This is a large format edition of the novel 'Discovering Love' the first book of the epic series of novels 'The Lodging for the Rose.' The series was started as a project to explore Love in its native dimension as universal love, unbounded and free. The project began with a single novel, the novel, Discovering Love. However, it soon became apparent that a subject as wide as universal love, cannot be addressed in the small form of a single book. It became apparent that a second volume needed to be added, and then another, and so on. Thus, over the span of more than a decade, the work grew into a series of 12 novels, which I have summarily named, for its ancient root, The Lodging for the Rose. A rose is a flower that is seen as beautiful in the human dimension. It is defined so in the human heart and soul where the beauty of the rose is located. A rose has no meaning to a rat; and to a deer, it simply means, food. But to us as human beings, a rose is an object that echoes what we love, a higher-level quality that we cherish as human beings, because this quality is lodged in our humanity. This includes also the love we have for one-another that binds us into one as children of a common humanity. What we call civilization, has developed from this root. The substance of this universal love appears to be so great and so profound, that if it was withdrawn, civilization would collapse. Unfortunately, this rather obvious fact is also causing a crisis. In our modern world its substance is waning. Love is diminishing. Civilization is correspondingly collapsing. We have tens of thousands of nuclear bombs prepared for one another as proof for the fading civilization. The heart has become hollow. We are allowing our economies to collapse for the lack of universal love; even while we face the onrushing resumption of an Ice Age in the near future, potentially in the 2050s, for which the transition has already begun, while society finds no commitment in the heart to prepare its world for the looming requirements. Civilization thus stands precariously on the precipice of its dying. Civilization has one last chance, if we care to recover what has been lost, and to move forward with this recovery into a new world where the term humanity begins to have a profound meaning again. Discovering Love Book 1 of the series. The 12 volume series on universal love begins ironically behind the Iron Curtain in an imprisoned land that the Communist sector of Germany had been in the mid-1980s. In this unconventional world, a wider social freedom in the small, stages a 'sunshine' that overpowers the drab and scary conventional scene, but which, in the end poses a challenge that suddenly ends in an impasse. Few people have dared to cross those impasses and tackle the challenges. The 'landscape' is unfamiliar. Nevertheless, without the Principle of Universal Love, we wouldn't have a civilization at all, and might not even exist, and may ultimately not survive in a nuclear-armed world, much less in a world that is facing a New Ice Age in 30 years, and this with a collapsing global economy and a growing starvation already unfolding in the background. Here the Principle of Universal Love and its underlying science, promises a New Renaissance. But is there anyone willing to face the challenges and boldly step forward to discover the light of the brighter world that universal love offers? Who stands courageous on this front today, to break the strong chains that were built over centuries of sexual division and isolation? Who dares to counter the many myths and trained emotions that have been forged over countless ages? Who is able to overrule them with an honesty that embraces our humanity in truth and its nature as divine? Here, as we dare and struggle, romance becomes ultimately uplifted with a brighter joy, and the erotic becomes enriched with a passion for life that we ultimately all share, and enrich our world with, and one-another.
