Some things I came across when I was wondering about love:
There is love, and it is a deep thing
but there are deeper things than love.
First and last, man is alone.
He is born alone, and alone he dies
and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.
Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives
alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy
and alone.
Love is a thing of twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.
And underneath the great turbulent emotions of love, the
violent herbage,
lies the living rock of a single creature’s pride,
the dark, naif pride.
And deeper even than the bedrock of pride
lies the ponderous fire of naked life
with its strange primordial consciousness of justice
and its primordial consciousness of connection,
connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire
and the old, old final life-truth.
Love is of twoness, and is lovely
like the living life on the earth
but below all roots of love lies the bedrock of naked pride,
subterranean,
and deeper than the bedrock of pride is the primordial fire of
the middle
which rests in connection with the further forever unknowable
fire of all things
and which rocks with a sense of connection, religion
and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness
and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial
imperative.
All this is deeper than love.
Followed by this remark I heard in regards to whether or not love is an illusion:
Very much so, you know.
Everything around you is an illusion in fact. For example, if you are one light year away from the earth and you see the earth, you see events from one year ago. So what does that mean? Every event is so unreal that our perception of stuff mattering is almost comical.
One more thing is what love are we talking about here? Is it love towards the immortal stuff like music, science and art? or are we talking boy-girl love here?
First, let me come to the latter part
Human beings are fickle.
It is said in Bhagavad Gita
“canchalam hi manah Krishna
pramathi balavad drdham
tasyaham nigraham manye
vayor iva su-duskaram”
(Translation - Oh Krishna, the mind is fickle, turbulent , obstinate and restless. To control it seems more difficult than controlling a full blown storm)
Arjun mentions a problem that we have all faced at some point in our lives. We just cannot control our mind. One minute, I’m thinking of focussing on work and the next minute, here I am on Quora answering random questions. How many days have you procrastinated stuff? As Arjun mentioned, its easier to control a storm than to control the human brain.
This is the fickle mind that we are dealing with. It is just impossible to create a “real” bond between one such human mind and another….especially when one has choices in choosing another mind - that is, your love towards your mother can be true because , one can have only one mother…thus in fact your love is towards maternity than towards the mind of the mother itself…no one would love their mother if the mother wasn’t kind and loving….would you love your mother if she had harassed you verbally and physically as a kid? No…because, you love the concept of maternity…which is care…and not the human being, that is the mother itself.
Now coming to lovers, a person has more than one choice for another human being as a “lover”. Now he/she categorizes a lot before choosing one …and that narrows it down to around a million rather than a billion choices. Now can we trust our fickle mind to bond “really” with another such fickle mind? The answer is no, the bond is not real. It is an illusion.
This illusion is created because we want it to be created. As things stand, no “normal” human being will like to admit that deep inside they are lonely. How much ever you claim to love a person, all the person can do is stand by and watch during some of your sufferings. Sure you’ll claim that him/her “being there for you” is a great sign….but no, its not a great sign…its a sign of weakness…if your mind is strong enough, you won’t need anyone to “be there for you”
Popularisation of idiotic things like mocking the guy who eats alone or mocking a guy who is single and forty years old in our sex-minded society is what has led to the popularisation of the concept of love. People want to believe that they have found their true lover….so that they aren’t “forty, single and eating alone”…
To sum it up - Love towards abstract things is ironically real…mainly because abstract things are a perception of one’s own mind…and hence your mind is totally attached to it.
Love towards “real” things is ironically an illusion…mainly because both of your minds are fickle
The second one makes me think about what we say when we love someone and contributes to me seeing it as more of an illusion than anything else. Because we don’t really love some ONE but rather the traits they exhibit. Like what is said in regards to mothers, it is doubtful one would love a mother if she treated them cruelly. The traits that we exhibit aren’t us either since if they were we would be that way all the time. It kind of blows a hole in my hopeful conception of what love is and makes it seem like more of an illusion than what science says about it.
The poem also raises a few concerns for me as well.
