To know more about lovemaking, we must get to know more about love. What is love? Where does love actually come from? Does it harm or heal? Can it be defined or understood? Why do we long for it so much and can this longing ever be satisfied? How and where do we find love? Why does it appear to hide from us? How do we know when we have found love? Can love be lost once it has been found, or is it indestructible?
Then what is lovemaking? What is this strange obsession that unites us all? What is the real meaning of lovemaking? Is lovemaking designed for and confined to procreation or does it have a life-long purpose?
How can we find fulfilment in our relationships? Why is there such apparent and widespread pain in relationships that start out by promising so much fulfilment? What would it be and feel like, to be truly fulfilled? Is it possible to transform relationships that have become shipwrecked or run aground? Can a relationship in crisis be rescued? If so, how can this be achieved? Discovering answers to these and other questions is the real purpose of this ICASA Programme.
Most people never really find love. They think that they have, only to be disillusioned and hurt. They think that love has hurt them, but they are wrong. Love can never hurt; it can only heal. It is the lack of love in relationships that causes pain and suffering. In fact, throughout history and throughout the world, all suffering is simply the effect of missed opportunities to love.
I have been on the spiritual path for over forty years and a transpersonal sexual therapist for twenty of those years. I meet with the face of loneliness in my clients every day of my life and have been privileged to spend most of my life working to alleviate this loneliness, the primary cause of which is longing for love and fear of never experiencing it.
To explain the inexplicable, to describe the indescribable, is obviously impossible. Ultimately, to know what love is, you must feel it. That is what intimacy invites us to experience.
Scientists will tell you that we use only around 0.5% of our brain. We understand even less about consciousness and practically nothing about love. Love is illimitable. Evolving through the forces of love is the purpose of life. Love answers the question: “Why am I here?”
Love is an endless voyage into greater and greater depths of feeling and life. As we explore the depths of the love, ever deeper realisations emerge of a force that heals, is indestructible and the supply of which cannot ever be exhausted.
This is a voyage into the unknown, and it is obviously helpful to begin such a voyage with a map, albeit a sketchy one that is as yet incomplete and is in rudimentary form. Such a basic map I call The Seven Stages of Love. In these workbooks, we describe the first five of the Seven Stages of Love. Those who are following this particular programme with commitment and a desire to advance further to the higher Stages of Love will find descriptions and explanations of Stages Six and Seven in the ICASA Quantum Sex Programme.
These Stages of Love, I hasten to emphasise, apply to us as human beings at this particular time in the evolution of human consciousness and physical human form. There will arise further stages of experience and growth in love beyond these ‘Seven Stages’ as human evolution further unfolds. For now, the Seven Stages of Love are available to us during our earthly lifetime, and attaining them is the highest purpose of life.
In the same way that explorers of the world began to discover the physical landmasses of the earth, astronomers the starry planets and scientists the energy fields, we have the duty and responsibility to explore the Ocean of Love.
How or where do we find love?
Where do we begin or start again?
If we start with ourselves, the voyage into love will unfold within us.
