What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Samantabhadra/Kuntuzangpo

In my previous post, I ended with this:

"The absence of fear is the beginning of love."

Briefly, and this will be brief: love is not sentiment, nor is it simpering, cloying "I wuv you" emotionality. Love is directly realizing fundamental Being. Each recognizing it in the Other and finding no-self/no-other.

There is no "how" to this. Oh, certainly, there are practices like tong-len, meditating on the Beatitudes in the New Testament, reciting prayers and a myriad techniques for training thinking and perhaps developing reflexes to respond with a degree of calm instead of apprehension; but these are only momentary. Is there a switch to a continuous response to events that is only loving?

Personally, I am not so sure in one context; in another, is there anything other than love at work?

In what could be called the Immediate Context, it often seems that maintaining a continuous, compassionate response to (or better, being in) the world is fraught with all manner of vicissitude. So we employ techniques and analyses of situations to decide how best to respond "lovingly." There are too many examples in my head of how often I don't respond lovingly to a situation; the seizing up when a stranger approaches (typically, here in Nepal, to sell me something or ask me for money, and so on), the contraction that I feel when someone bumps into me (with their body or their vehicle...yeah, keep an eye on motorbikes in narrow alleys), or in my former working life, the resentment I had to keep an eye on when my boss would tell me that there were people who wanted me out (which, believe it or not, I was fine with; but I wanted out on my own terms).

Maybe I've gotten much better at this over the years. Am I less reactive than I was five years ago? Most assuredly. More patient? Yes. Less apprehensive of the future? (That's never been an issue; this will become clear in future posts, I think). More giving? Mmmm, I don't think so, really. More diligent in watching, in letting be? Meh. Maybe, maybe not. Less fearful? Honestly, yes. Fear was never something inculcated in me; in fact, if anything, in our family, we were raised to not be fearful (or else!) I'm only joking about that last bit; I think the only person who I "feared" was my mother who I knew was doing the best she could (a single mother in the sixties dealing with a boy child? and this boy child in particular? Hoo-boy, she gets all the awards!), but she was tough and mercurial. Every day was an adventure! But in terms of teachings, hers were the first; just love, don't be afraid, see everyone as a child of God.

Now, talking about God is sometimes a minefield. Buddhists, one of which I suppose I am (yep, card-carrying refugee! A few times! More dharma names than anyone should have!), are often characterized and characterize themselves as an a-theistic approach to existence in the sense that there is on permanent, creator deity that made the universe and takes a varying degree of interest in the goings on of its myriad creations. However, there are heuristic terms, particularly in later Mahayana and Vajrayana that, if not theistic, do point to near-Platonic hypostasizations.

A good Buddhist would say, "but wait a minute, if you're talking about metaphysical overlays, we don't go for those" and then we go down the rabbit hole of scholasticism and textual analysis. Which, I'm happy to do, but not today and not right now. For now, I'll just say that within late Mahayana and earlier Vajrayana (most specifically in the Himalayan regions), you can find Indo-Iranian strains of thought (Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, etc.)

But let's say that you're raised a Christian and I'm not concerned with what flavor (Catholic, Protestant, Coptic, etc.), but let's look at a seminal statement from the Gospel of John (I think); where it's pretty baldly stated, "God is love." There are all sorts of interpretations, but I tend to favor Gnostic readings and the deconstructive approaches of later thinkers like Dionysus the Areopagite. Here God isn't some anthropomorphic Sky Being, but is what Heidegger and Herbert Guenther might denote as the Being of beings. In other words, God isn't some being apart from His creation but is Being itself. In that sense, there's no separation of creator and creation.

This is all very familiar to Sufis and you could point to similarities in Vedanta and so on and so forth.

All of these examples are what come to me when I talk about love. Perhaps when you are reading this, you can try it, too. Then this is what we're talking about when we talk about love: the basic sanity of Being itself, beautiful, luminous, and good. In Vajrayana Buddhism, Samatabhadra (Sanskrit)/Kuntuzangpo (Tibetan) is posited as the Primordial Buddha, "Always Good". My sister points out that when she uses the word "God", she simply means Good (there is an etymological connection there).

I'm not interested in going about "what is the Good" in some philosophical context. Again, I don't mind bandying about scholarship (or as Gudjieff called it, "philosophical wise-acreing"), but not right now. I'm of the mind that love, and we could capitalize it as Love, to further delineate this, is the motive force behind all that we encounter and all that we are.

I had earlier spoken of Mind as being luminous and pure. Without getting too imprecise - but then, precision is not of huge interest to me right now - Mind and Love are not two.

Years ago, Lama Tharchin Rinpoche said something that has been one of my favorite pith teachings: "There's not my mind, there's not your mind; there's only Mind." Some people find this problematic; you mean we have to surrender our identity? our individuality? What kind of crazy teaching is that?!

It's actually very, very simple. Identity and individuality are dynamic. As such, how Mind manifests to and as discrete minds is spontaneous and infinitely creative! If people worry about their individuality and identity, perhaps a good place to start would be to look at how much they conform to their society, to their religion, to their politics, to all of that. If we look honestly at our "self-expression" in the world, we have to admit that we are conditioned; our personalities, our thoughts, our actions and out reactions are all the result of conditioning. Told how to act, how to live, what to study, better get a good job, make money, have a family; all of this is conditioning and being conditioned, can we be free?

Can we be free if we've been told, usually quite early on, to behave certain ways, to trust this person or group but not that person or group? You might say, well, our parents were just looking out for us. My mother - mentioned above - would have none of that. Basically, she warned me to do the opposite; not so much be distrustful of people, but trust in God, in Life, in Love. And out of this trust, came a pretty confused Johnny when it came to personal interactions, but in the broader scheme of events, I honestly can't say, I've worried too much about what other people are going to do (either to me or in general).

Example. In my last few years of working in an office, as part of a development team, I (and my team) often ran into issues that arose (admittedly, some of it was our responsibility), the results of which had problematic results. I refuse to go into detail what the issues were because what counts is my reaction to the responses we (and I) received from a couple of power-holders in our department. At two points, I would have sworn I was going to be fired.

I wasn't so concerned about being fired, actually. I was more concerned that I not demonize or personalize the people who might set that in motion. And yes, this was an on-going issue and toward the end, when I decided it was time to go and return to Asia, I did. It is with gratitude that these circumstances arose; it's not a matter of suffering making one stronger (though there might be some of that), but that I had to challenge myself to open my perspective more and not to just not think ill of another, but to hold them even dearer.

Now, if I were that person who just simply abides and acts from Love and Compassion one hundred percent of the time, I wouldn't be writitng this. But in my life, so many instances and examples of the good that arises when I let go of holding emotionally-charged attitudes to people (both good and ill) have come about that I don't question the simplicity of all this.

"Letting go" all too often sounds like abandoning responsibility or being resigned to some fate over which we have no control. It's not that. Not at all. "Letting go" is release from a false sense of self, an illusion that we are separate and stand in sometimes antagonistic relations. When I let go of my sense of self-as-arbiter of what is right/wrong, good/bad, etc. and let go of seeing others as adventitious agents of interference with my well-being, then there's space for that well-being to become more evident.

If I continue to see Other, then there's an unwanted, unnecessary emotional overlay onto someone who just wants what I want, who just wants to be happy and whole and loved. And in that, we are the same and though this may make no sense right now, we are Loved.