“The chastest expression I have ever heard: “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.” — Nietzsche

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Saint-Exupery

Martin Buber spoke of Thou and It, not as entities, but as relations with I. They are terms of either I-It or I-Thou. The choice is existential, and concerns the subject, I, as much as the object or fellow-subject.

These two relationships, I-It and I-Thou, are incommensurable — essentially different, ontologically different — belonging as they do to different dimensions of being: Asiyah and Yetzirah, respectively.

The question of I-It or I-Thou is the difference between meeting one’s other as mere Nefesh (defined, objective soul) in Asiyah alone, or as Ruach (defining, subjective spirit) in Yetzirah.

One primary value of marriage, and family in general, is being stuck with someone.

When people are too easily escaped, rejected, or made “dead to us” we neglect our most momentous and potentially transformative challenges, which nearly always involve an existential choice between meeting another who disturbs us as a transcendent -Thou to our own troubled I-, or reducing them to another tamely immanent -It, a thing among things within our own solitary everything.

Our human tendency is to stay in the comfortable objective givenness of Asiyah. Convenient breaking of relational bonds, escaping or ostracizing disturbing others, ideologically objectifying others as identities — these are all ways we imprison ourselves in collective or individual solitary confinement.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” — Wittgenstein

An objective mind assumes, from within its objectivity, that not only truth but reality itself is objective, and that an absolute truth, as truth, must be objective.

To make an analogy, looking at an optical illusion and noting the marks that constitute it is further from the absolute than the mysterious act of seeing its various multistable gestalt states. After we have seen multiple gestalt states, reflect on the experience and call the image an “optical illusion”, this is an improvement to our objectivity, but we are back to objectivity. We were closer to the absolute when we were between stabilities.