Love and Wisdom

Your gentleness should have heart, strength. In order that
your compassion doesn't become idiot compassion, you have to use your
intelligence. Otherwise, there could be self-indulgence of thinking that
you are creating a compassionate situation when in fact you are feeding the
other person's aggression. – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all

-    Joni Mitchell

Sometimes we might think that love and compassion entails letting another person have their own way.  We might believe that true love involves enduring another’s disregard for our own feelings.  To some extent this is very true: we have to reach beyond our own self-centered desires.  On the other hand, by not asserting oneself one may be enabling another to remain unconscious. 

When I was a university undergraduate I made friends with an exchange student from Kuwait.  “Kahlid” and I spent some time together as I learned about his culture and sympathized with his difficulties in ours.  Unfortunately this included his addiction to alcohol and prostitutes.  One day he was looking for friends to hang out and get high with and he came to me.  I told him that I needed to study but he continued to press me and I gave in.  He told me, “You are my only friend because you are willing to put aside your needs for me.” 

Out of necessity I had to distance myself from my friend in order to survive at the university.  He ended up failing miserably and having to go back home to face humiliation.  Fortunately for him his family was extremely wealthy and it probably didn’t matter much.  It was a lesson for me though.  Often what we call compassion is behavior that is not healthy for us or the other person.  We both needed to use self-discipline and attend to our studies rather than give in to self-indulgence.

Within our ego-centric consciousness love has many guises and disguises.  Our problem is that from the ego-perspective we cannot know love.  In fact we are busy defending against it.  Love is like a tsunami that cascades through the boundaries of our separateness.  You don’t love until you let it annihilate you.  It is not a game of give and take.  When you truly love there is no self or other.  There is only love.

Our word “love,” though, seems to fit diverse meanings.  It can mean attachment, desire, infatuation, obsession, possession, etc.  Many of our favorite “love songs” are based on this kind of love.  We might call this lower chakra love.  It is worldly love based in avidya.  When we are rooted in avidya, “ignorance,” and asmita, “ego-identification,” we are not in love.  Interestingly, our English word love is based on Indo-European roots.  The Sanskrit lobha means “greed.”  Through flowers, poems, songs etc., we try to dress up this basic desire to make it appear to be something special.  In reality our notion of love is nothing more than the desire to possess another.  Of course we all want someone to want us as well.

Compassion means something quite different.  To feel compassion means to empathize, to be deeply aware of another’s suffering and desire to relieve it.  True compassion arises from a different center, from anahatha.  It is still selfish; we feel another’s pain so much that we need to relieve that suffering within ourselves as well.  One the other hand it is recognition of our interconnectedness.  Those of us who are more highly empathetic are prone to “compassion fatigue.”  In this condition we “burnt out” and unable to care anymore.  We have felt so deeply and tried so hard to help that we have exhausted our feeling capacity.  The antidote is mindfulness or nonattachment.  We have to be aware of our suffering and the suffering of others from a more expansive perspective.  When we are able relax into an expanded awareness we realize that all of this suffering is based in a shared limited view.  We become a witness to the drama rather than being involved in it. We can laugh at ourselves and our belief in our ability to “save the world.”

Usually when we talk of love we mean some mixture of desire and compassion.  We are attracted physically and we get to know each other on a deeper level.  This gives way sooner or later to an emotional wrestling match where we are both caring about the other while trying to get him or her to meet our needs and desires.  We might use the sense of compassion as a means of blackmail: “If you really loved me . . .” Then again we might feel guilty when we wish the other would be more considerate, ambitious, tidy, whatever.  Relationships often get stuck at the level of manipura, they become a power struggle.  Imagine a relationship based on mutual compassion and beyond that, a mutual attunement to the loving awareness that flows in and through the universe. 

Spiritual love, aka Agape, is of a higher order.  It is transpersonal.  When we begin to experience this kind of love we go beyond the concept of an object.  It isn’t about “I love you,” but more, “I love.”  As we further evolve in this process it may be more like “Love is all.”  (Yes, thanks to Lennon and McCartney)  One’s separate self begins to dissolve like a dream upon awakening.  We love and value ourselves all others and everything as expressions of One Love.  Personal relationships can continue on this level but they are subsumed into the higher order of awareness.  They are “surrendered.” 

Because of our dichotomous thinking, we tend to believe that love and intelligence, or wisdom, are somehow separate.  True intelligence is based in love and compassion; the wisdom of the heart.  As we awaken attachment diminishes.  We are not these bodies, so how could love be physically based?  We are not our minds, so how could it be dependent on our beliefs?  Our essence is pure loving awareness.  Love has its own wisdom.  It discriminates between what is real and what is unreal; what is Self and what is not.