Strength of an Emotion called Love or the Struggle for Strengthening ‘Enlightened Love’

Four years back, I wrote a paper Strength of Emotions as part of my Indian Philosophy Assignment mainly based on Vedanta Treatise, a book by A Parthasarthy. I found it kept in folds, submissively, among a stack of papers with a distinct smell, one inhales in flipping through the pages of an old library book. I smiled as I unfolded the paper, pressed it with my hands to smoothen the paper, as a mother would cuddle a small neglected child who locked himself up in dismay in a foetus posture in a dark room. I turned the pages, admired and congratulated myself on how beautiful my hand writing was once, in comparison to how horribly it has aged with me in time. I flipped a few pages carefully, looked at the last page to find Ma’am Makhija’s signature along side my conclusion which was a quote from Bhagavat Geeta, Chapter V, Verse 23. How appropriate I thought. It reminded me of Ma’am Makhija, her presence in our lives, her persona, her guidance, her charisma. I had got 19 out of 25. I must have written something good to deserve that or so I thought and I began reading in nostalgia. But soon I kept the nostalgia aside and realized or rather felt deja vu and it was not nostalgic, but one of becoming, of understanding, my now, myself, in the present moment, in the form of words of wisdom, I once wrote as a defense of Vedanta as a school of thought that didn’t preach emotionalism, but as one which thrives on not becoming a victim to it, is yet not devoid of emotions.

I read an excerpt from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem, The Deserted Village, I had so shamelessly copied. It reminded me of Raj Kapoor’s character in ‘Mera Naam Joker’, with a big clown face and the showman’s smile, big scary, photogenic smile behind the makeup covering his old fat wrinkled face in the movie. The image flashed. Just like that, it flashed, right after I read this…..

“To them his heart, his love, his grief were given,

But all his serious thoughts had rest in Heaven

As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form,

Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm,

Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,

Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”

One could only guess why this reminds me of that character – an actor, a showman, a joker, a clown, not anything close to a tall cliff with eternal sunshine despite the cloudy mid rib region, but may be his pot belly. His painted face, seems like an awful ‘face’ lift for a person whose life was an open diary, who shared his hopes and dreams with his audience, with expression, and disguised his vulnerability, his truths, his experiences, with that high voltage, oh now so haunting smile. I reflected, on the conclusion of this poem, the metaphor describing the stature of Oliver Goldsmith’s village preacher, on the actor who became unreal in the character of Mera Naam Joker, and reflecting on ‘Mera Naam Joker,’ it reminded me of clumsy me and I read these lines again, only to find them speak to me. I read on further.

‘To have emotions, therefore is a virtue’ I had mentioned back then in continuation with ‘but to allow emotions to interfere with intellectual judgement and awareness is spiritual weakness.’ The latter phrase made me mock at my self (My philosophy term paper was a theoretical discourse of Strength of Emotions!!) and other writers who had written about emotions like love, forgiveness, e.t.c. including philosophers like Plato (for full dialogues such as Symposium with an intellectual discussion on the topic) and Parthasarthy himself for exploring this topic in Vedanda Treatise. The former phrase issued the thought that virtue or no virtue, to have emotions is certainly to be human, and if knowledge is virtue and we are not all knowers of thyself, it made me think how human we are in totality, presupposing virtues to us ‘human’ animals. Anyways, what followed were not these thoughts in the paper I wrote back then, but a connection from Bhagavatgita, Krishna’s wisdom to rehabilitate Arjun’s intellect by slaying his emotions and reminding him of duty and Nishkarma Karma. It made sense to make that connection in an academic work I guess. I reminded myself that this was a paper on spiritual insight and mind control, so questioning the status of emotions as virtues was not appropriate just yet.
What followed was a Vedantic warning (like conditions apply* or parking at owner’s risk) supporting the sentence, ‘The quality and texture of each emotion would depend upon the direction it takes.' Emotions are like medicine, I had mentioned. They must be administered in proper dosage and are used to cure a disease. The same emotion, like the same medicine turns harmful, has poison written all over it if it is taken in concentrated form. Phrases like, ‘the direction it takes’, ‘concentrated form’ made me think about the authenticity of my paper, where I made a case for love as directionless, aimless, all emcompassing, everlasting, omniscient of them all. But then I corrected myself thinking that the direction oriented love, the concentrated form is not love but affection for the Vedandins or what is understood as ‘common love’ as opposed to ‘heavenly love’ in Phaedrus’ speech in Symposium.

What I read on further was in fact more profound and surprisingly more relatable, more profound and relatable than Derrida’s Nonsense about the logistics of Love and Forgiveness. Derrida had actually treated love, an emotion so deep and pure as frivolously as part of
Heidegger’s borrowed metaphysics.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY

In a video I saw and I very proudly possess, Derrida is left speechless about talking about love, and wants to instead talk about death. But when pressed, he tries to bring in the who and what distinction in the context of love and babbles between the distinction of love of someone and love of some thing. Then he babbles further. Without even having a clue or view about love, he makes love a past tense in a hypothetical situation and questions the credibility of that love, something he hasn’t experienced, something he doesn’t even understand, something he probably understands as the affiliations of affection and not heavenly love, the directionless, harmonious, one in all, Vedantic love. But what is interesting to cite what he had to say, is that this is exactly what love is not. Derrida questions his hypothetical feelings. ‘Do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are?’ (if there is such an absolute singularity is a question itself, let alone a hypothetical one I think). ‘I love you because you are you.’ Derrida points his love, directs it, in the ‘supposed’ singularity. ‘Or do I love your qualities, your beauty, your intelligence?’ ‘Does one love someone or something about someone?’ Even for common love the question is just dumb. A person comes in a complete package, with the part and the whole, with the who and a what, it is just the way of looking at a person that such categories and such wh questions arises. I do not think that some things can be questioned or even if questioned so easily framed as questions, let alone answer them. It is embarrassing what Derrida had to say further. ‘The difference between the who and the what at the heart of love separates the heart’ (I mean Oh My GOD!) ‘It is often said that love is the movement of the heart’ (Maybe in some bad romantic high school comedy that is said, and I am not sure I have heard that, and I have watched many to know). Derrida questions, does my heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity or because I love the way that someone is? (So Derrida, Love is the movement of the heart and the movement is explained or meant to be explained by the loving the way someone is, as one of the option, splendid mistake there!)

Interestingly Vedanta can answer Derrida’s ambiguities about the movement of the heart and tell Derrida that he is not really talking about love, but something that Vedanta strongly considers to be diametrically opposite to love, only because it is.

According to Derrida, Love starts with a type of seduction or attraction. Inversely love is disappointed or dies as one comes to realise the other person doesn’t merit our love, the other person is not this or that (as one thought not one person to be, but as this or that one was attracted to initially). So at the death of love it appears that one stops loving another, (again he talks about death of love and appearance of its stoppage) not because of who they are but because they are such and such. This goes on to say that Derrida’s conception of hypothysed past tense love is not that of a person but that of an object. This is to say (and please tell me how again, specially Derrida’s explanation started with ‘this and that’ and died in appearances at ‘this or that’) that the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. With such a short summary on Love (and a bad one at that) Derrida moves to the question of being, of ‘to be’ not understanding how love and being are actually synonymous if understood really. And Vedanta tells us how, at the same time telling us how to not fall prey to a duplication of love, a bad copy, if not of Derrida’s wit because he slipped at many places.

Love is nothing like what Derrida babbles about. I say this with more confidence reading on what vibrated across in the paper I was reading.

Love is being harmonious with one and all. Love means realising your oneness or identity with the other, with the world. The people of the world are like different parts of one’s physical body. To maintain harmony in your body every part of I must consider itself one with the whole. Similarly you must, or rather you feel and realise your unity with your fellow beings, oneness with the entire universe, then you are in love. You are perfect the moment that you are in harmony with nature. (And here I would like to add a little bit using metaphors of the heart.) No one said that this harmony is not going to be painful or excruciatingly hurtful. This is where the clown, Oliver Goldsmith Preacher comes in, with a smile and as strong as a tall cliff to stand erect in the face of all storm. Heart if not a center of love, is certainly a pumping organ which pumps blood throughout the body and perfection of human body requires that the heart ‘beats’. Interesting choice of words there. The heart gets a constant beating in an attempt to survive and attain harmony with the body. Whether the heart wants to beat or not, wants to pump or not even important, the fact is that it just does or the system fails. We just love, whether we want to or not, that is not an option, and love is required to keep it together.

The common complaint is that Vedanta teaches renunciation of love, it teaches indifference. This is not true. What people call love is far from true love or rather truth as love is truth and consciousness, sat cit anand. The concept of love, the Derridian Concept for instance is distorted. The much talked about love is nothing but personal attachment. All personal attachments limit you, they make you dependent, addicted, they make you fall. People say rightly, “You have fallen in love.” Vedanta says one rises in love and wants one to give up this clinging, selfish personal attachment which passes off as love. But this is not to say that one must discard true love.

A man of perfection according to Vedanta is saturated with love or is love infinity. He is likened to a child. The child is all love. It has no motives, no desires, no personal attachments initially. It is the embodiment of pure love, not the lover, but love itself. This explains why the world adores a child. We need to be that child by renouncing personal selfishness and attachments and purifying ourselves of motives and desires and returns and expectations. This may seem idealistic but we need to be that child, we need to stop growing up, that way at least but be in sync with ourselves, our spiritual side which cannot be but like a child.

Attachment is the perversion of love. When we attach ourselves to a particular object or being (here is where Derrida’s who and what can get classified), we automatically detach ourselves from the rest. Attachment is not possible without relative detachment after all. Since the child has no attachment its love is universal. As the child grows the youth falls in love. The youth likes someone in particular. Relatively he develops indifference for others. Parents, brothers, sisters, neighbours, companions, become a burden on him. He segregates himself from all of them. True love is lost. Instead he engenders hatred and jealousy towards every hindrance. All that he desires, craves is his lady love. Such love blinds him to everyone else, everything else. Here again we see a subject object distinction is seen between a lover and love. When people say ‘he is in love’, but actually he is hating the whole world. So when Vedanta says, ‘give up love’ it does not mean to become indifferent, it only means ‘give up hatred.’

(Here is where Nietzsche’s quotes of a woman’s love can be understood) Correct or not (and I know – not) Nietzsche does explain that as a cause for Women’s slavery and tyranny. He says, ‘ In a woman a slave and a tyrant have long been concealed. For that reason woman is not capable of friendship: she knows only love. In a woman’s love is injustice and blindness towards all that she does not love ( here understood as attachment). And in the enlightened love of women too, there is still the unexpected attack and the lightening and night, along with the night.’ Of course these quotes must be understood as meant for all humans animals, and not just Nietzsche’s cows in my vocabulary.

And it is the unexpected attacks the lightening and the night which bothers me, which makes even ‘enlightened love’ human and devastating. It is a smile of Mera Naam Joker, of a clown of a person, an open book who shares and celebrates his pitfalls as jokes. It is the ‘I am fine’ after a clumsy fall which makes me wonder if I am used to bear the pain or pull up a show for the world to see and laugh for fear of being weak and vulnerable or crying in the no tears grown up adult mature world or genuine acceptance of the excruciatingly mundane monotonous harmony of the beating of the heart that runs my system. Is it the real me, who hinds behind conflicting emotions, love and attachment, or an act to be strong? Maybe because it is easier to laugh along with others when one gets up after a clumsy fall, no matter how hard it hurts, and it hurts. When a woman doesn’t cry in the mist of those who do, as there is no point to celebrate dehydration of salty water along with a headache, and smiles instead, is it the ego which stops her, or enlightenment? Is that smile, is that cliff, necessary or natural(intuitive), authentic or an act?