The prison of Venus: Lucifer chained by Hesperon.
"Love follows humaneness" - Confucius
"Humaneness is difficult to define" - Confucius, again
Having written a chapter on diotimic love in Occultosophia, I would like to return to certain insights. Since I have experienced both passionate, unconditional and great love and tamed, mature and understanding love, I speak from the position of a knower, experiencer and promoter. In the first case, the ugly damsel invidia forced us to dance the 'devil's tango' and tore our minds and hearts apart; in the second case, the practicalities of life and turbulent conditions separated us.
I remember listing twenty-four forces in the universe by anthropocentric standards, only one of which was fusion or love. Now I would like to observe how enthroning just one value on the pedestal, just one force, upsets the rest and causes more devastation, suffering, war and killing than necessary. It is often said that "love is not understood," but we are human and can interpret whatever we want into this value. We can understand it as carnal, bestial sex, erotic leaning of bodies, hearts, minds and souls to a high sense of bonding of souls on a deeply spiritual level.
Love can blind us, it can uplift us. But the psychology of love is such that in the extreme carnal realm it is cannibalism, while in the extreme spiritual realm it is self-enclosure, like the couple in the "Garden of Earthly Delights" sitting in a bubble.
Gnosticism and Christianity ("a lovesick, hopeless case") excluded the totality of the power complexes of different ideas and decided to single out this one value as the highest. What followed is a dysfunctional distortion of the "harmonious man, harmonious woman" at the expense of countless other strains of virtues, muses that inspired us both bestial, temperate and idyllic.
There is only one point of "true love" if Agape, that pattern of universal forces, is interwoven with Philia (mature friendship) and Eros (erotic stuff), but it is not enough as a value to describe all the other forces in all their aspects to serve the goal of cognitive liberati. Most people do not understand this because they have been conditioned in the Judeo-Christian paradigm, which is secular but in which "love" still obeys civilizational constructs.
These people cannot imagine a world in which the towers of Aphrodite are not the only ones. Hence their suffering, hence their search, hence their desire and unfulfillment. When they find true love, they pass through impermanence and are soon crushed by the joys and sorrows of losing the pearl.
If you aspire to mastery, go through love, love to the utmost, experience it, but never be misled into thinking that the "love of God" or the "love of your partner," no matter how cosmic, is the gateway to liberation.