So life is about love, right? The problem is that, for the ego, love is always tragic. Romantic love is a form of bhakti, devotion. In fact, you could say that every form of suffering is a form of bhakti. Our neurotic suffering is always a result of mis-directed devotion that leads to devastation.

One of the great thinkers of the twentieth century who has explored the unconscious mind of human beings, perhaps more profoundly than anyone in history, is a French theorist named Jacques Lacan. Toward the end of his life, he made a very important pun in French on the word symptom, referring to it as Saint Thom, which in French is pronounced the same as symptome. He was alluding to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic philosopher. Lacan implied that every symptom is our attempt at sainthood. Every love object becomes our cross to bear, and the site of our crucifixion.