Love and Death

. . .from Chapter 4 Love and Death, in Love and Will by Rollo May

The confrontation with death - and the reprieve from it - makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever, the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful . . .Death, and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die.

from a letter by Abraham Maslow, written while recuperating from a heart attack...        

. . . To love is to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive  ---to grief, sorrow and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before. . . .

When we "fall" in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world.  Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects--as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced.  Love is the answer, we sing. Aside from the banality of such reassurances, our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic--albeit desperate--conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.  The very strength of the effort to support that illusion betrays the presence of the repressed, opposing pole.

This opposing element is the consciousness of death.  For death is always the shadow of the delight of love.  In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us? When we love, we give up the centre of ourselves.We are thrown from our previous state of existence into a void; and though we hope to attain a new world, a new existence, we can never be sure.  Nothing looks the same, and may well never look the same again. The world is annihilated; how can we ever know whether it will be built up again? We give, and give up, our own centre; how shall we know that we will get it back? We wake up to find the whole world shaking: where or when will it come to rest?

The  most excruciating joy is accompanied by the consciousness of the imminence of death--and with the same intensity. And it seems that one is not possible without the other.

. . . Sex and death have in common the fact that they are two biological aspects of the mysterium tremendum.  Mystery--defined here as a situation in which the data impinge on the problem--has its ultimate meaning in these two human experiences. Both are related to creation and destruction; and it is therefore, scarcely surprising that in human experience, they are interwoven in such complex ways. In both, we are taken over by an event; we cannot stand outside either love or death--and, if we try to, we destroy whatever value the experience can have.

On Impermanence

... from Chapter 3 Reflection and Change of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rimpoche

Usually we assume we must grasp in order to have that something
that will ensure our happiness. We ask ourselves: How
can we possibly enjoy anything if we cannot own it? How
often attachment is mistaken for love! Even when the relationship
is a good one, love is spoiled by attachment, with its
insecurity, possessiveness, and pride; and then when love is
gone, all you have left to show for it are the "souvenirs" of
love, the scars of attachment.

How, then, can we work to overcome attachment? Only by
realizing its impermanent nature; this realization slowly releases
us from its grip. We come to glimpse what the masters say the
true attitude toward change can be: as if we were the sky looking
at the clouds passing by, or as free as mercury. When mercury
is dropped on the ground, its very nature is to remain
intact; it never mixes with the dust. As we try to follow the
masters' advice and are slowly released from attachment, a great
compassion is released in us. The clouds of grasping part and
disperse, and the sun of our true compassionate heart shines
out. It is then that we begin, in our deepest self, to taste the
elating truth of these words of William Blake:

He who binds to himself a Joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.

Perspectives

The more I reflect, the more I realize how many perspectives there are in a dialogue about maturing, aging, dying, and making meaning out of our lives in the sunset of our years.  Truly, it is our perspective on what is happening that shapes our experiences rather than the events themselves.  So I have been looking at more worldviews than I  originally started to explore.  I have also recently begun to focus more deeply on the worldview that we create our own reality. While there do seem to be limitations posed by nature, how we position ourselves within nature makes a difference in how creatively we work with our consciousness and whether we identify with nature's limited templates or whether we identify with the Spirit and God and the many possibilities inherent in spiritual consciousness.

Greetings from the foothills of the Himalayas

I have come to Haridwar- the city name literally translates as gateway(dwar = door) to God (Hari=God), to attend to some important matters. I am suffering from insomnia.  At first, I thought my bodily rhythms were disturbed due to jet lag but the body has had enough time to adjust. I use my sleepless hours to write.  Despite some pretty difficult circumstances, I am getting time to reflect on the contributions the Indian culture has to make to psychology and spirituality.  I am especially keen on remodeling the four ashramas for modern life as ways of living more naturally and consciously in keeping with the patterns of the psyche from birth through death.  I see myself as being in the Vanaprastha stage of life - see my page on this blog explaining what that entails.

Reflecting on life's passages, I realize how important it is to discover one's purpose, the meaning of life events and to move consistently through challenges towards completion of this often unspoken purpose.  Change being constant, the greater pattern cannot be seen.