What About Love?

Post Three: What About Love?

“Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their books. But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.” This is a rather confusing quote from William Shakespeare on the subject of romantic love. I deliberately began with a difficult to understand quotation because love is a difficult subject to understand. Philosophers and poets have tried to define it for centuries. Literature is replete with odes and opinions on the subject. But most of us don’t normally equate Buddhism or Native American spiritualism with the topic of romance. What do these practices say about the subject, and can they help us in our relationships? Love is blind we’re told. Buddhism is about the opening of the eyes and the Crow Indians say, “The eyes of man see things the tongue cannot pronounce.”

        I once went on the Internet to look up some dating websites. The listings that came up were numbered 1-10 out of 11,274. I wondered, why so many single’s websites? In a world of 6 billion people, surely it shouldn’t be this hard to meet someone compatible. Is this why love has been called “A Universal Migraine”? What’s it all about?

The Seneca Indians say, “Even in Paradise, living alone would be hell.” Buddhist Nichiren Daishonin said that people in love should be united “like a pair of eyes, or the two wings of a bird”. It’s a nice image, but why doesn’t the picture often seem that pretty in reality?

            One thing that love and religion have in common is that people often seem to turn to them in emptiness or desperation. We’re unfulfilled, scared or lonely so we turn to faith or love to fill the void in our discontented souls. We’re needy creatures. Often, when we begin a relationship, we ask the other person to give us something we don’t think we have, to take us to a new level of contentment. But the paradox is, we’re also asking them to repair the damage done to us by people from our past. We all have a scar or two from our parent or an ex-girlfriend or ex-husband. We say to our new partner, make me forget all that. Our new relationship is irrevocably connected to our past ones.

            Many people have what the Buddhists call Heavy Karma in this area. Sometimes memory is a curse. Compromised relationships in the past become compromised relationships in the future. We develop harmful patterns. What’s past becomes prologue. We’re caught in a trap of self-defeating circular repetition. As the Lakota Indians say, “Whatever the world does, it does in a circle”. People caught in this ouroboros just cannot have a mature, mutually beneficial relationship.  But this karma can be changed. One benefit of these two philosophies is the strengthening of the self, and the repairing of a fractured sense of identity. Through our faith and practice we improve ourselves and allow ourselves to escape the vicious cycle.

            The course of true love never did run smooth. Maybe it was never meant to. But those people who manage to achieve a strong, positive sense of self, and who discover their true inner nature—the nature the Great Spirit intended and what the Buddhists call our “Buddha nature”—should have a much easier time than those who don’t. The more comfortable you are with yourself, the more comfortable you’ll be with your lover. This practice can help you with that.

            If love is “the noblest frailty of the mind”’ we should turn that frailty into a great strength and make our ability to love someone into something magnificent. There’s no formula to love. We learn by loving. If that’s the case, and we can only learn as we go, then we should give ourselves every advantage possible.

            A Buddhist saying goes that the closeness of a couple should be “as inseparable as fish and the water in which they swim.” The Hopi Indians say “One finger alone cannot lift a pebble.” This special unity can only be shared between two people who have awakened to their higher selves and who can understand the totality of union with another. It takes two people with a common awareness, or rather an uncommon awareness, to experience this.  “The mind has 1,000 eyes, the heart has just one.” We owe it to ourselves to have that eye opened, which will allow us to deepen our power to love to a level we always dreamed of. Love doesn’t have to be blind. We just have to open our eyes.