Is Love Worth It?

 Just watched a doco on North India and they explained the myth of Taj Mahal. Many people think its a sign of the undying love of Shah Jahan for his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal. It seems to me that it means the Crown of Mahal given that was her name. But this is clearly anachronistic. All these crazy modern ideas of love are really recent and come from Western Culture via the Romantics and the Medaeval French Troubadours and European codes of Chivalry. The primary relationship between women and men has always been around childbirth (obviously) and their relationship has been about this. Love if anything was just the duty associated with being faithful and generating children of known parentage.

In the days of the Taj Mahal it was a Mausoleum that symbolised the belief in Paradise after death. More complex and given that Mogul architecture and gardens were an expression of power it also served to cement the authority and power of the Emperor and his Empress.

Today though it is sad to see so many people absorbed into this new culture of Love. What is the point? What do people hope to achieve?

This blog documents my own struggle with this and the loss of "my muse." But now many years later I see that as the painful extraction of myself from this modern delusion of Love.

For me at the time the "union of souls" was an important step in person and spiritual development. I believed that romantic love was a gateway towards liberation from the self and enlightenment. A potent myth that made it very much more difficult to extract myself.

I have realised since that this is the worst type of nonsense. How can enlightenment lie in the mortal and condition soil of a romantic relationship. As if the point out the fragile foundations of this belief she died. What a blessing in retrospect. A short and sharp lesson of the futility of this belief.

So the usual approach is to not learn ones lesson and go in search of more union. Now this works if the goal is just childbirth and family. But if the goal is spiritual its an fast lesson in the fact this is not the way to anything worthwhile and lasting.

To add weight to the illusion I was also aware that we had had previously known each other somehow and that this was not the first time we had been attracted, and I knew the day we met that she would die. The sense of the "eternal" and the infallibility of love are integral to this illusion. But if Love is eternal why do we then have children in order to survive our deaths? There is a huge irony here. we have romantic relationship and form families precisely because we are not immortal and love is not eternal. Now it may well be that like Hungry Ghosts 餓鬼 after death we are not satisfied and go in search of what we still desire. Without a body to satisfy this we are in serious trouble. And then when we finally get born into a body and go in search of our still present desire we end up in my situation. But this is not romantic is it? It is insanity. What is the purpose of all this struggle to attain our desire? Is it not easier to be rid of all this trouble? So hopefully my change of heart has freed me from this many lifetimes struggle and hopefully that would free "my muse"... altho I always thought she was smarter than this and it was me being trapped in the loop.

In answer to the initial question, how can love be worth this?

Now what makes it more complex is ego. Much written in this blog about self and ego. It can be seen that even my desire for "my muse" was mixed up with investigations into self and ego. SRH even predates "my muse" she was almost the physical manifestation of SRH. You cannot enlighten by yourself, it must be done in relation to the "other". That in fact is Original SRH. But this all predates all of this by at least a decade in my conscious stream.

Problem with Love and Ego is that while Love should be the manifestation of a selflessness and the giving to another--which comes to its extreme in Chivalrous Love where the self fully submits to the object of love-- in fact Love can often become a reinforcement of the self. Its a displacement of self onto the partner. It is still self but like Narcissus it is a reflection of the self. The partner is loved only as long as the partner returns that love. When the narcistic illusion is broken it turns nasty, jealous and vindictive. All those women taking revenge on their cheating partners: this is not love, it is narcissism, it is just manifestation of self.

True love is what a mother shows for her child. It is about giving and humility. But a cynic would say of course it is their child so it is still selfish. But it is a start. True love involved liberation from the ego. Which was my original motivation for involvement in Romantic Love. But that is not the best way to liberation. Its like a moth looking for food in honey. If its lucky it will get a meal. But the honey is a huge trap that you need to be very skilful not to get trapped in.

Now there is nothing wrong with Romantic relationships. we get involved in them, like many things for reasons that change as time goes on. Perhaps we get someone pregnant and are forced to marry them. Its as good a reason for a marriage as any. In fact it might be a good one cos there are no illusions, the partners know from the start its about giving and sacrifice. But there may be a desire for romantic desire itself and the belief that without this heady cocktail of brain chemicals somehow the relationship is inferior and a waste of time for the partners. This is where the modern myth of love starts to rear its ugly head. What a load of nonsense. If we want a drugs hit then just go and do drugs, in particular heroine. And then get ready for the enlightenment someone I know when through: that if these feelings are that easy to make then what is the point in these feelings? Suddenly the whole post 1960s drug fuelled world of nonsense we have created in the West creaks and starts to fall.

Its such a perfect pile of nonsense I've started to wonder if it hasn't been perfectly engineered as a social control program. Get everyone worrying about pointless relationships and then they won't bother with politics and freedom. The irony too is that with all this focus on so called "love" these days actual populations in the West are falling. How does that work? One just as to look at "Love Island" to see the futility and self grooming nature of it all.

Now for Love addicts (of which I was one) this is terribly nihilistic. All the joy of life looks like it is being sucked out and replaced with a grey ashen sky of dull lonely unexciting misery.

Well partly yes. And its rather Matrix here. You need to go cold turkey to get out of this pile of pointless nonsense. And what is the motivation? Well you can get all those feelings and many more back on the other side but for free without being dependent on whether relationships work or not, and without always worrying about whether "you" are succeeding or failing to get what you want.

I read some comments on a Youtube video today about how Viktor Frankl's book saved them from suicide. Admittedly suicide makes no sense to me (surely being alive is the greatest gift already, what else could you want and what can killing yourself achieve? People die everyday and it makes no difference to anyone. If you think your life is pointless or you've got to the end of the road then yes kill yourself and be even more pointless and take an even more pointless road. Plus you will be reborn in an even worse state so don't think its a way of avoiding things). But it seems people need "something" to fill their lives otherwise they think they are empty. So we fall in Love to fill the void. Poor person we fall in love with, for they are just a butt plug to fill someone else's empty void.

Well just know there is no void, its nonsense. If we ever feel the void, and I have felt at times like being sucked down into a dark hole that dims the very light of my soul and existence (think it might be linked to low sugar amongst other things), then know that fundamental Buddhist thing that whatever that phenomenon is it hasn't always been there. It has started and it will end. The void is actually only temporary! You can't stop it being filled, even if that butt plug is plain fascination with what the void itself is! And now we are in SRH territory. Consider the Least Interesting Number paradox. Whatever number you decide is the smallest not interesting number becomes an interesting number. Equally try and go into the void and all voids, the deepest darkest emptiest despair in your soul and realise once you are there you just filled it so its no longer empty ;-) Its a nonsense.

What causes this darkness is a probably a toxic mix of guilt, anger, greed and ego. well these are all temporary things and we will find they completely fill what we thought was empty. And knowing that provides the sign post out of the pit if we want to work our way out. Or we can just wait and it will go away by itself as nothing lasts forever. That last bit is a struggle for the Ego, we think "why me", "why am I suffering and other people are not", "I don't like suffering I want it gone now." All brilliant demonstrations of Ego. All "bad times" provide us with the most vivid demonstrations of what we need to learn, but we rarely see the opportunity and usually default to the mistakes we made before. "Bad times" are really the "best times" cos used well we will progress faster to freedom than at any literally any other time. 

Now interestingly Peter 1 in Chapter 4 verse 8 says "Above all, love one another deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." But this is 2000 years ago long before the age of nonsense love we live in today. For Peter love is not a selfish desire for kicks and self-affirmation. Love is genuinely wanting other people to be happy and to see them free from all distress and worries. Now that original type of love is profoundly worth it! Just imagine for a second there are people out there who actually give a genuine shit about you! For the religious God does for sure. For the atheists then know there are some extraordinary kind souls around even if you have never met them or let them in yet. Such souls are the true souls who have found liberation themselves. You can bask in the joy of knowing them, or that they exist, or better seek the freedom to love properly oneself.