"Inklings of intuitive insight disappear when we attempt to over-define and reify. Insight is often a case of very subtle realignments in our understanding. It might be seeing a situation in a more symbolic, less literal or concrete way. We slip off the mark by creating false dichotomies or conflating two aspects of truth which although interdependent are not one. Non-duality is not the same as monism. To say we are relational rather than isolates is not to say we are fused and inseparable. The search for truth as an attempt to uncover another's reality under our projections does not deny their inscrutable alterity. The Buddhist concept of non-self (anatman) does not meant that we have no self and the all is nothing, but it refers to the absence of a permanent, autonomous, persisting, unchanging ego. The Buddhist concept of sunyata likewise does not mean simply emptiness in a nihilistic sense but empty of false selfhood. Bion's no-thing is not nothingness but an apprehension of the latent plentitude of the void of O. Non-attachment does not mean a schizoid detachment or disengagement from loving relations. It means freedom from a possessive self-centered clinging to an object of desire.
Our relations with eachother are all interdependent. So are the terms we use in the attempt to express this. We need to discovers a language of subtle distinctions that more finely discern the different and varied forms of love, and so may better catch their respective truths and more accurately gesture towards the ultimate. Can we say love exists as a thing in itself, without lovers loving, or without the daily contingencies of interpersonal experience? Love exists in the particular circumstances of loving which entail lovers relating as both beloved and lover, where the subjectivity of each is created anew in each encounter, ever seeking to be known and ever eluding definition. Love, alterity, exogamy and intersubjectivity can only accurately be understood in terms of interdependent relationships with each other. Alterity becomes meaningless and a form of philosophical dualism if we overemphasize radical Otherness such that no engagement or connection to another is possible. Exogamy incorporates the notion of becoming more fully ourselves in a love which is understood as intersubjective, and which recognises and respects the paradox of communion and alterity, epistemophillia and opacity".
From Judith Pickering's Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love.
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