The Paradoxes of Love

This is the most helpful book I've read in the English language about the mysteries of love. Spiritual poetry can awaken your heart and make you feel the bewilderment, pain and madness of longing for God, but The Paradoxes of Love somehow makes sense of it all. This book didn't put me at ease; it didn't give me warm, fuzzy feelings about divine love; but it did help me find deeper meaning in my own experiences of suffering, which have often been accompanied by doubts, fears, and frustration. Vaughan-Lee's writing is so refreshing: clear and simple, and able to hold truths too paradoxical for the mind to grasp, while remaining firmly planted in the real world. Some of the paradoxes dealt with in the book include separation and union, intimacy and awe, love and violation, and obedience and freedom. Vaughan-Lee cites numerous Sufi masters, providing a firm foundation for the science of love taught here, while offering examples from his students' dreams and experiences to illustrate how this ancient tradition is taking form in the modern Western world.

The Paradoxes of Love gives insight into common impasses that seekers bump up against when they step onto the spiritual path. The Western mind is very thoroughly trained to classify every thing, idea, and feeling it meets as being a particular entity that occupies a particular place. "If it's this," the Western mind says, "it can't be that; if it's here it can't be there." What then can the mind do with the reality that everything is also a unity? The author quotes one of the great Sufis, Ibn `Arabî, whose saying about the nature of the Divine presents the mind with a great challenge: He is and there is with Him no before or after, nor above nor below, nor far nor near, nor union, nor division, nor how nor where nor place. He is now as He was, He is the One without oneness and the Single without singleness. He is the very existence of the Outward and the very existence of the Inward. This book speaks of the impasses, like how the need for effort on the path is to be reconciled with the fact that everything is given as grace, how it is that mystical love is experienced as a complete violation on the level of the ego, and how surrender is the fulfillment of freedom. These things our minds experience as paradox are dealt with in a helpful way. Through the dreams, teaching stories, and life experiences the author relates, we can see a little deeper, maybe even take a step beyond those barriers where the mind would confine us if left trapped within its own structure.