One of the struggles that many people encounter in their lives is between love and power. When we view things within the cosmic sphere, we may agree that everything is in the form of energy. So it’s not a premature assumption that love and power energize humans to some extent. And perhaps what distinguishes those things is the existence of control.
Through poetry and romanticism, there are so many imprints that depict love as a state of drunkenness. While power most often depicts strength or dominance, and from literature as well, we find that love and power quite often destroy one another. When one falls in love, one will feel powerless, and when one is in power, one will draw into the coldness of authority.
Love and Madness
Two Men in the Madhouse
A guide in a certain madhouse was describing two cases to some
visiting psychiatrists. ‘In this padded cell,’ he said, ‘we have a man
who went mad when another man married the girl whom he was in
love with.’
‘And in the next cell?’ asked a visitor.
‘In that one, we have the man who actually did marry the girl.’
Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn
When one is in a state of love, they lose control of themselves. It is why, in Sufism, there is a sense of drunkenness within love. Losing oneself to the Beloved, a Lover will forget himself.
The story of Laila and Majnun clearly depicts this state of drunkenness for the beloved.
On the other side, having described love as a drunken state may cause one to wrongly interpret every drunkenness as love. In most cases, the participation mystique is often misinterpreted as love. A projection may lead one to conclude it was love at first sight. Hence, the meaning of love becomes varied and undescribable.
Power and dominance
On the other side of love, power holds you in a position of stiffness and fixated. Structured and composed. It seems with power, everything is held up unwavering. It breeds control and the illusion of strength. Power collides with all the energy. When someone feels powerful, they will hesitate to dominate all things within their sphere.
Ego, love, and power struggle
As summarized, the connection between ego, love, and power is that the unconscious ego wants power more than it wants love. It doesn’t mean that the ego is always evil, nor is power. But ego wants to be known, and to be known, one shall have the power to control one’s existence. While love is the disappearance of the lover, one has no control.
For this basic reason, one might have a constant struggle with one’s own ego. Since to love means to surrender in its state and to have power means to control its state.
