Even the most timeless of experiences, one that exposes the soul and opens the heart to bliss, don’t survive very long. Arrayed against it is an entire worldview in which such things are not acknowledged as real. Not only are most people unprepared for the opening of spirit but they have been actively conditioned against it by the materialism that gave rise to modern psychology, stripping love of any “higher” meaning.

The lover sees a more real world because he or she looks at ordinary things and finds the spiritual light that is actually there. The rest of us miss the transcendent and therefore claim it doesn’t exist; we are doing the best we can, yet we cannot claim truth for our side.

The mystery is not whether you will begin to transcend your old reality when you fall in love, for that is certain. What is mysterious is that being engulfed in your beloved is also divine. But the visitation of spirit is a subtle phenomenon, and a very impatient one. Either spirit takes you with it or it quickly departs.

Transcendence comes in many forms. Falling in love is not as unique as it may feel. Common insights link all these peak experiences: One feels that life is a blessed state, that fear is unreal because death is not an extinction but merely a transition, that love surrounds and nourishes us all, and that some part of ourselves lives beyond the world of struggle and care, in the domain of pure existence.

From the spiritual point of view, infatuation opens us up to these same insights–the beloved serves as a trigger, like the mountain, the space walk, the near-death encounter. This is not to diminish the allure of the beloved, for the transcendent wonder of infatuation has no difficulty shining through the physical delight–in love, the immanent and the transcendent are one.

Adapted from The Path to Love, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1997).