Well, how’s pontificating for a lark, taking a stab in grandiose manner at a ‘weighty’ subject, appearing all high and mighty and knowledgeable (?) in the safety of one’s blogosphere? Or maybe, just maybe, the attempt here is to come to grips with this thing called pure love, unconditional love, the highest form of love as some call it. And try to understand why romantic love between earthlings, mere mortals, is not accorded the same position as other kinds of love.
Falling in love, in the romantic sense, is found in many cases to proceed most naturally without any artifice or false methods. One “just falls in love” as the saying goes, in many cases. “I do not know how it happened, but before I knew it I was madly in love,” is a common statement. But even in such an apparently formless, inexplicable process one can discern various stages: there is the act of apprehension in some form (most commonly beholding the other person), then an interaction of some manner and then over a period of time, a development of ‘liking’ for the other person. The fine line between liking and love is often indistinct. But somewhere along there, love “happens”. So “true love”, very subjective yes, can hardly be said to be made from artificial constructs. It is a human endeavor surely, but not an ignoble one.
But romantic love, the love as we understand it between two people, is often considered selfish, self-centered. It seems to stem from some underlying need, why, almost a visceral hankering, for love and the need to be loved. This has been explained in many ways, this essential loneliness and neediness of ours, from our weaning away during our childhood to something deeper: the disconnect of the individual spirit from the universal spirit and the longing for the union.
In Indian mythology, the most celebrated instance of romantic love is the one between Radha and Krishna. However, what would otherwise have been a case of boy-meet-girl-and-falls-madly-in-love with the ‘cowboy-cowgirl’ twist to it (and a syrupy country song or two) was transmuted to divine love because Krishna is variously a god in a larger pantheon (an avatar) or the ‘Supreme Personality of Godhead’ himself, and Radha his eternal consort. This of course harks back to the universal yin-yang, male-female principle of things: men and women, even on Mars and Venus and beyond, need each other. Otherwise why would there be such a pairing of the gods? Even this divine love was played out in the human form as a commonplace dalliance between lovers, as lyrically outlined in Jayadeva’s Geet-Govinda. I mean either some rishi/sage who was into romantic plots and anticipated the Mills and Boons crafted these fine tales about gods and their consorts or, well, lets face it, that is the way it was , thus establishing the legitimacy of romantic love as a fact (Krishna, the facile charmer, Shiva and Parvati/Uma). If these were later add-ons then somewhere, someone felt the need for some balance, some mellow female touch in an other male-dominated world of gods. All I am trying to say is that underlying much of the divine love is a more common, earthy romantic interplay between the parties involved. Yet, above and beyond the apparent amorous games and escapades of the gods lie supposedly higher inspirations, pure love, undifferentiated, non-differentiating, undemanding, giving, giving always…
So that then is the face of divine love. It is supposed to be free from any blemishes, free from any selfishness, in fact absolutely selfless, attaining that one lofty goal of Indian thought, selflessness. And set against this moral high-ground, the love between mortals is a flawed, grasping, needy, obsessive, possessive, and essentially a carnal thing. It is of this body, of the senses, it is limited and limiting in its very conception and scope, “an arrogation of another person to oneself”. However, Radha is said to be the “female side” of Krishna and the union is, as they say, a match made in heaven, the divine re-merging with itself. Similarly, can the romantic engagement between two human beings, allegedly such a narrow, shallow, limited thing, not at the bottom of it be such a yearning for completion, of fulfillment, of a re-merging of individual souls, patterned on the divine union?
Even without appealing to many ideal forms of love, as one sees for oneself in this earthly existence, in this human form, romantic love between man and woman easily aspires to such high ideals, starting out in the simple form of a human friendship. While it is limited to begin with, it is but a seed for a wider proliferation and fructification. Children can come into the picture soon and the lovers become founts of motherly and fatherly love. A wider society comes to be involved and you have to spread your love thin for those pesky in-laws too. It is a reaching out, it is probably a fulfillment of some basic need of ours, yet even this love, stripped down to its basics, can be no different that the highest form of love. I think, like much of the high ideals, pure (divine) love remains something to be aspired to, something ‘up there’ but for us mortals, our own earthly loves are just fine and dandy. The Buddha preached Maitreya (metta), often rendered loving-compassion, and the common Hindi (Sanskrit) word for friendship is Maitri, which I believe to be the basis of love and finally the Maitri-monial, the match made in heaven!
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