Elias

“You are in a maze of love right now.”

This was what my astrology app told me and, ready to play make-belief, I could already feel how this could be true.

There's this song, Big Love by Fleetwood Mac, that I'm listening to right now.

“Say that you love me
and that you always will”

“I wake up alone with it all
I wake up but only to fall
Looking out for love”

This seemed like the “dangerous” part of the maze, the cliff that just leaves you falling. But so what? I know that I will survive this type of a fall that doesn't involve real gravity.

But what is it that makes this maze actually a maze? What is it that makes it so complex? I would argue that love is a phenomenon much rather than simply an emotional state. It is a phenomenon which happens in all Quadrants – inside myself, outside of myself in my physical body, in individual other people's bodies, in groups of them, and also inside their minds, expressed through culture. A full clockwise round through the quadrants, starting from the upper left I.

Out of Time by Damon Albarn is one example for a collective and individual expression that definitely influenced my thinking about love.
(Just listened to it, maybe that's why)

Time is definitely an important factor, but it seems to be somewhat mutable.
The main solution to the suffering that comes from this, the thought that maybe you have spent the most or even all of your time together with a loved one and it won't repeat, might be to transmute these feelings into more preferable ones. There are many definitions of nostalgia, and not all of them are bad.

More important however are levels on lines of development. These also occur in all quadrants and are not really linear but rather energetic boundaries that our states need to pass. It can easily occur that a certain higher state is reached, but the energy level can't be sustained, so we fall back to the last level. Only through deliberate practice can we learn to spend more time in these states.

So if everything is fluctuating on different levels of integration, and it all happens at the same time, how are you supposed to have a handle on this?

You want to love everyone but your time and energy is limited. You can't relief everyone's suffering. Or can you? What about joy? Do we also increase this?
It takes a tremendous effort to try and (effectively) love every being in existence and in the future.

One human who had apparently perfected this art has been Plotinus:

“Simple in his habits, though without any harsh asceticism, he won all hearts by his gentle and affectionate nature [this apparently is no exaggeration, for during his entire time in Rome, he made no known enemies, an almost impossible feat], and his sympathy with all that is good and beautiful in the world. His countenance, naturally handsome, seemed to radiate light and love when he discoursed with his friends.”

says Porphyry about Plotinus.

Plotinus, by his own account, had numerous profound experiences of the “all-transcending, all-pervading Godhead, and this, of course, was the central pillar of his teaching, along with specific contemplative practices (injunctions) to actualize this realization in one's own case. In addition to recollection or contemplation (going within and beyond), he describes what amounts to a type of karma yoga like that of the Bhagavad Gita: grounded in Unity, do your duty, and do so in a thoroughly “this-worldly” fashion. Karl Jaspers writes that “he was called upon as an arbiter in quarrels, but never had an enemy. Distinguished men and women on the point of death brought him their children to educate and entrusted him with their fortunes to administer. Consequently, his house was full of boys and girls. “A house full of orphaned children? And this is the man about whom Jaspers says, very accurately and with much admiration, “No philosopher has lived more in the One than Plotinus”! Clearly, when Plotinus said that the true One embraces the Many, he meant it.

(Even Bertrand Russell, fairly jaded in all things spiritual, maintained that we could judge a philosopher according to the True, or the Good, or the Beautiful. The True belonged, presumably, to Bertrand; the Good belonged, he said, to Spinoza. But the Beautiful...ah, the
Beautiful, that belonged to Plotinus.)

• Sex, Ecology, Spirituality p. 459