Monday, September 17, 2007
A wise man once said that love is life's most powerful illusion
I think I may have written about all of this before, but couldn't find anything via search, so I'm writing it again. At some point I'll have to go and see how often I've repeated myself here, as I'm sure much of what I'm writing about will prove to be reruns. There is only so much I can think through and express in written words, after all. Add to that the mind's repetitive, cyclical operating processes and you've got a recipe for repeats. That said, I felt the need to put something down, so here we go…
The original Buddha is said to have argued that life's most dangerous illusion is love. Buddhism as it is practiced seeks to still the mind, so that the spirit might know reality as it is, without the input of internal dialog, or the filter of cognitive thought process. As I've written about before, we do not know Reality, but only our own version of it. In this way, our minds write their own version of the world that is unique to each of us. Love, as Gautama perceived it, is the most dangerous threat to our understanding of reality. When love is in play, our reality becomes a wholly subjective experience. We become convinced that our love is the only love that matters, and that the people we love are of intrinsically higher value than others around us. Even a destructive love will often find itself being perpetuated by the people involved, to their mutual detriment. As an experience, love cannot be defined specifically, and each person's perception of it varies, sometimes wildly.
Buddha would argue that this is definitive proof of love's illusory nature. The argument is that we need to dispel these individualistic illusions in favor of a more honest understanding of our shared truth. If an emotion or perception is not universally understood, it is not a piece of the universal truth our spirits inherently seek and is therefore a subjective conjuration of the mind. A Buddhist seeks to free his spirit from the rotating wheel of reincarnation. To do so, he or she must work their way toward spiritual absolution and purity of understanding as they travel from one life to the next. Obviously, subjective experiences and knowledge are not conducive to the development of total clarity. This state of pure, clear existence is what Buddhists refer to as Nirvana. Spirits who are worthy of Nirvana, but choose to remain in their physical forms as teachers are known as Boddhisatva. Buddha was a Hindu Brahman who became the first Boddhisatva.
To get a basic idea of the original Buddha's travels through life, give Herman Hesse's Siddhartha a read. Wikipedia gives a fair summation of Buddhist principles that is consistent with what I have learned about the faith through the years. Barring a more detailed history, the point of sharing all this is that Buddha is said to have known lust, love, and a myriad of other human emotions and experiences during his time on Earth. After all, Buddha was only ever 'just' a man. Before finding his way to Nirvana during a meditation under one of Nepal's Bodhi trees, he was a son of royalty and unencumbered with want of material things. He knew opulence and comfort, but abandoned it all in the name of his yearning for enlightenment.
He noted that love, and our want of it, was the most massive of all the psychological forces working against our perceptive purification. Love clouds the mind with distraction and creates an incredibly powerful connection to others. Therein lies one of the greatest problems with love as a source of spiritual freedom. Buddhists commune with their spirits by bringing the mind into balance with the body's second center of consciousness, known as dantien (or dandien, depending on who's doing the spelling). This second center of awareness serves as a conduit through which the spirit's truth finds its way into our waking life. I've talked about it here before, I'm sure of it. This second center serves as our intuitive core and works to balance the emotional and cognitive creativity of the mind.
There is said to be a thin line between love and hate, due to the powerful, often unstable, nature of love as it is actually lived. Like the rest of our individualistic realities, love is a manifestation of our physical understanding. The concept of love is tied to the senses and sensuality, all of which can conspire to distract us from the absolute truth of our spiritual existence. After all, the spirit is an eternal energy, so what use has it for the concerns of a mind and body that my last only a few decades of measured time? What is 60, 70, or 80 years on a scale reaching out toward infinity?
Love has its own gravity, its own monolithic presence, even in its absence. People in love, or who believe themselves to be in love, are capable of doing just about anything for one another. Their lives become increasingly insulated to the world outside of their love, and more focused on the world within it. The perceptions of those in love are inherently skewed by this insular focus, so the chances of seeing reality in its absolute purest state is lessened, or eliminated altogether.
Yet, knowing all of this (and seeing the sense in it), I am still compelled to know what it is like to love and be loved at least once in this life. Maybe it is simply a byproduct of my incessant curiosity or simply the allure of the unknown. Whatever it is, it remains one of my mind's many occupants, despite the fact that I understand this thing called love could very well derail my journey and leave me broken. Such is the risk associated with all things of substance in life, but with that great risk comes a chance for wondrous returns.
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Labels: life, love, spirituality
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well, buddhism certainly appears to place love in a negative context. and i understand why it does. in our world, "love" is often characterized by obsession and dependancy. we are, i think, attracted by the intensity of such experiences. but there are other ways to think of love. the christian understanding, for instance, is love as mutual respect and concern for the spiritual well-being of another. it's much less about sensuality and far more about affection, or friendship. pope benedict writes that "in the early days of Christianity ... pagans were converted on seeing the love that reigned among Christians." here, love is clearly a positive, unifying force, and even an avenue towards (as opposed to a deviation from) clarity.
I see your point, but the Buddhist perspective characterizes all of these things as distractions from absolute understanding. To cleanse the mind of all thought and be entirely, perfectly in the moment, you can't be thinking...anything. That's the Buddhist position. Personally, I think love can be a beautiful thing, but as it is practiced by people, often falls short. "Love is work", as the old saying goes. What would be the fun if love were actually freeing, empowering, reassuring, or mutually uplifting? lol I have no problem with the Christian ideal, never have had a problem with that particular component of organized religion in general, but I also agree that love, in so far as it interferes with the total detachment necessary to purify our visions, is an hindrance to the clarity of our understanding.
Look at it like this, if you love your fellow man, why not love a stone, a tree, or a bird? In the end, all of these things are of the same essence. We are all one in the context of existence. I keep leaning more and more on science's second law of thermodynamics and its implications for matter and energy. Really, we are all nothing more, and nothing less, than energy in various states. It can be argued that the rest is purely subjective. :)