One soul, two bodies.

Recently I read something profound and I decided to share it with all of you. It deals with the origins of love in Greek mythology.

The first human beings were androgynous with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. They aspired to climb into the heavens and usurp the gods, so Zeus split them all into two individuals: male and female. He then scattered them throughout the earth, condemning them to spending their lives searching for their lost other halves. Though they were given male and female properties, sexual intercourse was given to humanity to fulfill the need in body to become one with their opposites, though it would not suffice because their fulfillment could only be complete by the unification of their souls, not just their bodies.

Plato wrote about this in his Symposium.

I have to admit that I'm a lot like a lot of other people who read this; I'm not well versed in the ideals of Greek mythology despite the fact that I lived in Greece on the island of Crete for close to three years. So before I read this, I had no idea that such a concept even existed.

I find it profound because even though it is a relic of a world religion that has since been rendered obsolete, it is very accurate even by the standards of today in expressing the human desire for compassion. For love. I find it profound because there are so many cliches pertaining to "oneness" with a separate individual but none of them explain why. None of them have even the slightest expression as to why we all as human being hunger for love from someone else. But this does. And when I read it, this selection from Plato's Symposium, I couldn't believe how poetic and abstract this idea was. I couldn't believe that even back then people actually had this sort of idea about love being in a sense "completion."

I have my own ideas about love. I think that love is the most important emotion that a human being can feel in his or her lifetime as long as it's true. I think that if a person has experienced true love and it has failed them, it wasn't true love to begin with because true love never fails. There's a difference between loving someone and being in love with them. There's a difference between just love and true love and love and passion. I've written a lot of things stating the differences between all of these, especially love and passion. But I haven't written anything on here about it so I'm going to explain this (one time and one time only).

You can love anyone. It takes time to be in love with someone. There is such a thing as love at first sight, but you are not IN love with them. Thinking that you are in love with someone at first sight is an indicator of lust.

Lust is a disease.

Love is any deep admiration for someone but it has a limit. True love is endless. It overcomes anything and everything and cannot be broken. Love is associated with heartache. True love is associated with passion.

Love is being there for someone when they've drank too much and they're puking their guts up and telling them it's going to be alright. Passion is doing the same thing but holding their hair back and kissing them even though it's most likely to be disgusting as well. Passion is putting something in the forefront of your life and living every single day by it. For instance, my friend Nathan Farmer once told me this:

"I love to play piano. It's my passion and I've been doing it all my life. When my true love comes along they can break all of my fingers, making it impossible for me to play piano anymore. Because they become my passion."

He told me this years ago and I still remember it word for word because it made me think really hard about my idea of love (at the time) versus passion. In black and white, passion and lust look virtually the same without someone to interpret them. It's such a terrible thing when two completely different things get lost in translation.

I have to make a note that right now I'm talking about romantic love. Not love when it comes to lifestyles, friendships or families.

But yeah, that's just a few things I wanted to share with you. Comment this blog and give me your own ideas and interpretations. That's why I have a blog: to share and exchange ideas. Yet everyone refuses to play that game.