Live and Let Love

Thinking back, there have been times in my life when things were so difficult that I did not know how I would get out of the situation. There did not seem to be any way out. 

It was in those difficult times that you get to know yourself. You ask yourself, what is the worst that could happen? Why did it feel so intractable? Was it shame, loss of a loved one, physical danger or financial ruin that made it so difficult?  

You see, everything that I mentioned before is painful simply because of attachment. There's attachment to pride, to someone you love, or to your own physical and financial well-being.  If you let go of them, all pain dissolves away. 

The worst that could happen is that you die. Our attachment to our own existence in this mortal frame is what we are ultimately concerned about. Let's say that you lose everything that you own, your money in the bank and the job that you have now. Everyone you know and love is gone from your life. Would you still have the strength to go on living?

If you say yes, or that you'll have to, for you have no choice, then the rest is simply a willingness to endure pain consciously--the pain of picking up the pieces and starting over again. It takes strength, courage and resilience--qualities that are difficult to summon in times of despair.

Even when you have not encountered such a dire situation before, it's a good thought experiment that one could perform, for it reduces life to its simplest objective: to survive. What does it take for one simply to survive?

There you will come face to face with your karma. You are born because you still have an attachment to life. It's the simplest of attachments: you want to be alive. To survive involves overcoming a lot of everyday obstacles--seeking food, shelter and companionship. It involves a lot of painful work. That is what working out your karma means. 

And if you have the wisdom to take this pain consciously, you do not generate fresh karma. Work and relationships could be difficult things to tackle. If you love someone and think that your possessive love is something very noble, you are simply generating fresh karma with a lot of potential pain.

Love for love's sake. There's pain and pleasure in the act of love. Take them both. There's no future goal when you love someone. It is not to have kids and a beautiful home. That's a by product of love which you could express gratitude for, if they do materialize. The act of love itself is selfless and goalless.

To live is to love. Love is an energy that emanates from your being. Just spread it around like the selfless sunlight that nourishes the flora, like the cool breeze that brings relief during a hot afternoon, like the gentle ocean waves that lap on the shore. 

Think again of that difficult situation that you have. What attachment is it that's holding you back and making things so difficult? Let go and fall back into your natural state of love. Then you'll know that love and life are inseparable.

A Scheme for Pain

How does one deal with suffering? With acceptance, equanimity and a resolve to transcend it.

And attitude of anger and rejection towards suffering only intensifies the pain. Let the pain take its course. By allowing it, one finds catharsis.

A friend's wife once called me, crying. In between sobs she told how she caught her husband with another woman. She was utterly heartbroken.

I asked her whether she would forgive him, if he was repentent. She was willing, but she told me the pain was too much for her to bear. How do you make the pain go away?

I told her to let time dissolve the pain. By allowing time to do its work, pain fades away. Accept that certain things have happened and nothing one does will change or erase the fact. Allow pain to take its course. In due time it will fade away, like everything else in this world. Even love.

There's no antidote for pain. Pain has to be suffered, consciously. To suffer pain consciously means that you understand its causes, and that you have the determination to ride through all its phases, taking every lesson that it throws at you.

Only then will you understand that what you thought was love, was mere attachment. Selfish attachment. It is your need to possess something or someone so that you yourself feel more complete, more fulfilled.

We love ourselves more than anything else in this world. That is the root of all pain. We want to build an environment where we think our personal wellbeing and happiness can be guaranteed--a well-paying job, a loving partner, children who will look up to us and take care of us in our old age.

We think the rest of the world are like props on a stage that we can place wherever we choose. Then one day we realise that these props don't always remain where they are: they move. They have their own idea of "happiness". That is how pain arises.

Are we mature enough to live in a world where things don't always go according to our plan? A world where our vision of a perfect life don't always match with everybody elses? I'll end with a quote from The Dark Knight:

The Joker (played by the late Heath Ledger):

You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are...It's the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and uh, look where that got you.

The Challenge of Relationships

Living together with one's spouse requires enormous tolerance and understanding. The moment either party forgets that, resentment will inevitably creep in. This resentment typically starts small, often triggered by daily events that to outsiders appear trivial; but they accumulate, day by day, until argument errupts. This release of anger allows the resentment to subside a little, but only temporarily. Resentment soon builds up again, leading to anger and sometimes physical violence. The cycle repeats itself ad infinitum.

A marriage is stable when the oscillations of this cycle of resentment is small. Everytime it builds up to a certain critical mass, it is released. Hence the relationship remains intact. Mature couples know that this cycle well. They either consciously, or unconsciously allow it to happen. And this keeps the relationship alive.

Some couples make their relationship work by avoiding conflicts early. Through years of relationship, they would have understood what each other's sore points are. Some kind of compromise is worked out: as long as they agree not to encroach into each other's sensitive territories, everything is fine.

In most marriages, you'll have a bit of both. There'll be occassions where small fights serve as an outlet for the release of pent-up resentments, and they'll also be occassions when such situations are prevented from arising through a well-honed early-warning system.

However a marriage requires more than these two conflict-avoiding strategies to be successful. The foundation of a relationship is held by shared interests, beliefs and values. People get married because they want to share their lives with their chosen life partners. If they have nothing to share, they shouldn't have got married in first place. Remember the places, food, books or movies that both enjoyed together during those early days of courtship? Sadly, couples tend to forget that. A relationship starts to degenerate when commonalities are not emphasized and differences are allowed to be unnecessarily amplified.

How does love fit into all this? Isn't love what brings two people together in first place? Isn't love the true foundation of a strong relationship?

First, let us differentiate love from dependency. Dependency is the result of fear. We fear loneliness. We fear old-age. So we cling to our loved one to ease that pain of fear. That fear becomes a "shared value". We love our spouses because we love ourselves more: we want them to be around so that we don't feel lonely; so that we'll always have someone to be with in our hour of need. Dependency at its worst is a form of addiction.

True love has to transcend addiction and selfishness. Is this possible at all? Yes, but not immediately.

Love is an ideal that one strives for in a relationship. It is not the starting point; in the beginning there's a lot of physical attraction and emotional attachment, fuelled by the fear of loneliness. Temporary relief can be attained in the companionship of one's "loved one"; but inevitably selfishness rears its ugly head and pain results.

There's no relationship without some amount of pain. One should never be deterred by pain. Your partner could be the one in the wrong, but even the party at fault suffers pain. Pain is nature's way of pointing out our imperfections. Understand it. Trace its source. From what depths of fear did it originate? Why did anger arise? Why did such a seemingly trivial matter arouse such strong emotions?

Tracing the source of pain is like debugging a piece of computer software. No commercial application out there is bug-free. Bugs are constantly being traced and fixed. It is a neverending process. The more "bugs" that are eliminated from a relationship, the closer a relationship is to this ideal called Love.

Bugs can never be discovered if an application is not used. Only through the daily ups and downs one faces in a relationship can the sources of pain be traced and eliminated. If all couples adopt this debugging paradigm in their relationships, imperfections can be slowly rectified without resulting in catastrophic system crashes. That way, a relationship grows and matures with the passing of time.