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From our newsletter (Vol8No2):
Love, Longing and Loss
When I was sixteen, I wrote an article
for my school magazine and called it "The Different Aspects
of Love". Wow! Looking back I wonder now what a mere sixteen-year-old
knew about love, let alone its different faces. Now decades later,
I return to ponder on the amazing, miraculous and paradoxical
nature of human love.
Buddhists and Hindus believe that the human condition is suffering.
For most of my adult life I have pondered on the truth or falsity
of this basic premise that forms the beginning and end of these
two great spiritual teachings. Nowhere is this truer than in
the multi faceted diamond called love. The highest of ecstasy,
whether found in erotic or divine spheres, love remains true
to the twin suffering of longing and loss. The suffering engendered
by love's longing to fulfil itself either in union with the Inner
Beloved or a warm body next to us, is inexplicably sweet, poignant
and always lonely. Assailed by restlessness, an inability to
sit or stand, eat or starve, the lover's suffering is a fever
forever in search of a cold. Or in search of a Soul. Yes, the
human condition is suffused with pain and pleasure, a paradox
that plagues us. The exquisite pain of loving someone is also
the reward of that same love. Another paradox: picture the restless
yearning and wandering of a person who searches for the beloved
and once found, is equally torn with jealousy, sleepless nights
of wondering where the beloved is when out of his or her sight.
He, who longs before to be in the arms of his one true love,
is now tormented by the imagined or real loss of this sweet object
of his love. Strange are the ways of love indeed.
Longing is a restless, nebulous feeling difficult to define.
It is not a feeling one particularly would seek. Yet, one has
little control over when it comes and when it goes. Its source
is mystical. It comes in odd times of a person's life. As I said
earlier, I recall having this feeling when as a child growing
up in Malaya. It came strongest when the day was ending, the
brief twilight of the tropics. A glimpse of the divine, lasting
the length of a breath and totally inexplicable, especially for
a child. Now as an adult, I have the words to name the feeling.
I have the knowledge to describe the call of the Inner Self.
It is the call to spirituality. It is an invitation to be in
union with the Great Tao, Brahma or God. Now I can retrieve a
residual memory of long ago, buried deep, a memory before birth.
For the Chinese Taoists, the Buddhists and the Hindus, the Self
is our inner God or Goddess, our inner Beloved, in Carl Jung's
view. Longing for the Self is therefore primordial. It is only
still when the most laudable of human emotions, divine or spiritual
love, is found within oneself. This form of Self-love then liberates
and exhilarates. It brings bliss, peace and a stillness of mind
in the face of pain and suffering.
On the other hand, love outside oneself tends to bring pain when
we suffer its loss. A loss of one's outer beloved does not necessarily
be bad however. For some, loss brings new life, new growth. This
is dependent on our mind set. Is this a mind that can accept
every life's event as a manifestation of divine love? Or a mindset
that can only accept the benefits of love and reject its losses?
Love's loss is, of course, most celebrated universally at death.
Death is always someone's loss whether for the living or dead.
However, death is seen as liberation in all great religions.
The Chinese Taoists, Hindus and Buddhists see death paradoxically
as yet another stage, another change, a transient passage to
some place where we will be born again. So love, longing and
loss are all linked in their view as an infinite spiral, spinning
forever and ever towards the ultimate liberation of the soul
from our body and ego, the source of all our suffering.
In Australia?
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