Preface
Like everyone else, I know that love has occupied a big place in my life. Like everyone else I have had plenty of opportunities to consider it: in my flesh, in my mind, in discussions with living people and with writers of all ages, times and places. But since one life is too short to know in a comprehensive manner that which needs to be lived by mankind as a whole so as to be known, I was prepared to sail through this life and know of love only that limited area which my actual life would bring to me. Yet, in the way encounters open up one's heart to a new life, a neutral question came to me recently and invited me to revise all I thought I knew of love. The question I faced was: what could I learn about love if I considered it as an attribute of the self and looked at it in terms of energy? With this question I start the body of this writing. An essay like this one (which I could have entitled: “Phenomenology of Love�) is, at every moment, a personal 1