This week, I've been thinking about love and about time.

About spontaneity. How some of the best moments just - happen.

Timothy Leary, famous for trying to discover a higher level of consciousness, once wrote, "Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other people, with other forms of energy."

I think Leary, despite his fascination with psychedelics, got it just right.

Which is why these moments are so rare. Because a "serene merging" with someone requires a special state. A higher level of consciousness that most of us - perhaps all of us - have a really hard time achieving. But - in those rare moments - we feel its power.

Powerful, profound. A high, an epiphany, a euphoria. A narcotic transfiguration of who we thought we were - and whom we thought you were. For a moment - for an instant - we change. Time freezes.

Maybe these frozen moments in time are simply achieved elements of our destiny.

Leary also wrote, “If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love." You see, he knew that conscious love was impossible to create in the vortex of mixed emotions. Dr. Leary's prescription for serenity was the removal of emotion.

For how can this merging of self and others be achieved in an environment of thinking, analyzing, reacting, comparing, hoping and resenting?

It just can't be. It's spontaneous and karmic.

What I'm saying is that this is different from the continuum of a relationship that is wrapped in commitments and history and connections. It's a moment in time.

It's why we desperately seek moments like these. Whether we do it knowingly or not. And I think that these flashes in time are what souls long to experience. It's a drug that offers a brief glimpse of heaven.

I've had a few of those experiences. They are sweet and transcendent. And hopeful. Certainly addictive. And, like everyone, I think of them with longing.

Like that night. In that old house, when we talked almost all night about life and love and the world. You were sitting on your knees on the couch. As we were talking, you spontaneously sat on my lap, laughing and looking into my eyes. You barely knew me. But my love felt, in that moment, deep and conscious.

I wonder, from time to time, if either of us will find it again. But I hope that we both always remember that feeling. It was about you, about love - and about time.

You know what I mean.

#timothy leary

Things About You, About Love