Last summer, a man I fell in love with sat beside me on my couch, wrapped his arm around me, and played a song for me that illuminated the intersection between loving one person and loving the divine, “Find Love,” by Clem Snide. He sings:
Don’t let hurricanes hold you back
Raging rivers or shark attacks
Find love, and give it all away
Wrestle bears bring them to their knees
Steal the honey from killer bees
Find love, and give it all away
Don’t be scared to connect the dots
And dig for gold in the parking lot
Find love, and then give it all away
In my dear friend, I found love. A treasure chest of jewels on the ocean floor. Companionship, devotion, and altruism. Shared dreams and mind-blowing magic. Warmth, affection, and passion.
I found love, but I had not yet given it all away. Instead, I held it in my palms like the most valuable possession in the cosmos. The explicit objective of our relationship, from the very beginning, was to cultivate awakening within one another, but I clung to the relationship like a raft in the middle of the ocean, forgetting that the universe of seawater threatening to swallow me up was itself the divine suchness I sought in him.
When we seek the divine in human form, endeavoring to find God through sex, as David Deida puts it, if we come to mistake the form for the divine itself, only by losing the form can we perceive the essence behind it.
Devotion and Distance
It was always clear that I would never be his one and only partner. On a walk through a national park, he balanced rocks one atop another in meditation. We left the trail and hiked through the thick trees, looking for edible mushrooms and feasting on wild apples, until we found a mossy creek bed.
“When you find your next love interest,” I told him, “I will need distance from you. It’ll be too much for me.”
He poked my shoulder gently with a stick and said, “I’m never going to leave you. You’ll finish your degree. You’ll live in another city and write books. And we’ll visit each other. I’ll always be in your life.”
Our friendship, cradled in Ati Dzogchen, weathered every storm. “You can’t break it,” I once told him. We experimented with merging the sacred and profane, shining light into dark places, blending divine and animalistic impulses, and consciously allowing dark emotions to complement the sublime.
I cherished our relationship like a precious pearl, but I also sensed a need to push it away. In a lucid dream, I held a cup of stagnant water, and when I tried to empty it, I asked the universe what to do. A character in my dream said, with jolting clarity, “You must become angry if you are to reclaim your well being.”
“I can’t do it!” was my incessant reply. “I won’t!” Despite many hurts, I would not abandon him. Even when he encouraged me to heed my dream and become angry, I couldn’t do it.
If You Meet the Buddha on the Road…
Forms we set apart as sacred, instead of waking us up to God, can become an impediment to real love, the kind of love that makes no distinction between one person and another, between friend and enemy, between goddess and whore. The kind of love that senses the continuous presence of the Beloved rather than an insatiable, gnawing absence. However, when forms we set apart as sacred begin to embody the profane, when worship becomes disillusionment or luminosity becomes confusion, souring the milk so to speak, the heart is effectively redirected to the source, the ineffable oneness (and “confusion dawns as wisdom”).
“If you meet the Buddha on the road,” said Zen master Linji, “kill him!” If you think one particular expression of the Divine, a man or woman who has stolen your heart, is the sole embodiment of the Divine, that by acquiring or merging with that particular form, you will possess the Divine, crush your illusions into dust! Embrace bitter disillusionment as the doorway to the lasting, loving presence you crave but cannot articulate.
Give it all away. Only by giving love away do we eliminate the categories and concepts, expectations and fantasies that obscure our perception of the love that surpasses time and space. Only by giving it away do we actually drink the water in the vessel instead of clutching the vessel itself and carrying the water around trying to preserve it. Only then is the thirst quenched, just when we think we have funneled our oasis into the Sahara.
Breaking It
A crescendo of disillusionment, among a host of other losses and crushing weights, robbed me of my well being. In the hospital, wishing I was not alive, my friend came to visit me. He had a patient yet pained trust that despite appearances, all was well in the divine suchness. He was, of course, right.
After he left, I was in so much pain that I gripped the rails of my bed as if a new life were clammoring to get free of me. “The intensest, the most poignant cry,” writes Coleman Barks, “comes from one who has known the union and lost it.”
I felt a pressing need to put him out of my mind and cut him off, to allow the firmness and determination of anger to operate. Time to push.
“But, in my mind, it’s as if I would be killing him!” I protested.
As if this, my loss of well being, isn’t already doing the trick, I thought. Around the same time, a former lover, another precious pearl whose emotional distance had triggered a lot of pain and confusion, serendipitously explained his perspective on separation, and I finally assimilated the potential love aspect of distance. In that moment, I stopped resisting and embraced distance, and like a new mother, agony turned to ecstacy.
The degree to which we can resist God pressing on us to move in a direction we do not understand is the degree to which we can suffer.
Weeks later, my friend went on a pilgrimage in India. I was thinking about the song he played for me, about giving love away. I asked for wisdom and opened to this story in Rumi, The Book of Love (which, just as an aside, is an excellent illustration of crazy wisdom as it relates to the intricacies of karma and doing right):
Ayaz and the King’s Pearl
One day the king assembled his courtiers,
He handed the minister a glowing pearl.
“What would you say this is worth?”“More gold
than a hundred donkeys could carry.”“Break it!”
“Sir, how could I waste your resources like that?”The king presented him with a robe of honor
and took back the pearl.
Then he put the pearl
in his chamberlain’s hand. “What would you sell it for?”
“Half a kingdom, God preserve it!”“Break it!”
“My hand could not move to do such a thing.”The king presented him with a robe of honor
and an increase in his salary. So it went
with each of the sixty courtiers. One by one
they imitated the minister and the chamberlain
and received their reward of new wealth.The pearl was given to Ayaz. “Can you say
how splendid this is?”
“It’s more than I can say.”
“Then break it, this second, into tiny pieces.”Ayaz had had a dream about this, and he had hidden
two stones in his sleeve. He crushed the pearl
to powder between them.
As Joseph at the bottom
of the well listened to the end of his story,
so such listeners understand success and failure
as one thing.Don’t worry about forms. If someone
wants your horse, let him have it. Horses are for
hurrying ahead of others.The court assembly
screamed at the recklessness of Ayaz. “How could you
do that?”
“What the king says is worth more than
any pearl. I honor the king, not some colored stone.”The courtiers immediately fell on their knees and put
their foreheads on the ground. Their sighs went up
like smoke asking forgiveness. The king gestured
to his executioner as though to say, “Take out
this trash.”Ayaz sprang forward, “Your mercy
makes them bow like this. Give them their lives!
Raise their faces into yours. Let them wash
in your cool washing place.”Ayaz in his speech
to the king gets to this point and then the pen
breaks.“You picked me to crush the pearl.
Don’t punish the others for my drunken obedience.
Punish them when I’m sober because I’ll never be
sober again!
Whoever bows down like they are bowing
will not rise up in his old self. Like a gnat
in buttermilk, they have become your buttermilk.
The mountains are trembling. The map and compass
are the lines in your palm.”Husam, a hundred
thousand impressions from spirit are wanting to come
through here.I feel stunned in this abundance,
crushed and dead.
If you find love, and it becomes more precious to you than its own origins, take that pearl and crush it into dust! What did you find that you did not already have?
If you don’t crush the pearl, it will be taken back, wrenched from your hands. Not because the universe wants you to lose everything precious that comes your way, but because the universe wants to make sure you do not pour your soul into a mere image of the whole, into one pearl in the King’s collection, cherishing it above the King himself, who can bring pearls into existence as easily as we dream. As Rumi said, “If the Beloved is everywhere, the lover is a veil.”
Rinpoche was always telling me, “Give your heart to the dharma.” Whenever I asked about romantic pain, his advice was that I turn first to the dharma and let romance take care of itself. Intellectually, I agreed, but emotionally, I couldn’t fathom being satisfied that way, not until I crushed the pearl.
Discovering the Ineffable Beloved
I crushed the pearl, stomping and grinding without reservation. To be precise, I took all of my fantasies and let them go. I imagined my concepts of him, mental imagery and mental movie scenes, gathering together in a big clump and crumbling under my foot. The part of my mind that seemed to harbor him, that collection of living perceptions that I felt was him, I crushed that too. In my mind, I had met the Buddha, and I killed him. No more images. No more form. Nothing.
The result is something I cannot adequately put into words, because whatever words I choose will seem to point to metaphor and poetry. How do you give form to the experience of perceiving what has no form? Even to say it has no form is misleading, because emptiness is the ineffable fullness behind our empty pointing.
I thought the love and presence I sensed from him would be gone after that, but paradoxically, I felt love and presence more than ever before. I felt not only his presence but other lost loves as well. They are all there, and I am with them. The connection is palpable and satiating, nothing like the frustrated wanting I envision when I imagine spending life alone.
I no longer miss him. How could I miss him? He never went anywhere. The same love and presence comes through in everything around me. Dreamy, sentimental notions give birth to wide awake love in this present moment. Cleaning the kitchen counter becomes as blissful and pregnant with kindness as cradling my lover’s head in my hands.
The deep alienation that we all experience, that profound sense of being cut off at the most basic level of human existence, may be the very thing that allows us to find what cannot be given form, and what every form is–wordless, incomprehensible, timeless love.
The next time you find love, offer your joy to the universe. The love is not for you alone. You are not acquiring something. You are not even an isolated entity that can acquire. Do not keep it to yourself. Give it all away, and you will become the ocean itself in which every treasure rests.
“I have the world’s largest seashell collection. You may have seen it.
I keep it spread out on beaches all over the world.”
~ Stephen Wright
“Find Love”
by Clem Snide
Set to a very odd but amusing film
