Passion's essential nature is spontaneous and unconditional because it is unfabricated. Since our very being is open to begin with, it naturally resonates and wants to connect with what is greater than ourselves-the vastness of life itself. Passion is the feeling of life wanting to connect with life; life inside us connecting with life outside.1 To fall in love is to feel the basic openness of our being. The swelling of passion, which makes us feel so full and rich, makes our usual state of distraction and disconnectedness seem pale and impoverished by contrast. Yet here is where we also start to fall into delusion, for we usually imagine the object of our passion to be the source of this newfound fullness. This makes us try to grasp and hold on to the one who sparks such an intense feeling of aliveness inside us.  The inexhaustible richness of life is, in Buddhist terms, a "wish-fulfilling gem" because it provides us with everything we need. Yet when we fall in love, we usually imagine the beloved, rather than life itself, to be the wish-fulfilling gem who could make all our dreams come true.

So, to the extent that we do not feel deeply connected with the life moving inside us, we come to depend on something outside ourselves to enrich us.  In regarding the focus of our passion-the beloved-as a treasure to possess, we convert our unconditional passion into something conditional and grasping: "How alive I would feel, how beautiful life would be, if only this person belonged to me." Yet grasping at another person only magnifies our inner sense of poverty and leads to the torments of romantic addiction and obsession. Love becomes a drug, and the loved one becomes the addicted lover's "fix."  Unconditional passion has no agenda. It is like the freely radiating energy of the sun. Yet if l identify my beloved as the source of this powerful energy, then I must have her-and my passion turns into an obsessive, blinding, fatal attraction. No wonder the great love tales usually end in tragedy. Those who try to carry such a burden for others, such as Romeo and Juliet, or even Marilyn Monroe, die young.  Yet it is important to distinguish here between seeing an- other as the source of our passion-which always leads to distortion and addiction-and allowing another to be the focus of our passion-which is not in itself a problem.

Passion becomes problematic when we confuse focus with source, imagining that the one toward whom our passion flows is the cause of our feeling so alive. The natural activity of passion is to connect intensely-whether it be with the colour of the sky, our life's work, or the presence of our beloved. Of course, we do not feel equally passionate toward just anyone or anything that comes along-only certain forms or qualities awaken our energy and inspire it to flow toward them. Yet when we imagine that the conditional focus of our passion is the unconditional source of our aliveness, we throw ourselves into a state of inner impoverishment and confusion.

Peter Trachtenberg, in his book The Casanova Complex, describes this kind of tormented passion in this way:  When I met a woman who attracted me, my desire for her was immediate and crippling-a hammer blow to the heart. In the beginning there was just that longing, and the sense of myself as a starving orphan gazing through a window at a happy family sitting down to dinner… I had to see her again and again, to conquer her in different ways. It might take a few days to a few years a whole relationship based on hunger and frustration. Yet he eventually understood that nothing outside him could fill his inner sense of poverty, for he concludes: "For my part, I yearned for something no woman could ever give me."