Enjoy, Comprehend, Love. Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love. Yury Tomin

      ISBN 978-5-0053-4585-1

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      About the Book

      We often think about love but very rarely dare to talk about it. We dream to meet love but we almost never consciously go for it. We try to understand love, but we understand only the futility of our efforts and that “this great secret is.” The book Enjoy, Comprehend, Love is written for those who would like to talk about romantic love with famous thinkers and poets, open your mind to the perception of the fullness of love, comprehend its versatility, and if you decide, then choose out loud your own conscious love.

      In the book, while contemplating on love one can find excerpts from famous literary works and illustrated schemes of certain psychological laws of love relationships. Thus, the author invites the reader to his own thoughts about love, armed with graceful metaphors and initial logical links.

      The image of travel through the spaces of love was chosen as a canvas connecting the book, and spatial metaphors were used to describe the complex, paradoxical manifestations of love relationships. You can start your journey with any chapter in the nine sections of this small but intense book depending on what interests you the most at the moment. For example, you can start with Courtly Love, interested in the mentioning of Plato, move on to Platonic Love, then, clarifying its delicate moments in the chapter Love that Conceals its Name, proceed to Building a Love Boat.

      The reader is also given the opportunity to independently conduct simple tests and experiments of their own undergoing love, allowing the curious one to feel its new bright facets, and for those interested in the secrets of famous love stories the book offers an analysis of the pure love relationships in the Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot and the metamorphosis of enchanted love in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

      The Spaces of Conscious Love

      Dedicated to my lovely children Egor, Darya, Ilya, and Anna.

      The immense spaces of love are gradually covered somewhere with already well-trodden paths, and in some places with only barely noticeable lost paths. There is no and, perhaps, there will never be highways. You can learn how to navigate here by studying ancient myths and legends, getting acquainted with fascinating stories about journeys to the love land of experienced writers, or referring to modern popular guidebooks that guarantee an easy fun ride on the boats of love along the turbulent currents with steep rapids and sharp turns.

      Lost in the spaces of love, sometimes they resort to the help of a stalker, in the role of which acts as a psychotherapist. Well, one intuition is good, but two, of which the second with a scientific background, is better. And yet all this way or more each part goes alone, learning from their own mistakes, finding a way out of a deadlocked relationship, making their own fundamental discoveries, or accumulating solid baggage of small but hard-won life lessons to that time when the path has already led to a quiet and cozy harbor. Since ancient times, travelers to uncharted lands left behind maps, so that those following them could see the whole picture of the path, calculate their strength, learn about the dangers that lie in wait, and not go astray at the forks.

      The book Enjoy, Comprehend, Love presents carefully selected landmarks in the field of love relationships tested by centuries traditions or based on philosophical views or supported by the achievements of modern sciences. Here you will find everyday rules passed from generation to generation and guesses of famous thinkers illuminating the depths of their hearts, you will also find scientific calculations and strategic maps of love, as well as outline sketches of desperate prospectors of yet unexplored paths in the endless spaces of love.

      The author is convinced that love can be made friends with the mind, filled with consciousness, while not losing emotional saturation and vivid impressions of love. Enjoy, Comprehend, Love sequentially examines the stages and various facets of love, as well as those paradoxes, riddles, and traps of love that often lead love to a dead end and create irresistible barriers to the conscious experience of this feeling. Probably, it will be difficult to learn from the book lessons of love for all occasions, but everyone will be able to adopt two or three priceless considerations on how to get out of difficult situations in a relationship with a loved one. Lovers are invited to take a fresh look at crises of love and learn to understand them before they have to face disappointments and the fading of love.

      I hope this book will be your kind companion. But you, dear reader, we must not forget that you go your own road (or off-road) because only you know that beckons you and waits there, far ahead. The book contains quotes and excerpts from classic literary works that, upon thoughtful reading, give rise to reflect on your own path of love. And if the reader decides to turn to the full texts of the cited works, then he can again plunge into the multifaceted world of gracious love.

      FOREWORD

      Yea, if she knows not love, soon shall she feel it

      The immense spaces of love are gradually covered somewhere with already well-trodden paths, and in some places with only barely noticeable lost paths. There is no and, perhaps, there will never be highways. You can learn how to navigate here by studying ancient myths and legends, getting acquainted with fascinating stories about journeys to the love land of experienced writers, or referring to modern popular guidebooks that guarantee an easy fun ride on the boats of love along the turbulent currents with steep rapids and sharp turns.

      Lost in the spaces of love, sometimes they resort to the help of a stalker, in the role of which acts as a psychotherapist. Well, one intuition is good, but two, of which the second with a scientific background, is better. And yet all this way or more each part goes alone, learning from their own mistakes, finding a way out of a deadlocked relationship, making their own fundamental discoveries, or accumulating solid baggage of small but hard-won life lessons to that time when the path has already led to a quiet and cozy harbor. Since ancient times, travelers to uncharted lands left behind maps, so that those following them could see the whole picture of the path, calculate their strength, learn about the dangers that lie in wait, and not go astray at the forks.

      In thinking about love, there are two main directions. The well-known of them incorporates a huge variety of works of fiction and popular-science literature, united by the theme of love stories. A striking representative of modern adherents of this path the Russian writer Mikhail Weller speaks with his personal book About Love and the historical one Love and Passion. Love stories are a fascinating genre. In our youth, we delightfully plunge into the dramatic fate of the heroes; we empathize with their quivering feelings and put off in our minds images that excited us. In adulthood, we can already understandingly sympathize, but with constant enthusiasm follow the vicissitudes of love destinies.

      The desire to find some patterns in the variety of love stories gives us a more modest set of works representing one or another classification of love relationships like descriptions of causality and dynamics of feelings experienced by lovers, typification or logical schematization of love. The invasion of reason into the realm of love was not easy. And in our time, there is a myth that the analysis is killing