The ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote about love in his work "The Symposium.

" In that work the character Aristophanes says the following: "It is my belief that people have entirely failed to understand the power of Love, for if they had understood they would have erected the greatest temples and altars to it. As it is, nothing of the sort is done, though Love deserves it more than anything else... Once upon a time our anatomy was quite different from what it is now. In the rst place there were not merely two sexes as there are now, male and female, but three, and the third was a combination of the other two. At that time the androgynous sex was distinct in form and name, having physical features from both the male and the female, Secondly, the form of every person was completely round, with back and sides making a circle, and with four arms, the same number of legs,and two faces exactly alike set on a round neck. There was one head for the two faces (which looked in opposite ways), four ears, and everything else as you might guess from these particulars. They walked about upright, as we do today, backwards or forwards as they pleased. Whenever they wanted to move fast they pushed off from the ground and quickly wheeled over and over in a circle with their eight limbs It is said that these humans tried to make an ascent to heaven in order to attack the gods. Zeus and the other gods deliberated about what they should do. They could hardly kill them and annihilate the whole race, for then they would be putting an end also to the worship and sacrices they received from human beings, but neither could they put up with their insolence. After much hard thought Zeus delivered his conclusion. I shall split each one of them in half, and that will make them weaker, and at the same time they will be more useful to us by being greater in number. They will walk upright on two legs, and if they persist in their insolence and refuse to keep quiet I will split them in half again, and they will have to hop about on one leg only. So saying he proceeded to cut everyone in two. After the original nature of every human being had been severed in this way, the two parts longed for each other and tried to come together again. They threw their arms around one another in close embrace, desiring to be reunited. So it is that ever since that far-off time, love of one person for another has been inborn in human beings, and its role is to restore us to our ancient state by trying to make unity out of duality and to heal our human condition. For each of us is a mere tally of a person, one of two sides of a lleted sh, one half of an original

whole.We are all continually searching for our other half.