May 2013
By Suma Varughese
In a world rife with toil and trouble, love is the redemptive force that gives us the heroism, strength and commitment to triumph over the human enterprise. But how do we learn to love, asks Suma Varughese. Legend has it that when King Babar’s son, Humayun, fell dangerously ill and his life was despaired of, Babar walked around the sick boy’s bed three times and asked that the death be transferred to him. It is stated that from that time onward Humayun began to recover and the condition of Babar went from bad to worse and eventually he passed away. In the book, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman writes about Gary and Mary Jane Chauncey, who were travelling by train in the US with their wheelchair-bound 11-year-old daughter Andrea, a victim of cerebral palsy. A freak accident plunged the train into a river. The couple strove heroically to save Andrea. Before they sank to their death, they managed to hand her through a window to rescuers. The Taj Mahal may not, after all, be India’s greatest monument to love. When Falguni Devi, the wife of Dashrath Manjhi, a poor labourer in a Bihari village called Gehlour, died because her village was too far away from the nearest hospital to get the help she needed in time, Dashrath Manjhi vowed that no one else should be subject to that fate. Single-handedly for 22 years, Manjhi dug a hole through the mountain blocking their access to the nearest town and forged a road that shortened the distance between the two places from 75 kms to 1 km. Almost all of the sublime stories that document our planet’s history revolve in some way around love. The love of a parent for its child, a man for his mate, the love between siblings, man and animal, animal and animal. And if we were but more sensitive we would have been able to document the love that runs through the veins of the plant and mineral kingdom too, and which can be heard in the music of the spheres. Eknath Easwaran: Love is our native state Indeed the saying that love makes the world go round, is probably very true because love causes us to care and care compels us to act. Every invention, every reform, every social act that has benefited mankind has had as its basis, the emotions of love and care. Wherever you look But we don’t need to look at history or the daily newspapers for proof of love. Love’s imprint can be found in the smallest of incidents, transfiguring ordinary moments into sunlit cameos. My own list of favorite moments includes the sight of two little urchins travelling aboard my local suburban train. One was about four and the other seven. The seven year-old fished out an apple, and grandly offered it to the smaller boy. “Kha jha,” he said with an air of supreme opulence. The little boy took a bite of the apple with gusto and handed it back to his patron, who took a bite too before returning it to the small boy. From bite to bite the apple exchanged hands until it was demolished, and I don’t believe the look of ineffable satisfaction on the faces of the two friends came only from the nourishment of the fruit. A few days back, I went to buy a tender coconut from a tiny hole in the wall shop that also stored coconuts in its front. The shop was run by a woman of about 30 with her two children, a girl of about eight and a boy of about three. Just then a man appeared from behind me. The faces of the children lit up. “Daddy,” they squealed. The look on the father’s face told me everything I needed to know. I was witnessing a happy family. It is said that when Shiva discovered Brahma’s design of human life with its many sorrows and troubles interspersed with brief moments of joy, he was so distraught that he immersed himself in meditation and emerged with yoga – as the way out of the cycle of birth and death. But perhaps what leavens this perilous human enterprise and gives us the strength and will to continue is the presence of this thing called love. It is love that kisses our wounds and makes them all right. It is love that pours balm over our sorrow and enables us to get up next morning and feed the children. It is love that gives us the heroism, sacrifice, strength and dynamism we need to triumph over life and in doing so, it richly embellishes our life with meaning. Most of us live through the trials and tribulations of our lives because of the love of someone or the love for someone. But the power of love is even more lofty. For it is love that unravels the whole human adventure and leads us safely back to God.
Love is all there. It is not just the grace that cocoons us through hard times or the prize that presses us to give of our best. It is our very nature. Love is who we are. And love is what the universe is. The whole of creation vibrates with love. There is nowhere love is not. For God is love. In the introduction to his book, A More Ardent Fire, Eknath Easwaran quotes the Christian mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg who said, “The soul is made of love and must ever strive to return to love. Therefore it can never find rest nor happiness in other things. It must lose itself in love.” Easwaran comments thus on the quote: “Once we grasp the sense of these quiet statements, they can change our lives forever. They mean that being able to love fully, unconditionally, is our native state. We cannot lose this native capacity, cannot get rid of it even if we try. The most we can manage to do is cut ourselves off from it, burying our capacity for love under layer after layer of the self-centered conditioning that accumulates so easily in the modern world.
But that conditioning can be removed, and when it is removed what remains is our original goodness, a capacity for love that is, in principle, without limit.” What a promise! What a possibility! No matter how distant we may be from realizing this glorious vision, how comforting to know that it is always there as our very own nature, waiting patiently for us to return to it. The journey begins So how do we begin this journey towards the center of ourselves? Like all spiritual journeys, it begins with knowing ourselves. Discovering where we are in the love game. In all likelihood, we may find ourselves dauntingly far from our goal, especially if we are spurred by heady concepts such as unconditional love and absolute love. As we study ourselves, we discover our own selfishness, and how hard it seems to prioritize the needs of the other. At lunchtime, we automatically reach for the last cutlet on the plate even though it is clear that our younger sibling has the same idea. On the road, we refuse to give side to the driver horning from behind us, out of sheer cussedness. At work we scheme and strategise to get ahead of our colleagues. Our own needs and preferences prevent us from being available even to those we profess to love. Your daughter may shake your knee for attention but you are too busy watching cricket on TV to notice her. Your wife adores karela but you can’t stand it so you never buy the vegetable. And blocks come in the way of restoring or renewing ties that have frayed with time. You know you need to develop your relationship with your sibling but find you have nothing to say to her. You would love to have a closer bond with your parents but the past comes in the way. You love your girl friend but that does not stop you from telling her which job to take or which color outfit to wear. From the closest ties to the most distant, our capacity to relate to the other is muffled and distorted by our insistent wants, needs, dependencies and preferences. We cannot reach out to the other because we are too caught up in ourselves. Nathaniel Branden: the guru of self-esteemSays Osho, the late maverick founder of the Pune-based Osho Meditation Center, “At the lowest, love is a kind of politics, power politics. Wherever love is contaminated by the idea of domination, it is politics. Whether you call it politics or not is not the question, it is political. And millions of people never know anything about love except this politics – the politics that exists between husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends.” There is no relationship we can succeed at if we do not go beyond our ego, because the ego will inevitably foment conflict. Eckhart Tolle, one of the best known spiritual teachers of our times and the author of The Power of Now and A New Earth, writes on his website, “The ego singles someone out and makes them special. It uses that person to cover up the constant underlying feeling of discontent, of “not enough,” of anger and hate, which are closely related.” It is clear then that in order for there to be room for the other, ‘we’ must vacate the consciousness. In other words we need to free ourselves of our constant pre-occupation with our feelings, our past, our pain and our needs. We need in short to work on releasing the ego, more clearly called Ahamkara or the I-maker in Sanskrit. How do we do this? Love yourself The first step to eliminating the ego, which most spiritual teachers omit to explain, is to cultivate its health. There is no way we can eliminate our ego if we are caught in the clutches of poor self-esteem or self-hatred. The more insecure and unsure we are of ourselves, the more tightly we clutch our ego for it is all we have as self-protection. What is more, the less we love ourselves, the more dependent we are on the love, approval, appreciation and support of the world. Is it any wonder then that we are unable to love the other? We cannot give what we do not have and our own needs are too urgent for us to be able to spare time and energy for the needs of others. It is imperative therefore that we build up a healthy self-love and self-appreciation; we need to have confidence in
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