Love is an Eros centered process that oscillates on alternating legs of approach and separation. Wisdom is a Logos centered process that moves by successive inward withdrawals and outward returns. Through love, we find each other. In wisdom, we discover ourselves. Love starts with a greeting. Wisdom begins with a departure. While love finds its peak experiences in close communion, wisdom gets its powers when a person descends alone from the surface of life to the depths of inwardness to make a discovery there and return with it. Alchemists called the process “rectification through going inward.”
     Both processes are dynamic engines of change, not states of being. They belong to the vita activa as unfoldings in time. Only in retrospect do they enter the vita contemplativa as truths to ponder.

     Why do love and wisdom matter so much? What makes them so memorable to us? They matter because they employ our evolved physiology in ways that generate rhythmic resonances across many body systems. We experience their biological rightness with an augmentation of energy that, in its rhythmic consanguities, transmits a feeling of meaningfulness.
     The strength and wholeheartedness with which we enter our turning points in love and wisdom, rightly understood, is a measure of their rhythmic integrity. And rhythmic integrity can be measured by activity in specific frequency bands that we will explore in the course of our investigations (See # 7, 14, 19, 20).