A series about Inspiration.
**To my wife-to-be**
As I prayed for her all day, I had a vision and a conversation.
Background
My Wife-To-Be writes to me—“Eben, I think that’s why we feel so free with each other. Because we both know it and allow it. And because we are so free, we can allow or do anything in our love, and I think that’s why I so often feel like we are God’s first children.”— a reflection of personal love and a glimpse into the eternal and pre-existing. Plato would say it is an expression of what he sought in the realm of Forms, in anamnesis, and in the highest expression of Eros—not the transient, but the love that remembers its own divinity.
1. Knowing and Allowing – Plato’s Theory of Knowledge
The first part of her statement, “Because we both know it and allow it,” is similar to Plato’s epistemology, particularly his concept of anamnesis—the idea that true knowledge is not something we learn, but something we remember. For Plato, truth is not constructed, but recalled, for the soul once beheld the Forms before birth.
So when my Wife-To-Be speaks of knowing and allowing, she touches on something fundamental: love is not something we discover, but something we unveil. It is already there, pre-existent, waiting to be realized.
This is why we do not fall into the struggle of conventional relationships—their boundaries, hesitations, and learned inhibitions. Instead, we move within a framework of recognition: love as a thing already known, which needs only to be allowed.
This is why our love does not fear—because knowledge precedes it, and with knowledge comes trust.
2. The Freedom of Love – Plato’s Eros and the Ladder of Ascent
The second part, “And because we are so free, we can allow or do anything in our love,” brings us to Plato’s understanding of Eros. For Plato, love is not just a feeling—it is a movement of the soul toward the divine.
In the Symposium, Socrates recounts Diotima’s teaching that love begins with physical attraction but must ascend through different stages:
- Love of a single beautiful body (the initial attraction).
- Love of all beautiful bodies (the realization that beauty is not limited to one form).
- Love of beautiful souls (intellectual and spiritual connection).
- Love of laws, institutions, and ideas (the love of harmony in the world).
- Love of the Form of Beauty itself (where love becomes contemplation of the divine).
My Wife-To-Be explained how Plato mixes up the concept of love and it is seen in the progression. She, however, also recognises beauty in the flawed progression since it speaks to a love that does not stop at the lower rungs. Such is our love!
Our love does not get lost in jealousy, possession, or fear. Instead, it is a love that has already reached the higher forms, where love becomes freedom itself according to Plato. What makes our Love different is that our Love is attaining the ultimate while lingering in Eros.
It is true that for love to be free is something rare. Most lovers are trapped by fear—fear of loss, of limitation, of boundaries. For us, Love is not about acquiring or possessing, but about being.
Our love allows everything because it has already reached the stage where nothing is external to it. Our Love is everything and everywhere!
3. God’s First Children – Love as Divinity Remembered
The final part, “And I think that’s why I so often feel like we are God’s first children,” is the most striking.
Plato’s Myth of the Soul in the Phaedrus tells us that before birth, the soul travelled among the Forms, seeing the true reality of things. Some souls remembered more, others forgot more. The goal of philosophy—of love, even—is to recover that lost vision.
What is expressed is precisely this recognition of the primordial: that in love, in knowing and allowing, in total freedom, there is a feeling of returning to the origin of things.
To be God’s first children is to be closest to the source—to exist in a state unburdened by convention, limitation, or dilution. It is to love as love was before the world introduced division.
Plato might say that this was the state of the soul before it was weighed down by the forgetfulness of incarnation. It is love that has not yet fallen into the illusion of separation.
It is primal love, both animalistic and original. Love before law. Love before structure. Love before fear.
We are God’s First Children in that we are as God intended! Nothing more! Nothing less!
Love as Plato’s Highest Reality
Plato would have seen in my Wife-To-Be’s words a statement of truth beyond philosophy.
He sought an absolute—a world where all that is good, beautiful, and true exists in its purest form. He sought the Forms, believing that all things in this world were merely shadows of the real. But what if love, in its most unrestricted and knowing state, is itself a Form? What if the first children of God are those who recall what love was before the world’s distortions?
Perhaps freedom is not found in philosophy, but in the love that precedes it. Perhaps love does not need to climb the ladder—perhaps it is already at the top while it beautifully remains trapped in Eros.
What we have is not a conventional love. It is a remembering. A returning. A step out of Plato’s cave of illusions, into the light where everything is already known and already allowed.
It is love that does not fear.
It is love that does not question.
It is love that does not demand.
It is love that remembers itself.
And in that remembering is the divine. And Her.
4. Unbroken