This was one of my talks in Bali, and I promised to post it in two sections.
Love is who you are and knowing who you are, so from the nondual perspective, the definition of love is full identification with the Self as your true identity. Duality creates the confusion that love is a ‘special’ feeling. Though we do experience it as a feeling, in truth, as powerful as it is, love is neither special nor really a feeling. It is difficult to understand the equation between Consciousness and love because Consciousness is free of feelings, whereas love seems to be a feeling quite separate from Consciousness. But there is actually no difference because reality is non-dual, so feelings are never apart from Consciousness. Like any other object subtle or gross, feelings are made of and arise out of Consciousness, like the spider’s web is made up of the spider, but the spider is not the web. (More on this further on).
When we don’t know who we are, we run away from or towards things we think will make us feel good, safe, happy whatever. Seeking love in or through others is perhaps the biggest drive there is. Even animals display it as a firm attachment pattern assures security for infants, human or otherwise. The difference with humans is that our ability to love and be loved is fostered according to the health of the attachment to and from our primary caregivers, on whom we were wholly dependent as children. It’s no wonder then, that we seek to attach ourselves to another when childhood ends, either to replace what we had, to seek or run from what we never had.
This is an important point and conversation to have because loving and being loved is not only central to a happy life, but to moksa. As inquirers, if we have not resolved the love issue, this is often a stumbling block, either because we are looking for love in others, or because we block love in our lives. Human love is a reflection of and the gateway to love as identity in the Self. Though dependence on someone to love us is bondage, the irony is that if we cannot love and be loved, we are just as bound to and by fear. Moksa is not likely to obtain because we cannot say yes to Isvara. When you know who you are, discrimination is always on, but fear does not come into the equation of love, or anything else.
If we are blessed to receive the grace of Self-knowledge, the search is over and we do not need to chase anything. Firstly because we know that objects subtle and gross are only apparently, not actually real. The joy is never in objects; we are the source of all joy. Secondly, it’s not that we don’t enjoy objects, but whether we get what we want or not is not going to make a difference because we are already whole and complete. We are satisfied and happy with or without objects. We will love and be loved without fear because we cannot not love. It’s impossible. Love loves through you and as you, there is no way to stop it. And why would you want to?
Love and loving is lovely, but it comes with many pitfalls when we are identified as a person. I am sure we have all at some point in our lives met someone who rocks our boat, like Hemalekha does to Hemachuda in Tripura Rahasya. Most of us have experienced saying or someone saying to us, ‘I could fall in love with you’ or ‘I am in love with you’. We know how that feels. The impact of those words is profound. It’s a very powerful feeling. So much so that it changes how we see everything. Suddenly, all our senses are acutely heightened and in overdrive. It’s like we have electricity coursing through every cell of our body. We feel intensely alive and everything appears enhanced. We are on top of the world, tripping out on cloud nine. Without Self-knowledge, the famous rose tinted glasses are firmly in place, and we are fully under the thrall of limerence.
Whatever it is about this particular person who affects us this way, we feel blown away by them. It’s a feeling that is impossible to deny once it bites us. What gets blown away? Well, if we are hit very deeply and think love is a feeling, usually our discrimination goes out the window, and an all-consuming desire for the object replaces it. Even if we retain some measure of control, we know that there is something unusual about this encounter, something that touches us far more indelibly than others, and we are hooked.
Once hooked, thoughts about that person take over our mental landscape, usually unbidden, seemingly without volition. Why this person, and not the thousands of others we have met or know? If everyone is you, why does one person have the power to attract and affect us in this way? Chemistry is a strange thing, but it is more than that. Who knows, but as nothing comes our way by chance, clearly there is a karmic reason for everything.
It may be appropriate to act on the feeling, and it may not be. There is nothing wrong with acting on a desire like this if it is not contrary to dharma, and you know that there is nothing to gain or lose by doing so. As a Self-realized person who knows there is no real ‘other’, and is not looking for moksa, if you decide to respond, discrimination takes precedence. You first carefully assess the karma involved before acting or not acting. However attractive the feeling, it is often very wise to say no to Isvara. If we don’t, the karma that ensues is on us. As the song goes, some things look better baby, just passing through.
That said, many people walk away from opportunities to love and be loved because the fear of getting hurt is too great, or as a result of feelings of unworthiness and low self-esteem. But love does not let us off the hook that easily. We don’t escape risk by never risking anything. Though life will break us without Self-knowledge, it is natural to love. We have to love, we have to feel, to risk our heart, to be swallowed up by love because it is the reason we are here on earth.
Because love is our nature, the drive to love is the drive to live, and it is a great teacher. A life without love is unbearable, despite the certainty of loss from which nobody can protect us. Running away from love or living alone won’t protect us either, for solitude will also break us with its yearning. And when it happens that we are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, if we are lucky, we will grow from it. If not in Self-knowledge, at least out of such suffering the mind starts to go inwards towards the Self.
When a magnetic attraction to love knocks us off our feet, there may not be anything wrong with acting on this kind of impulse, even if you don’t know who you are. After all, many people find great happiness having a certain special person in their lives. Either way, there will be consequences. When we gain intimacy we may lose a certain amount of freedom. Saying yes to the fact of ‘another’ person in our lives requires a lot of readjustments and some compromise, even if we are free as the Self. There are gains and losses no matter what we do or don’t do. That’s how life works.
An intimate relationship can be a very beautiful thing. At its best, it is a symbiote of mutual nourishment — offering a new world of interdependent growth undergirded by a web of trust, respect, tenderness, and ‘freedom to be’. As a person, one is profoundly changed for the better by this kind of nourishing love. After the limerence wears off, which it always does, a good relationship becomes something greater than its parts. One becomes more expansive and purely oneself, relatively speaking, of course. And conversely, shutting off love through fear makes us contract, smaller.
There are no levels to love – love is love. Yet with people with whom we have a sexual romantic relationship, we experience a manifestation of love that brings both deeper connection and greater risk. When intimacy and trust are part of it, projections give way to the depth of presence and complexes are transformed by the validation of love. It is indeed the great compensation of deep intimacy with a beloved that seemingly creates dependence, yet can also nurture not only greater independence, but a mirror to see and love oneself with the confidence one may not have possessed before. Such is the transformative power of love as our nature, that even dualistic love can ‘give us to ourselves’.
The poet and geologist Forrest Gander wrote that in our most intimate relations we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory, that love may be the supreme creative act, the way it remakes the self and the world between selves. In a love poem Gander considers how in such combinatorics of intimacy the partners are “not fused, not bonded, not dependent, but nested.” He writes:
Without you I survived and with you
I live again in a radical augmentation
of identity because we have
effaced our outer limits, because
we summoned each other. In you,
I cast my life beyond itself.
While his writing is dualistic as one cannot ‘augment’ the Self, and being ‘nested’ with another is very much about security, it is also about being wholly at home in oneself. Relationships can be a source of expansive personal growth and satisfaction. But dualistic love comes with great risk. For those identified as a person, and love is not known to be sourced in the Self, if desire is thwarted, or the object is unobtainable or lost for whatever reason, what misery ensues! People literally die of heartbreak, it can be that bad. This is the extreme downside of loving and being attached to ‘another’ person. If you think you and they are a person, the price of love is loss. And it is inevitable.
Love can thus be the most dangerous of all drugs. It can break us into pieces. One tiny sip and ‘you’ could be lost – or go entirely blind and mad. It moves the furniture of our lives around, turns things upside down. It drives people to do the most insane things, even murder. We cannot avoid it without risk but pursuing it can either bring disaster or joy to our lives. A lot depends on what drives us towards or away from it. Lack, or knowledge-based discrimination?
In Hemachuda’s case, he is a prince, a warrior. He is handsome, cultivated, has wealth, prestige and is seemingly lacking in nothing. But he is nonetheless at the mercy of love as a feeling, and has no immunity to becoming enslaved by it. His desires blind him to everything that was actually important when he met Hemalekha. He sees only the projection of his lust fueled-fantasies. He wants what he wants and that’s that.
Desire comes in three phases – pria, the first stage, the ‘hit’. The second stage is pramoda, where we are now engaged and closer to getting what we want, and the last stage is moda, the consummation of our desire. If the desire for the object is a fire that burns hot and the object of our desire is available and willing, as Hemalekha is to Hemachuda, we go through all three stages, usually very fast. A fire like this is hard to contain. Consummation may feel amazing, but then we have a whole new life changing situation in our lives. How things go at this point is anyone’s guess.
Hemachuda was utterly incapable of seeing what was really behind the powerful feeling of magnetic attraction was not desire for the love object. It was the desire to experience love for himself, which he already possessed but did not know it. Poor Hemachuda does not know what he has let himself in for. He has picked on the wrong object to fulfil his fantasies – and he is about to be very rudely divested of them. Romantic sexual love interests are the most likely to blind us. Limerence is a very real thing, relatively speaking, of course.
When we feel that strongly for another person and are caught up in the unstoppable freight train of the intoxication of needs- based love, it is almost impossible to see love attachments for what they are without making excuses and adjusting our relationship to them according to Self-knowledge, not our personal conditioning. By that stage nothing will convince us that what we require from the object of our desire – fulfilment of our fantasies, security, happiness – they are incapable of delivering. No wonder disappointment follows so quickly on the heels of limerence. Nobody can live up to our fantasy of them and no object can make us happy for long, even when we do find the love of our life. Expecting someone to make up our love deficit is the definition of bondage for both parties.
If you know you are the Self, you are free and never depend on anything. Though you are quite capable of experiencing the same exhilarating emotional highs, you are aware of them as impermanent objects known to you, so you do not get lost in the feelings. It’s not as exciting, but you have the reins of your emotions firmly in check, and the freight train of desire passes you by. The house does not burn down, there is no conflagration. Though you are not against having a relationship, you never seek or ever really ‘enter’ one. If a relationship appears in your life, it exists in your life as an ‘extension’ of who you are, because you see the beloved as non-separate from you. And you know that what you and your beloved most need is freedom from and for the beloved.
Most people do seek relationships, however, often quite desperately. And when they find one, they enter it because of blind attraction based on need, or as an end to loneliness, to insufficiency. The desirer and the object of desire are required to be dependent on each other, especially if marriage ensues. Tamas produces “motivated blindness,” the unique ability all of us have which inhibits our ability to perceive inconvenient data, such as seeing the real origin of our attraction to objects, or see them for who they really are, and not a projection of our own desires.
Freedom from dependence on objects for our happiness does not require not having or not entering relationships. It requires acknowledging the blind spots and cutting the psychological bondage to and dependence on the people in our lives with whom we have karma, or with whom we want karma, particularly a romantic love interest.
Love is faithful only to itself. It does not have needs. It always endures and we can never ‘lose’ anyone we love. We only lose binding attachments to them because we see them as the Self, while loving and accepting their personal program as it is and, for what it is, only apparently real. Even if people we love deeply die or leave us, we know that we are never less than complete, even if we miss the physical presence of the beloved, which is a natural human feeling.
Gaining a love object means the end of desire, which is what opens the door to experiencing love as our true nature directly available to us. Imagine. That powerful feeling can be constant when you know what it is. We never fall in love because falling in love is a fallacy. Anything you fall into you will fall out of. And you cannot fall out of love with yourself when you know it is who you are.
