must believe he sees her as a complete person, or his saying so is flattery or make-belief. Secondly, that the reality should last. Conventional thought allows love to last six months after a marriage; and then the parties settle down to the business of living together. Six months is not very long compared with an eternity. Yet if a man loves a woman, he must want his love for her to last; it is only if he loves himself and his own appetite more, that he will not mind if his love for her fades.
So the question obtrudes itself - how long is it to last? The answer must be that if a man loves his wife, he must want it to last as long as he does. So one is driven to ask, how long does man last? It is not surprising then that when a man takes “love” in earnest, instead of playing the fool with it, he is driven to ask, “How long do I last?”
If all life ends in death, then love and marriage must also end in death. Once the loved one is dead and buried, the lover's love for him, or her, is only a day-dream in the imagination. The lover can say, “I did love her”; it is nonsense for him to say, “I do love her”. But if human beings are potentially immortal, and death is only the gateway to fuller life in the next world, then the position is reversed. The lover must want love and marriage to go on through eternity too, as Robert Browning saw in his poem “Any wife to any husband”. And if the marriage can make the transition through death into eternity, then it will last all through eternity, because almost by definition eternity is a “place” where death has no more dominion. But if the perfectly relaxed consciousness is also the consciousness of immortality, or of eternity, as I suggested in Part I, then one's love has already made the transition in this world, and therefore the consciousness that one is married, and the joy that this brings, is also likely to make the transition into eternity in this world. Provided…