We must distinguish, therefore, three kinds of love: psychological love, mystical love, and ontological love.
The first represents the ideal of love as it is usually presented: a caring for the outward-directed, or external aspect of human nature, including the emotions as we ordinarily experience them. When this aspect of human nature is exclusively attended to, the result is progressive fragmentation, because there is no effective ruling principle in such an individual. The physical or psychological desires are cared for. But, in the absence of a ruling principle within oneself, the inevitable conflicts of body, mind and emotion can only be falsely integrated within the structure of egoism—that is, false ideas about oneself more or less successfully screening from view the contradictory impulses within myself.
from "Lost Christianity" by Jacob Needleman
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