Whenever you love, actually love anyone, there is no such thing as a model of actuality by which what is nice for them is dangerous for you, no selection they may probably make that’s proper for them and flawed for you, nothing they may offer you that might make love extra full.
This can be a troublesome notion for the Western thoughts to know — too straightforward to mistake for the psychopathology of codependence, too fast to slide into the tyrannical Romantic preferrred of merging.
At its coronary heart is one thing else altogether: a type of transcendent ego-dissolution underneath which the self ceases to be and turns into Being.
That’s what Ram Dass (April 6, 1931–December 22, 2019) explores in his landmark 1971 e-book Be Here Now (public library), largely chargeable for introducing historic Japanese teachings to the fashionable West.
He considers the paradox of our atypical expertise of loving:
Once we converse of falling in love, we’d discover {that a} slight restatement of the expertise would assist make clear our path. For if you say “I fell in love” with her or him you’re saying that she or he was the important thing that unlocked your coronary heart — the place inside your self the place you’re love. When the expertise is mutual, you’ll be able to see that the psychic chemistry of the state of affairs permits each companions to “fall in love” or to “awake into love” or to “come into the Spirit.” Since love is a state of being — and the Divine state at that — the state to which all of us yearn to return, we want to possess love. At finest we will attempt to possess the important thing to our hearts — our beloved — however ultimately we discover that even that’s unimaginable. To own the secret is to lose it.
A treatment for this paradox comes from a central idea in bhakti yoga: the non-dualistic merging of lover and beloved right into a single totality of being, an awesome common One — a notion finest articulated by the Indian non secular grasp Meher Baba (February 25, 1894–January 31, 1969), whom Ram Dass quotes:
Love has to spring spontaneously from inside: and it’s under no circumstances amenable to any type of interior or outer power. Love and coercion can by no means go collectively: however although love can’t be pressured on anybody, it may be woke up in him by means of love itself. Love is basically self-communicative: Those that do not need it catch it from those that have it. Real love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering energy and spreading itself, till ultimately it transforms everybody whom it touches.
Complement with the nice Zen trainer Thich Nhat Hanh’s abiding knowledge on how to love, then, for a Western counterpart, revisit the humanistic thinker and psychologist Erich Fromm on our greatest obstacle to love.
