LOVE -- ITS TRUTH, UNTRUTH AND OUTRIGHT FALSITY

LOVE -- ITS TRUTH, UNTRUTH AND OUTRIGHT FALSITY

Human love is no love at all for it is ever tinged with selfishness. Only after extinction of the ego does love surface from the hidden depths of the soul where in secret it resides nourishing manifested life. This love is the essence of existence and is the driving force of life on earth but it is much misunderstood to be the blind attachment humans suffer from which they in ignorance choose to term love.

So long as ignorance persists, love cannot be. Even a mother's love falls short of this absolute ideal of true love for even she is limited by her finite ideas about her children. So long as the idea persists that one is a body, real love can never be for love is essentially spiritual in nature.

Love is a 'spontaneous overflow' of pure emotion 'out of the fullness of the heart'. It is a selfless act of giving, either one way or in equal reciprocity without the impulsion to seek or to repay. Spontaneous and spiritual without a tinge of necessity tainting its intent or content -- such is love. And it is only possible when one's material desires have been fulfilled, one's earthly thirst quenched. Till such time love is merely carnal craving wrapped up in the muslin of confusing culture with all its appetites and appendages camouflaged and concealed behind masses of roses that rot by the hour. So is earthly love tainted and tarnished by coarse contact with the corrupting flesh.

And yet the dream will not go, will not let go of fallible mortal to sink to his existential essence. Ignorance is deep and dividing and is the whole of this compounded lot called man, and ignorance itself disappears in transcendental realisation, love remains beyond bounds. So, the whole of earthly love is but a misnomer and is really the preparation for what truly love is, what will one day emerge from the forest of the heart within even as the Hrishi's realisation emanates from the depths of his being.

So long as clinging to this body is, love cannot be. The demands of flesh being met, love takes to wings in its flights of fancy beyond earthly realms. It is a rare visitation, this love, which possesses the human heart and spreads to every pore of a person's being, rendering him divine for the while before the dream breaks on collision with the structured scheme of things in society and all its organised demands. Then the touch has been felt once as love recedes to its ante-chamber, waiting for the fullness of time when it will blossom afresh with the lover's earthly vanities vanquished, earthly bonds sundered and the wholeness of his being readied unto submission to this massive flooding of the light from beyond and the love from deep deep within.

The fundamental problem in this efflorescence of love divine is the very structure of interdependent society with all its strictures, impositions and conditional requirements for the effective collective efficiency of gregarious living. Here interaction is inevitable from close contact and exchange of hearts natural, but the free flow of emotions and combination of couples thereof as life's partners becomes necessarily difficult as structural strictures stand in the way till society is rendered free of such impediments that lie in the way of individual fulfilment. Towards that end of individualism is Euro-American society geared in modern times and man finds greater occasion for free fulfilment of his cherished dreams and aspirations. But the rest of the world is yet to follow this model, as religion and archaic laws and practices hold societies as yet not ready to subscribe to such supposed profanities of the human soul.

The evolution of man has never been uniform the world over owing to geographical, racial and, in consequence, cultural differences. The degree and the direction of social evolution has widely differed across terrestrial regions and this has led to widely differing perspectives on individual freedom and social control among the different races of the world. Modernity is moving in the direction of increasing social freedom but the path is strewn with the rough stones of resistance from archaic institutions of religion and social mores. Hence, it will some time still before the expressions of emotion find free play in the terrestrial scheme of things everywhere.

But will that alter the state of things in truth? Will love be true only when social restrictions to its free flow removed? What about the restrictions imposed by flesh itself? What about the demands of the flesh, the carnal appetites corrupting the course of love sublime, caging it after clipping its wings with the instruments of material intelligence? Whither the poetry of love amidst the pervasive material gravity pulling the soul down to dwell in the dungeon of the body? No, mere freedom social, flights intellectual and conversation cultural will not let the spirit fly unto 'Ionian skies' where love undisturbed dwells ever in undiminished glory, where the drain of energy does not dilute the content of love and drag it down unto adjustment concrete which is the shadow of real love. For love in truth to be, love must be set free from the confines of the flesh and allowed to soar in the limpid spaces that lie beyond. There shall commingle souls free to make the music that is love and free each other from the shackles of all that bind the Spirit in the maze of means and ends.

Unfinished and expanding ...

Written by Sugata Bose