symposium on love by guggenheim public

I am told the subject is Love. What do I know of love? What can I say that will not trivialize, sentimentalize or reduce love? How can I even think of approaching so sacred a subject? What words will I find to describe a feeling that no words can communicate? Love is an indescribable and glorious experience, just as watching the sun rising over the ocean is indescribable and glorious. Can you imagine sitting on a white beach at the onset of dawn?
As the sun rises you are flooded with colors, your body tingles with warmth and excitment, your heart leaps at such beauty, your eyes weep at the sublime sight. Is anyone immune to such beauty? We are all touched, in our own individual ways. We all respond, as if the rising of the sun were a universal language. Our bodies cannot but respond. We experience a sympathetic expanding outward to merge with the phenomenon. For a moment we forget our worries, pains and sufferings. We are filled with a simple joy. What words will not diffuse or break down the experience? Can we describe the experience of becoming one?
Yet it seems we are in great need of words, to understand love, to understand how this return to oneness is accomplished. For we are rapidly sliping down a path of no return, where disunion, disaccord, separation, conflict reign. Unfortunately conflict breeds more conflict, like a self fufilling prophecy. Has love disapeared? Are we an afficted generation of men and women whose inability to love reveals some fundamental flaw? Have we done something wrong, not only politically or philosophically but intrinsically?
Is there something we need to correct, to bring love once again into the central place of our lives? In this last century we have been afflicted more globally than ever before. Love, the real thing, still exists among scattered individuals and on a small scale in communities. But love as a global movement of human beings towards each other has all but disappeared. Talk of love has sunk to a quagmire of sentimentality, exploitation and banality.
Will we greet the new millenium without even an effort at unravelling why we are plunged in such extremity? What can we do to correct this terrible calamity?
Love is too wide a concept, too radiant a feeling to be split into categories, although this has been attempted. We speak of mother love, erotic love, neighborly love, loving kindness, spiritual love. Even Plato attempted such a categorisation... But isn’t this precisely the problem? Love is wholeness. Can we split wholeness without losing it? Yet we are told that from the very beginning we were sundered from love. Our first ‘story’, that of Adam and Eve, tells how Eve, loving God, wanting to be just like Him, listened to the words of the snake and ate of the forbidden fruit. Note that it was the snake’s ‘words’ that enchanted and convinced her. If Eve, that most pure and perfect creature, was susceptible to the danger of words, how much more so are we. She bit into the fruit, splitting wholeness into pieces.
She gave to eat to Adam. At that moment they saw they were naked, they tried to hide, they became confused. Note how separation breeds confusion. Is that not a contradiction? Are we not told that clear boundaries delineate, clarify, define? Our whole civilisation is dependent on upholding this very concept. What happened here? We should be able to tell love from non love, yet sundered from the wholeness of love we can only flounder and wonder whether love is truly love or merely self-interest.
Today we are like Adam and Eve, mixed up, fallen from our Garden of Eden.
We have polluted our earth, our rivers, our air, our foods, our children’s minds with images of violence, despair and drugs, we have torn down politeness, respect for the other, meaningful relationships for the sake of passing distractions. Greed is our credo. The more we grope for power the greater our loss of empowerment. Today we feel impotent to change the evils which afflict society, much less those that afflict our lonely, dissipated lives. How do we go about changing this growing sense of meaninglessness.
despair, impotence? How do we re-invest the world and ourselves with love?
There is an ancient story, again from the Bible, that gives us a clue. It is the story of the people of the Tower of Babel. Once upon a time, says the story, “the whole earth was of one language and of common purpose.” But as soon as the people decided to “make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed across the whole earth”(Genesis 11:4) in effect as soon as naming entered the picture, the men and women who were building the tower began to babel. (babel means ‘confusion has come’ ) What is this mysterious common language? The emphasis on naming as the cause of our ancestors’ misfortune - these dispersed people were descended from Shem whose name means exactly that, ‘name’ - suggests that this language was radically different from the ones we now use, that in fact it did not use words. Before Babel these people were “of common purpose”. What can this common purpose be? What do we all long for? Happiness, of course, and goodness, love, peace. Can our one language be a language of the heart? Are we in fact dealing with a language of feeling?
How do we return to feeling? What is blocking our way? We seem to see-saw very easily from desire to emotion, from thwarted instincts to reactivity. We live in a world where instant gratification is expected, where the ‘common purpose’ is largely disregarded. Being caught in the loop of our own self-interests, our desire “to make a name for ourselves”, how can we detach ourselves enough to contemplate another possibility? How can we take a leap out of this general impoverishment into the world of feeling?
Love happens when we least expect it, in an instant. We take a turn in the road and are caught breathless before a wondrous sight. We meet a stranger, our heart stops and it is done, we are in love. A smile, a child’s face, beauty, a poem, music, great art can do that to us. Without that jolt we cannot plunge into the mysterious world of feeling, where we are made whole. But can we wait for the unexpected? We are in such dire need, is there a way to throw ourselves, willy-nilly, into wholeness? What common forgotten language must we re-discover to help us with the plunge? ThinK: there is no love without imagination. How can we love others if we cannot leap out of ourselves towards them, to hold them, metaphorically, in our arms, to include them, encompass them, to merge with them and become one? This jolt out of our petty selves is served not by our rational minds but by our imagination.
Yet imagination is devalued, pooh-poohed, put down as so much fantasy and day dreaming. We must be rational, think causally, respect only that which we can name and prove to be a verifiable part of our reality. What reality are we talking about? Our every day reality, where we can name each object, each cause and effect, is very much in need of a new infusion of life. We have two brains, the left and the right, the verbal, causal, logical, linear and the imaginal, dreamy, creative, spontaneous, leaping, playful, unexpected. Why have we so little respect for the other side of ourselves? We have developed naming to the detriment of creativity. The accumulation of data and the gaining of true knowledge are not the same, yet we pit one against the other.
They cannot exist apart without ill consequences, as is so abundantly clear.
Yet this is what we have tried doing. We have tried to separate the experiential embodied experience of inner reality from the verifiable step by step appraisal of outer reality. Can we at least agree to respect both realities, as a first step towards creating a “common purpose”?
Today our right brain is enslaved to the needs and desires of a population disfranchised by too much self gratification. We use our imagination to satisfy our needs, instead of understanding what the royal road of the imagination is. When cleared of our desires, claims, expectations, needs, imagination can return to its true function: that of awakening in us a lived sense of meaning, of wonder, of wisdom, of ineffable love. How do we re-educate our right brain, include it in our dialogue, in our school curriculae, in our community meetings, in our policies, in our goals for the future?
There is only one way, which can be exercised in a number of different modalities. Imagination is fired by a jolt, a shock, tension, contradiction, paradox, sudden turns, riddles, ‘leaping poetry’, unbearable beauty. The unexpected opens the inner space to its own play, where stories and forms unfold, dissolve, transform like clouds in the sky. The world of imagination, free as a lark, can allow itself riotous abundance, luminous silence, purposeful direction. It expands to encompass the whole, contracts to hold a grain of sand in its palm. Imagination holds the key to the expansive world of feeling, the radiance that comes with love. Says the poet Ghalib, “In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we are one.” Let us learn from the poet, and look in to our own beauty. It is the secret to love.
AHAVA, love in the sacred Hebrew language, uses A, the sound of the heart, three times. If you breathe out 3 times slowly, eyes closed, counting backward (reversing from this world into the inner world) to the 1, then imagine a circle and watch what appears in the circle, you have begun your journey back to ahava, the experiencing. You will see something that was hidden to you, some magical mysterious beautiful aspect of you, and beyond what you see you will be touched by a feeling of its mystery and power. This is so easy, and yet so completely shunned by our too sophisticated world culture. Can we make it a practice to look within? Can we allow all our senses to come together, to reveal to us in our inner mirror the cornucopia of our inner world? Soon we will learn we can ask imagination any question we wish: it will reveal to us the truth, not falsehood, because it will show us our inside as it truly is.
We are, like Eve, perfect creatures, perfectly whole, and perfectly wise a s to what is best for us. Imagine if everyone practised turning inward, if we taught our children, after gathering their facts, before they started on a project, to look within, if we all allowed ourselves, unembarassed, this luxury, before starting on tough peace negotiations, do you not think we would find more creative solutions, more unexpected new ways? Love shines like a diamond and attracts by its warmth more warmth, goodness, harmony, and peace. It is all done by exercising the imagination, a language common to us all, a language we knew in our play as children, a language we can all so easily re-learn.

Catherine Schainberg