At every major turning point we experience changes in value, moral changes that issue out in new ways of behaving with the other or others based on a better integrated "knowing" of their needs and natures. But these changes don't always happen on the same plane of intimacy, with the same kind of love. Love can jump from sex to Eros when you actually "fall in love with each other", or to philia when intimate companionship emerges. And it can transform from philia to agape. Love can even move to different persons in different stages of life, between man and woman, between friends, from parent to child, to nature, to God.
Love is much more widely distributed then we are accustomed to think. In fact, much of its fullness comes from the transferability of libido among the four kinds of love, and from this comes the interconnectedness of the world. The opportunity to transfer love marks the defining moments in personal and cultural life. And these moments happen only at the turning points. As when Beatrice died and entered the Godhead for Dante. In these defining moments, at certain crucial instants that can be felt and chosen, you can switch planes, change paths, revolutionize your life. From this follows a simple maxim: Wherever the juices are flowing keep them flowing. Begin from where you are, go with what's happening. One of the four kinds of love is drawing you to someone right now, but which? And to whom? And on which leg do you stand, Approach or separation? Which is the easier leg for you, less defended, more open? Which is more blocked and troubled with fantasy and delusion? If you can't get satisfaction in physical love, perhaps the love that is service will open things up for you. Or vice versa. Once the rhythm is back, you can move from one to the other kind of love at the turnings. They are not mutually exclusive but include each other. Anywhere love is flowing let it flow.
This is the full fruit of my understanding of love in life: that love can often be reestablished on a new basis, though we are predisposed by both nature and nurture to specialize in one or the other kind of love, to have intense or mild turning points, to have a weak and a strong leg, to be histrionic or flat, extroverted or introverted. Wherever you are now, that's your starting place, but it's not where you need to finish. The training for growth is to accept reversal, to accede to and even reinforce the rhythms on the long legs by building on your current strengths. Your relative strength in any of the four kinds of love will do fine. Strengthen the rhythm wherever it is happening. That is the first and main prescription in love because sexuality, Eros, philia, and agape have the same source. And the source is in us. And they can cross at their turning points. The second prescription is harder: learn to strengthen the weak leg, to stay on it longer and more realistically so as to enter the turning point on that leg with adequate momentum.
Finally the story ends, and we are lifted out of all of this by death, and in our last moments we must somehow experience the final separation from the experiential realm with special brightness. I hope to be alive to that moment and to leap with alacrity into the final turning, which will for me be my last and greatest adventure.
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