The Real of Love
I wish to mention that in recent years I have taken some interest in science and its view of reality, with much of the emphasis in science on chemistry, physics, and biology. This picture of the world, built from matter and energy, strikes me as a narrow view of reality.
In my understanding and experience, nothing should remain excluded from reality, nothing at all. Significant areas of life, including love, perceptions, thoughts, profound human experiences, and especially consciousness, belong to the field of reality and deserve no marginalising or cutting away whatsoever.
In talking with you during this period about love, I offer a Dharma perspective drawn from the teachings of the Buddha. A word well known in Pali, and equally in Sanskrit, carries this theme: Metta in Pali, Maitri in Sanskrit. This word holds a threefold meaning. The first, and the most common one used in the Buddhist tradition, refers to loving kindness. That stands as just one of three primary meanings. The second meaning is friendship. The root of the word conveys friendship, both received and given. The third meaning points to love.
I have one of my two books of poems here Poems from the Edge of Time with three poems to read in this talk. Expressions of love can show through acts of giving, service, sharing and activities. We know the love of creativity, love of being, love of a way of life, and much more. When the Buddha spoke of love, a category that includes romantic love, he used a key word: immeasurable. Love, loving kindness, and friendship convey an immeasurable expression, inviting us to explore deeply the extraordinary significance of metta.
The Buddha used the word metta alongside other related terms within the Brahma Vihara. Brahma means God. The word vihara means to abide or dwell within. For example, monks staying in a monastery dwell in the vihara, the place of abiding. A human being with deep experiences of immeasurable metta abides in God. In India, Brahma stood as the single god, not yet part of the numerous names of Gods that developed centuries later. Guardians of the Sanskrit texts, the Brahmins taught the ancient Vedas, offered chanting, rituals, animal sacrifices and mantras, in their role as servants of Brahma.
The Buddha felt comfortable using the word God. Buddhist translators dropped the word God for the Supreme and used the word divine instead. The Pali word for divine is dibba (adjective meaning heavenly. Another closely related Pali term is deva meaning a god or radiant being. The word divine may have is origin in deva. A diva today means an adored goddess or a highly temperamental performer. Secular culture has its gods in the cinema, music and sport.
The Buddha felt free to use the word God and equally free to speak without use of the word. This meant that deeply religious people who trusted in God, who believed in God, knew the Buddha could speak to them because he encouraged abiding with God. To abide in God meant to abide deeply in love, compassion, deep appreciative joy and equanimity/resilience/steadfastness.
People holding belief in God, and people holding no belief in God, agnostic or otherwise, could come to the Buddha and feel heard. His concern centred on the end of suffering rather than upholding atheist, agnostic, or theistic views. This marks the radical nature of the teaching, a beautiful teaching, generous in spirit, to the letter and precision with language.
Our Western culture centres on the heart, on feelings, emotions bound up together. This shows itself beautifully among our poets, novelists and in the theatre. Forms of love reveal in music and dance. Our arts carry the thread running in a variety of forms that nourish our being We experience love of music, love of the written word and love of creativity found in statues and paintings, Love sits at the centre of culture and the arts standing as confirmation of a statement of the real of love.
Poem One
In exploring the theme of love, I will read a poem.
CAVE OF THE HEART
A love that’s pure adapts itself to thought
we found deep in the cave with truth thus taught t
hen light falls upon what matters is so near
wonderful, free from limits, truly blessed
the flow of loving kindness without fear.
As goodness dances with a beat in season
while this love vibrates for such good reason
and softly falling raindrops are quiet
a sacrifice, a gift to the season,
the chance to meet life’s sweetest diet.
Applaud the passion for kissing night’s air
and fulfil necessary signals flare
abide free with not even a wish left s
o real of love unties the knots that freeze l
ets go of habits and the need to please.
A tiny eye arrests the movement kind
a shooting star catches, we can’t forget
yet wanting jealousy grabs the mind
ache never touches love, a pain not known,
the heart so big and the desire so blind
We abide in love forever growing.
Sometimes love arrives in the sweetest of moments, something inside our being responds. Such momentary presentations of love acts; a light within us, capable of landing anywhere. This movement confirms the best of us, and it can show itself in communication, appearing when preparation exists for love to move through the being. I have in mind here awareness, interest, curiosity, empathy and the ability to keep in touch with another, with ourselves, and with whatever has touched love within us before.
Consider this: we have all listened to a piece of music, listened to it again, and listened to it yet again, and sometimes we notice a change, a new appreciation, between one listening and the last. The same happens when we return to a novel, a meditation book, or a poem. We remain infinitely adaptable, infinitely flexible, amid all the changes we go through. Whatever we looked at before refreshes itself when we look again; we see something fresh and touching. In this depth, we feel glad we gave that extra attention, glad we went back to the music, the words in the book. The new reveals itself in the old as well.
The same principle applies to everybody we know. It applies when we see a human being standing in front of us with a presence. There is a genuine connection to that person. In that communication, we can set aside the past, along with things once said, things once problematic. The old perceptions take a distinctly second place.
Holding onto the past acts like a cloud passing over the sun; a cloud moves across consciousness, lands in consciousness, and tricks us into thinking we see the present of the person. Our reaction confirm, we see the past. If the person behaves in a way similar to that unsatisfactory past, the perception doubles the impact on consciousness.
When things double in this way, love pays the expense. We lose the ability to know love, sense it, see it, or express it. Trapped in a contraction of the past, we project a judgmental view of the other in the present moment. The same trap applies to how we view ourselves. Love functions as a liberating force, a freeing up movement. We may find such a movement becomes a poem confirming the transcendent nature of love.
I would say some highlights of my romantic life over the decades find their way into poems. A person might read a poem in my book and remark, “My God, Christopher, that must have been a nightmare.”
I need to clarify: I write not only about my own experiences but sometimes about other people’s challenging experiences in their romantic life. So far, my romantic life has never produced a nightmare.
A poem may spring from years of a relationship, precious encounters or a one-to-one meeting over a coffee. A woman in a poem read one of my poems and emailed me, “Christopher, I know who you’re writing about.”
She was right!
Part 2 in the next day or two. Includes two more poems on the theme.
