splendid rose dies tomorrow. In other words, bodies are not capable of retaining beauty. But if a person, for example, is fair, they are upright, is honorable, he retains that beauty in his soul for a lifetime.
And then he goes from the bodies to the souls. Which are much more capable of keeping beauty with them. So this same man who was running after a body, then runs after all the bodies.
Then he starts running after the Souls. And then he picks up the works straight away that these beautiful souls generate in the world. So beautiful laws, beautiful institutions, beautiful actions.
Beautifully organized states. Beautifully made works of art. He begins to run after the footprints of these souls in the world.
And he falls in love with them too. And he thinks it's wonderful the footprints that a beautiful soul can leave behind because it marks, divides history. It creates a new chapter in human history.
And from there, he starts chasing after Beauty in the ideas that generated these works. That these ideas are timeless and can generate many other works. Throughout history, in other men.
So running after Beauty, he starts running after the sciences and knowledge. He realizes that on the plane of ideas, Beauty lasts much longer. All beautiful things in the world are tied to an idea which is still fertile, can still generate much more in history.
Then he runs after science and knowledge. And eventually he'll get to Beauty itself. That inspires, that creates, that germinates this plane of ideas.
This beauty itself would be the idea of God. The Absolute. Of that permanent, perennial beauty that fecundates the world of ideas.
I mean, running after Beauty, the love of beauty leads man from a beautiful body to God. And this ladder of Eros that is passed in the Banquet is, in a very pedagogical way, a ladder of maturity of man's capacity to love. Realize that as he evolves, it includes those 14 categories of Dr Lomas.
A person who loves laws, loves institutions, loves things, loves places, loves objects, loves friends, love family members, love groups, the institutions that are created. In other words, every time you go up a step, this love will become rich. Richer, pardon me.
And will encompass those 14 categories in such a way that when the man gets up there, that he arrives at the love of God, at Beauty itself, whatever you prefer to call it, all the categories of love are there. They've all been applied there. It is the fullness of man's capacity to love.
It's another very interesting qualification. Understand, people. All this exists within us as a power.
Instead of doubting love, why not mature it? Why not get to know it in greater depth? Why not bring out his latent powers?
Love has many possibilities. We probably use very few. Because our languages lack granularity.
Our emotions also lack granularity. And even in our thinking. We've reduced everything and everything is too square.
We needed to delve deeper into the art of being human. In the art of living as human beings, in the art of feeling as human beings. Moving on, I also bring you another very interesting concept, originating first from the Stoics, after Nietzsche, which is the concept of Fati love.
Nietzsche considered this the noblest of loves, and he's right. It's a love that really qualifies. What is Amor Fati?
Amor fatum. Love of fate, love of destiny. Imagine you look at your life, look at your past and understand, at a certain moment, that everything you've lived through has been necessary to bring you to where you are.
For everything you've lived through, there's no better way than this for you to be what you are. And you learn to accept, to integrate all your past. That's one thing.
Amor Fati is more than that. That you learn to love everything that has happened to you. And understand that all of this is a mercy of the Order of the universe.
All of this is meant for you out of a need for experience. Attracted by your need to grow. All these things are the right medicine.
Prescribed to the millimeter, exactly for you. "Nothing happens to man that is not man's own. " Understanding life as a cosmos.
Not just accepting what happens to us. But to love what happens to us. And not wanting things to be any other way.
Not just in the past. But in the present and in the future. The Stoics spoke, and Nietzsche spoke.
That's nobility. That's faith in life. That's confidence that come what may will be for my betterment.
Because all of nature works to perfect beings. It's what Jung called synchronicity. Because of the need to be ever more human, which is what nature expects of us, we attract the elements that are exactly what we need for that.
Which are confirming our path, which are signaling our way. Amor Fati is love for life. Love for what we call destiny.
Love for the facts as they are. And not how, at some point, we wanted them to be. I come back to you with that Indian prayer I always quote which says that we should be careful what we ask for because we run a great risk, if we ask with great faith.
We run the risk of being answered. That in general what we want is the worst thing that can happen to us. It's better to trust what nature brings.
She knows us more deeply than we know ourselves. She knows our great potential to become full human beings. And she needs us to be that.
And she brings all the ingredients to make a trail of least resistance up to that point. Nature is economic. If you drop an object here, that object has a certain weight, there's no wind, it falls in a straight line, it doesn't curve.
Nature doesn't waste energy. And it's probably taking the path of least resistance for you to become what you were born to be. A full human being.
That's Amor Fati. Which implies a lot of nobility and a lot of trust in life. And finally I bring you the concept of love according to Plotinus.
Plotinus speaks of the Soul's operations as if it were a sculptor who is carving a stone and looking at the model. You look at the plane of ideas and see your model and sculpt the matter so that it looks like that. Then he says that the two operations of the soul are contemplation and organization.
Contemplation of the plane of ideas and organization of the material world. So that it is a symbol. So that it's an image and likeness of what things were born to be.
Including the human being itself. And these two operations, according to him, will generate two types of love. The two Venuses.
The Uranian Venus, which is the one that makes you look up, to Uranus, to that world of possibilities. To that plane of perfect ideas. And Venus Pandemus, who looks at all things in the concrete world.
The two together perform exactly the two operations of the Soul which is contemplation and organization. When they separate, or you'll have a man totally attached to the things of heaven, but without any concrete fulfillment, or a man attached to the things of earth, but with no value to bring to the world. Without any valuable addition.
No possibility of adding anything to improve it. It moves things along, but deep down it doesn't add any value. So these two Venuses that look up, look down.
One is not superior to the other when they work together. Contemplation and organization. If I only have organization, what do I organize based on?
On what gives me the most profit? What is profit? What is real gain in the life of a human being?
If I have nothing to organize, why do I contemplate? It's still a kind of selfishness. Of wanting to witness what is, but not telling anyone and not adding value to the world.
So Venus Uranus and Venus Pandemus, for Plotinus, encompass all types of human love. They all act by looking upwards and shaping things in the world. It's also a precious concept.
Where is our Venus looking? Is it only looking in one direction? And finally, I'd like to close with this idea that the full man develops all his possibilities.
Brings out all his latent powers. And fully develop a feeling it's like you become all sensitive. In all things you remove a bond, a tie, an essence.
So it has a lot to do with what was classically called to see God in all things. It's not just seeing, because that's what the mind, or intuition, does. It's feeling God in all things.
Because my love has a thousand arms, a thousand eyes, like the ancient Hindu gods. And touch all things, experience all things. Through its various possibilities of love.
Touch and don't exploit. It benefits. It touches and adds value, it doesn't take away.
In other words, it's a fundamental love for enriching the world. And to perceive in all things in the world their essence. Even our own essence.
And that would be this great God, Hesiod said. Eros the Ancient. With many, many possibilities.
And none of them dispensable for us. Think about that for a moment. Love is a feeling that we have a lot to develop, a lot to mature and a lot to practice.
That's all for today. Thank you very much for coming and see you!
