Who Are We to Love?
Sometimes life will slap you across the face so hard that you cannot help but stop and pay notice. These are the times that force you to reevaluate your thoughts, your life. Tonight was one of those nights. The details of my personal experience are not important here, but the main question is: Who are we to love?
And by posing this question, I mean exactly that. Who the hell are we to say we can love? What makes us believe we are even capable of such? We are all carrying our own burdens, our own weight, our own pain. What gives us the right to say we are capable of loving another human being? When you get down to it...nothing. If you want to be brutally honest, no one has the right to claim they are capable of truly loving any other person. Heck, we don't even really have the right to claim we can love ourselves. We are buried so deep under the layers of our own lives that we can't even help ourselves. So, then, the question becomes, why do we love? The answer, quite frankly, is because we have to.
We are going to get nowhere in this world on our own. Without love we are all going to die cold and completely alone. Friendship, companionship, love...they are the only hopes we have of shedding even a bit of this weight we carry. We say, I will give you imperfect love because it's all I have to give. And we can expect nothing more than imperfect love in return, because that is all anyone can give. And the moment we believe we can give more than that, or that we are deserving of more than that, we only make our burden heavier. This belief, this very arrogant belief, is what leads to much of the frustration people find in this world. But we don't see these people as having a chip on their shoulder, because we have the very same chip on our own. We are all guilty of placing ourselves at the center of the universe. The world is relative, but in our blinded egocentrism we refuse to accept this worldview. Why?
Our world, the one inside of our heads, is each our own. And it's the only world we have ever actually known. When we look at the world around us, we take what we see and we suck it into our own minds, conforming what is around us to our own worldviews. Questions of morality and ethics no longer become questions—they become dogmatic viewpoints. The world is literally forced to conform to not only accommodate our perspective, but to become it. We impose ourselves upon the world. The human ego is powerful in that regard.
But then comes along the enlightened mind, a mind who has embraced the relativistic viewpoint, who has risen above The Divine Comedy, whose worldview is not egocentric. (I am not that mind and do not claim to be. But I have seen hazy shadows through its eyes.) This mind looks at the world and sees all these people trying so hard to be what what they so desperately want to be...happy. It sees billions of souls on their knees in the pouring rain, crying, looking to the heavens for an answer, and finding nothing. It sees them try to conceal this pain, this fear, this want with a blinding egocentric mindset that allows them to honestly believe they are inherently owed the fulfillment of their desires. And it is out of this self-created debt that they try to demand love.
And why love? Why is it that of all things we demand love? Love is powerfully fragrant. Love by its very nature is mysterious, and can be conformed to whatever we want it to be. So we shape the love we desire, and then we demand it. And when we don't get it, when we can't find it, when we can't even buy it, we scream at the world, curse it for denying us what we believe we are justly owed. But never do we stop and see the whole picture. Never do we stop and see The Divine Comedy for what it is.
And so I want to draw this to a close by summarizing my main point: We are all here, we are all stuck in The Divine Comedy, and we all desire love. The desire for love is inate to the human condition, and there is no ridding ourselves of it. But what we must come to realize is that the only love any human being can offer or expect is an imperfect love. Our desires will never be fulfilled. We have to accept life for what it is, and stop demanding it conform to our worldview. We have to accept love for what it is, and stop demanding it be the cure for what ails us. We have to accept ourselves for what we are, and stop demanding we be what we envision ourselves to be. We're all in this together. We're all handicapped by the flesh. The sooner we all realize this, the sooner a sufficient existence can be lived.
And by posing this question, I mean exactly that. Who the hell are we to say we can love? What makes us believe we are even capable of such? We are all carrying our own burdens, our own weight, our own pain. What gives us the right to say we are capable of loving another human being? When you get down to it...nothing. If you want to be brutally honest, no one has the right to claim they are capable of truly loving any other person. Heck, we don't even really have the right to claim we can love ourselves. We are buried so deep under the layers of our own lives that we can't even help ourselves. So, then, the question becomes, why do we love? The answer, quite frankly, is because we have to.
We are going to get nowhere in this world on our own. Without love we are all going to die cold and completely alone. Friendship, companionship, love...they are the only hopes we have of shedding even a bit of this weight we carry. We say, I will give you imperfect love because it's all I have to give. And we can expect nothing more than imperfect love in return, because that is all anyone can give. And the moment we believe we can give more than that, or that we are deserving of more than that, we only make our burden heavier. This belief, this very arrogant belief, is what leads to much of the frustration people find in this world. But we don't see these people as having a chip on their shoulder, because we have the very same chip on our own. We are all guilty of placing ourselves at the center of the universe. The world is relative, but in our blinded egocentrism we refuse to accept this worldview. Why?
Our world, the one inside of our heads, is each our own. And it's the only world we have ever actually known. When we look at the world around us, we take what we see and we suck it into our own minds, conforming what is around us to our own worldviews. Questions of morality and ethics no longer become questions—they become dogmatic viewpoints. The world is literally forced to conform to not only accommodate our perspective, but to become it. We impose ourselves upon the world. The human ego is powerful in that regard.
But then comes along the enlightened mind, a mind who has embraced the relativistic viewpoint, who has risen above The Divine Comedy, whose worldview is not egocentric. (I am not that mind and do not claim to be. But I have seen hazy shadows through its eyes.) This mind looks at the world and sees all these people trying so hard to be what what they so desperately want to be...happy. It sees billions of souls on their knees in the pouring rain, crying, looking to the heavens for an answer, and finding nothing. It sees them try to conceal this pain, this fear, this want with a blinding egocentric mindset that allows them to honestly believe they are inherently owed the fulfillment of their desires. And it is out of this self-created debt that they try to demand love.
And why love? Why is it that of all things we demand love? Love is powerfully fragrant. Love by its very nature is mysterious, and can be conformed to whatever we want it to be. So we shape the love we desire, and then we demand it. And when we don't get it, when we can't find it, when we can't even buy it, we scream at the world, curse it for denying us what we believe we are justly owed. But never do we stop and see the whole picture. Never do we stop and see The Divine Comedy for what it is.
And so I want to draw this to a close by summarizing my main point: We are all here, we are all stuck in The Divine Comedy, and we all desire love. The desire for love is inate to the human condition, and there is no ridding ourselves of it. But what we must come to realize is that the only love any human being can offer or expect is an imperfect love. Our desires will never be fulfilled. We have to accept life for what it is, and stop demanding it conform to our worldview. We have to accept love for what it is, and stop demanding it be the cure for what ails us. We have to accept ourselves for what we are, and stop demanding we be what we envision ourselves to be. We're all in this together. We're all handicapped by the flesh. The sooner we all realize this, the sooner a sufficient existence can be lived.
posted by Lunchbox at 12:19 AM
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