Ongoing Process

One of the most fundamental human needs is love. More specifically, we need an experience of love, which is a conscious awareness of simultaneously being loved and loving in return.

Most of the time, most people seek and find this love in another human being. But as we all know, this means of experiencing love is fraught with hazards. Insecurities, deceit, miscommunication, or just evolving personalities routinely threaten love relationships. But even the most stable and lasting love between humans never completely satisfies that deepest yearning. While our relationship with our human lover may create a beautiful microcosm of love, at some level there always remains an awareness that our deepest need is for something larger, for the macrocosm of love.

But what is that macrocosm? Since the Axial Age, our prophets have been attempting to tell us, though their messages have been composed in countless ways in the context of each culture. However it is formulated, the basic message seems to be that the macrocosm is a love relationship with Life itself.

The trouble is that “Life itself” is typically very difficult for us to love. For whatever reason, humans are deeply predisposed towards subject-object relationships. We find it relatively easy to love another human, an animal, a place, a thing. As we mature, we can even love more abstract objects such as a community, a cause, or an ideology. But the macrocosm of love relationship is just too big. Indeed, the mystical tradition tells us that it is quite explicitly too big. It transcends the relativistic nature of words and ideas; it is not of the nature of object-ness. From a subjective perspective, there’s just nothing there to love.

Of course, our prophets (and especially the institutions which took up their cause) gave us all kinds of words and ideas. God, Brahman, Tao, Heaven, Void, Karma, Salvation… untold volumes of thought attempt to capture the macrocosm of love relationship. But they never seem to really work out for the vast majority of people. Literal interpretations on the one hand leads to fundamentalism and its inevitable violence, while liberal interpretations on the the other hand reduce the message to a meaningless mass of relativism. As the classic Zen wisdom goes, a finger may point to the moon, but one will never see the moon if one keeps looking at the finger.

So then what are we to do? This macrocosm of love is reported to be available to us everywhere and all the time. I think most of us have even tasted it to one degree or another, even if only for fleeting moments. Yet most all of us seem helpless to experience it consistently.

It has also been reported that this macrocosm of love relationship is preexistent and perpetual. That we can never “find” it because it was never lost to us. We simply do not know how to recognize it. We are stuffed full of preconceptions of what that relationship must feel like or what it must bring into our lives and, it failing to mold itself to our expectations, we conclude that it isn’t present.

How then shall we open ourselves to the experience of this love which is already here? When we open ourselves, all too often we feel pain. And we are conditioned down to our deepest instincts that pain is the most fundamental characteristic of that which is dangerous, that which must be fought or fled from.

Perhaps that, then, is the answer. To know the macrocosm of love relationship, we must let in the pain. We must learn to overcome the reflexes that served us when we were less conscious but now hold us back. We must learn that the pain of Life is somehow part of the love of Life.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Life, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.