Opening into life
About a month ago, I stepped into my garden and was met by a vision that moved me deeply. My arupo tree—a companion of my life since childhood—was in full bloom, its branches covered with hundreds of pink blossoms that seemed to catch fire beneath the intense blue sky of Quito. The sight filled me with a joy difficult to describe, and in that instant a question took root in me, the same question that gathers us here today: What would it be like if we, as human beings, could blossom with the same spontaneity, the same natural grace, strength, and coherence with which this precious arupo flowers? Perhaps some of you have seen it today in my garden.
I find myself wondering who we might become if we could open to life by following our own inner cycle, without force, without masks, allowing beauty and truth to rise from within us as naturally as the blossoms of the arupo, obedient to a deeper nature that seeks neither approval nor permission to express itself. I speak of a vitality and coherence that involve the entire being. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno once wrote: “There are those who seem to think only with the brain—or with whatever organ may serve that function—while others think with their whole body and soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with life itself.”
I am not speaking of a life in a permanent state of grace—of eudaimonia, as the ancient Greeks called a life both full and virtuous. What I mean is something more fragile, impermanent yet no less essential: a state of harmony with the cosmos, a deep acceptance of life as it is. It is what Jung called synchronicity—the mysterious alignment between the inner and the outer worlds—the quiet pleasure of being alive in resonance with all living things.
This absolute sense of joy is neither abstract nor solitary; it arises only when we feel connected to something far greater than ourselves—to nature, to the universal order, to mystery, to God, or whatever name we give to that which transcends us. When we lift our eyes to a night sky dense with stars, we fall silent. What could we possibly say before such mystery? What words could explain what lies beyond our capacity to narrate or to understand?
That is the great paradox of grace: what leads us toward it is silence itself—the stillness, the emptiness, the state of presence and wonder. Culture and philosophy, in their essence, are the maps that allow us to navigate the human experience: pain, death, love. Without a living culture and a community that embodies it, we would lack the symbolic and practical tools to face life’s vast possibilities and trials. Even the purest joy, the most radiant pleasure, when lived in isolation, would lose its meaning.
True vitality does not arise from isolation but from connection—connection with the cosmos and its mysteries, with the earth we inhabit, but also with those around us, with the community that sustains us, with those we love and who love us in return. Philosophy, therefore, should not be regarded as a distant intellectual exercise but as a living guide, capable of transforming our existence. It is our compass, the quiet light that orients us. To take philosophy as an ally is to allow it to illuminate our path—not as an external beacon, but as a fire that burns from within and leads us to blossom into the fullness of our own nature.
Carl Sagan, whom I consider one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, popularized astronomy and brought us closer to the immensity of the cosmos. In his famous television series, he wrote a memorable dedication to his wife, Annie Druyan: “In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.” It is a recognition of life as a miracle—not in the religious sense, but in the scientific and statistical one.
A few years ago, I wrote this poem:
It is so.
You have waited
centuries for your skin.
For you to exist,
your DNA has journeyed
for millennia—
thousand upon thousand—
assembling itself,
unfolding,
losing its way
through the labyrinths
of evolution and desire,
until it arrived—breathless—
at the meeting of two lovers,
your parents,
your grandparents,
your great-grandparents—
all the way back
to that primal soup
where life first became life.
An almost infinite testimony
to the encounters that made you.
And yes… it has arrived.
Not a day late,
not an hour,
not a second,
not even a microsecond.
The loving instructions
of all your ancestors
have reached you.
They have been granted to you.
Each of those encounters—some sought, some accidental, some violent, some filled with love—was necessary. The statistical miracle that gathers us here today, speaking of spirit, of wholeness, of vitality, is so immense it can scarcely be contained by the mind. And beyond the story of our ancestors, we had to coincide as well—in the vastness of space and the immensity of time.
Carl Sagan once said something of immense beauty: that our consciousness is one of the ways the universe has of knowing itself. There may be many other forms of consciousness, unimaginable to our limited cognition and brief existence, yet we are one of them—precious and irreplaceable.
We belong to a universe in which everything is connected, at infinitesimal and cosmic levels alike; a universe where distance sometimes ceases to matter, where quantum entanglement defies our notions of separation. We are part of a living planet where every being fulfills a precise function. As the great evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis wrote, all the creatures of this planet have evolved together—there were no ones who came “before.” We all share the same evolutionary time and occupy our own place in this potent chain of life.
Our consciousness, then, is not merely a private state: it is the universe itself reflecting, wondering, recognizing through us.
Not long ago, a friend said to me, “I’m not a philosopher— that title is too big for me.” He was entirely mistaken. We all have the capacity to be philosophers, for philosophy does not arise from the writings of others but from life itself—from the painful, the joyful, the intense experience of living: from the valleys and the peaks we traverse. Each of us, through the intensity of what we live, is already thinking, already searching for meaning.
Today it has become fashionable to “manifest” our desires, as though willing them into existence could bend the universe to our wishes. But desire is always a form of limitation: who among us can truly know what the universe has in store? What we call manifestation is often nothing more than the projection of our fears and our boundaries. There is a deeper spiritual path—one of trust. It is the trust expressed so beautifully in the prayer that lies at the heart of Christianity, in the Our Father: “Lord, thy will be done, not mine.” It is a humble recognition: I do not know what is best for me. I trust.
The attitude resonates with the amor fati of the Stoics and of Nietzsche: to love one’s destiny, to love what one has been, what one is, and what one will become, as a vital stance. It is not a call to justify or to remain passive before the great events of life, but to take full ownership of what has been lived and to transform it into hope and certainty. The Übermensch—often rendered as the Overman—is not a superior being but one freed from resentment and fear: the human being who trusts, who is capable of opening into life.
The Grammar of Love
The ancient Greeks understood with absolute clarity that the two great forces shaping the human spirit are love and death—Eros and Thanatos. Without love, without connection, life loses its meaning. We are not islands; we need the other as mirror and as possibility. Every human being, every living creature, embodies a unique and unrepeatable perspective on existence.
And yet, we are profoundly ignorant when it comes to love. Rarely do we speak of it with the clarity it deserves. Love is, above all, dialogue—a radical opening toward the other, a deep astonishment before the vastness of another being.
In our time, love is too often reduced to a performative sexuality, burdened with expectations, obligations, and fears. We enter the most fragile and sacred of spaces with muddy boots. Instead of using sexuality to build a language of attentive listening and joyful celebration of the other, we play the tug-of-war of negotiation and power, obsessed with extracting as much pleasure as we can from one another, or with anxiously soothing the wounds of fear and abandonment. We seek the orgasm like a holy grail—the fleeting moment when the restless mind finally stops, when we surrender control and give ourselves over to mystery. And though we arrive at it with so little care, each climax remains a transformative experience.
Sexuality has been reduced to a mutual extraction of pleasure, rather than a shared act of meaning, tenderness, and communion. We strive to reach the peak of pleasure instead of embracing the miracle of encountering another precious, conscious being within the immensity of the cosmos and the vastness of time.
This truth becomes tangible when we think of a mother cradling her newborn child. She knows the child is perfect, that there is nothing to demand or expect from it—only the precious miracle of being. A lover who recognizes in their beloved the perfection of the cosmos, and who sees themselves reflected there, discovers the power and creative potential of dialogue—the living conversation that gives shape and meaning to existence.
In the Andean world, there exists the concept of ayni—reciprocity. Without reciprocity, no true dialogue can exist. Imagine a mother or father who suffers over the choices of their child, loving them only when they meet certain expectations or desires. In withholding unconditional love, they teach a grammar of love in which the child—and later the adult—becomes a beggar of affection, someone who will wander through life seeking that one person who might love them without condition: not for what they do or possess, but simply for who they are.
In the 1970s, psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined a fascinating term: limerence. What we have long called “mad love,” “romantic love,” or “platonic love” is not truly love—it is obsession, an illness of the mind. Limerence describes a state in which the mind fixates on another person, repeating the same thoughts endlessly, hoping that this person will finally give us what we most long for: unconditional love.
But love, to be love, must recognize the miracle and the dignity of the other—the profound freedom of another soul. It must be dialogue, ayni, reciprocity. Mature, conscious love is not a love of need but a love of vitality and expansion; it does not seek to complete itself through the other, but to grow alongside the other.
The ancients had a wise saying: “Love those who love you; do not force those who do not.” Yet our societies and our homes have taught us a grammar of love centered on the “I, I, I”—I who need, I who want to be loved, I who search for someone to transform my life and grant me the vitality I have not found within myself. Instead of recognizing ourselves as whole, as worthy children of the cosmos—a precious statistical miracle—we approach the people we love as if they were magical solutions meant to fill our emptiness and our solitude.
Limerence is, in essence, a state of emotional beggary, of need— the very opposite of wholeness. Within it we form obsessive relationships, demanding that the other yield to our will or dreaming that one day they will finally learn to celebrate the wonder that we truly are. It is a crippled form of relationship—one in which one “loves more” than the other, where there is no true dialogue, no full recognition of the dignity and freedom of the other.
The same pattern appears in certain family bonds: a mother who spends sleepless nights tormented by her child’s “wrong” decisions, who loves to the point of suffocation, or a father who insists on choosing the “perfect” destiny for his children—a destiny of material abundance but emotional poverty. These parents perpetuate a long chain of limerent attachments, teaching love as conditional dependence rather than freedom. In such cases, there is no complete love, only attachment—a love that betrays the other’s freedom and authenticity.
Psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and philosophy all have much to contribute in healing this illness we call limerence. For limerence is not limited to people—it can be directed toward things, toward objects, toward relationships devoid of meaning or consciousness. We cling to people we have turned into things, hoping they will magically solve the meaninglessness within us.
The truth is that all of us were taught to love conditionally. Limerence is the illness of our age: the absence of reciprocity, an incomplete grammar of love in which we exalt the needy “I” or the supposedly perfect, unreachable “you,” instead of cultivating the fragile, trembling “we” that approaches the other with curiosity and gratitude—for the miracle that they are.
In ancient times, witches and sorcerers were often depicted beside a cauldron. The cauldron is where obsessive thought is stirred again and again—where the mind boils over. It is the runaway obsession, the absence of silence, the loss of wonder before the perfection of life and the cosmos. It is the very opposite of the Our Father, of that absolute trust in destiny. It is the manifestation of desire.
Do you see how the act of desiring is, in itself, an expression of poverty? Each time I desire—this person, that thing—and seek to manifest it, I become poorer, more limerent, more obsessive, more empty.
I speak of something intimate, something that happened to me. Two years ago, I was gray, spent, detached from my own soul: limerent, full of unfulfilled desires, only half-creative, impoverished, a beggar for love—and worse still, surrounded by other limerent souls. I had forgotten the miracle of being alive, the simple, profound pleasure of breathing.
And strangely enough, in that moment of deepest sadness and darkness, it was joy that pierced the cauldron of the obsessive mind. Joy always enters accompanied by presence and gratitude. When joy returned to my life—by some strange accident—it reminded me of who I am. I reconnected with my soul. Then came clarity, to remind me that I was not mad—that what I saw was real. And after that, courage: the courage to take up the sword and cut through the threads, the cobwebs, the fears.
It has been a process of deep beauty. I have found again the young man I once was—enamored of life. And I share this not out of vanity, but for a simple reason: because it is necessary, indispensable, that we teach our children, our young people, and our adults the grammar of love.
The Sovereignty of the Soul
There are moments in life when we must ask for help—from others, from faith, from religion, from ritual. All these forms of aid are important. Yet, in the end, the path to wholeness and to the reconnection with oneself passes through the recovery of the soul’s sovereignty—through deep and genuine silence.
No one and nothing can interfere with that sovereignty: not our thoughts, not the unfulfilled desires of our parents, not the envious or restless mind, not the limerent love of those who think they love us, not even the inner chatter we mistake for consciousness.
For the soul to blossom, it must be clean and bare—free of every story and narration, simple, unadorned. We must relearn the language of love and remember that through words we bless and we curse; we trace the destinies of others.
Words, and the thoughts they carry, are powerful. Light can be recognized by its signs: in flourishing, in freedom, in dignity, in respect for the autonomy of the other—in the act of blessing, of speaking well. Darkness, on the other hand, reveals itself through desire, through control.
We must also relearn the language of ritual, for rituals speak to that dimension of our being that lies beneath consciousness but is no less vital for it. Rituals, when built with discipline and intention, cleanse the soul, the heart, and the body. They open the windows, clear away the dust and cobwebs, wash fear with water, and awaken the transforming power of ancestral wisdom.
It is necessary to renew the dialogue between philosophy, psychotherapy, and ancestral spirituality. We must cleanse ourselves of limerent thoughts, of our own desires and those imposed upon us. We must cultivate dialogue, reciprocity.
We must reclaim the dignity and quiet strength of our naked spirit—a spirit that trusts completely in the precious miracle of being alive, that knows life, as it was, as it is, and as it will be, is perfect.
Below is the original talk in Spanish, recorded during the gathering Cuando el alma florece, held at my home in Quito on August 16, 2025: