How simple and clear it all seems now! A few words tell the whole story: I had lost the power to love. A cloud of darkness enveloped me. The fear of losing her made me blind. I could easier have accepted her death.
Lost and confused, I roamed the darkness which I had created as if pursued by a demon. In my bewilderment I sometimes got down on all fours and with bare hands strangled, maimed, crushed whatever threatened to menace our lair. Sometimes it was the puppet I clutched in a frenzy, sometimes only a dead rat. Once it was nothing more than a piece of stale cheese. Day and night I murdered. The more I murdered, the more my enemies and assailants increased.
How vast is the phantom world! How inexhaustible!
Why didn’t I murder myself? I tried, but it proved a fiasco. More effective, I found, was to reduce life to a vacuum.
To live in the mind, solely in the mind … that is the surest way of making life a vacuum. To become the victim of a machine which never ceases to spin and grate and grind.
The mind machine,
Loving and loathing; accepting and rejecting; grasping and disdaining; longing and spurning: this is the disease of the mind.
Solomon himself could not have stated it better.
If you give up both victory and defeat, so it reads in the Dhammapada, you sleep at night without fear.
The coward, and such I was, prefers the ceaseless whir of the mind. He knows, as does the cunning master he serves, that the machine has but to stop for an instant and he will explode like a dead star. Not death … annihilation!
Describing the Knight Errant, Cervantes says: The Knight Errant searches all the corners of the world, enters the most complicated labyrinths, accomplishes at every step the impossible, endures the fierce rays of the sun in uninhabited deserts, the inclemency of wind and ice in winter; lions cannot daunt him nor demons affright, nor dragons, for to seek assault, and overcome, such is the whole business of his life and true office.
Strange how much the fool and the coward have in Common with the Knight Errant. The fool believes despite everything; he believes in face of the impossible. The coward braves all dangers, runs every risk, fears nothing, absolutely nothing, except the loss of that which he strives impotently to retain.
It is a great temptation to say that love never made a coward of any one. Perhaps true love, no. But who among us has known true love? Who is so loving, trusting and believing that he would not sell himself to the Devil rather than see his loved one tortured, slain or disgraced? Who is so secure and mighty that he would not step down from his throne to claim his love? True, there have been great figures who have accepted their lot, who have sat apart in silence and solitude, and eaten out their hearts. Are they to be admired or pitied? Even the greatest of the love-lorn was never able to walk about jubilantly and shout—All’s well with the world!
In pure love (which no doubt does not exist at all except in our imagination,) says one I admire, the giver is not aware that he gives nor of what he gives, nor to whom he gives, still less of whether it is appreciated by the recipient or not.
With all my heart I say D’accord! But I have never met a being capable of expressing such love. Perhaps only those who no longer have need of love may aspire to such a role.
To be free of the bondage of love, to burn down like a candle, to melt in love, melt with love—what bliss! Is it possible for creatures like us who are weak, proud, vain, possessive, envious, jealous, unyielding, unforgiving? Obviously not. For us the rat race—in the vacuum of the mind. For us doom, unending doom. Believing that we need love, we cease to give love, cease to be love.
But even we, despicably weak though we be, experience something of this true, unselfish love occasionally. Which of us has not said to himself in his blind adoration of one beyond his reach—What matter if she be never mine! All that matters is that she be, that I may worship and adore her forever! And even though it be untenable, such an exalted view, the lover who reasons thus is on firm ground. He has known a moment of pure love. No other love, no matter how serene, how enduring, can compare with it.
Fleeting though such a love may be, can we say that there had been a loss? The only possible loss—and how well the true lover knows it!—is the lack of that undying affection which the other inspired. What a drab, dismal, fateful day that is when the lover suddenly realizes that he is no longer possessed, that he is cured, so to speak, of his great love! When he refers to it, even unconsciously, as a madness. The feeling of relief engendered by such an awakening may lead one to believe in all sincerity that he has regained his freedom. But at what a price! What a poverty-stricken sort of freedom! Is it not a calamity to gaze once again upon the world with every day sight, every day wisdom? Is it not heartbreaking to find oneself surrounded by beings who are familiar and commonplace? Is it not frightening to think that one must carry on, as they say, but with stones in one’s belly and gravel in one’s mouth? To find ashes, nothing but ashes, where once were blazing suns, wonders, glories, wonders upon wonders, glory beyond glory, and all freely created as from some magic fount?
If there is anything which deserves to be called miraculous, is it not love? What other power, what other mysterious force is there which can invest life with such undeniable splendor?
The Bible is full of miracles, and they have been accepted by thinking and unthinking individuals alike. But the miracle which every one is permitted to experience some time in his life, the miracle which demands no intervention, no intercessor, no supreme exertion of will, the miracle which is open to the fool and the coward as well as the hero and the saint, is love. Born of an instant, it lives eternally. If energy is imperishable, how much more so is love! Like energy, which is still a complete enigma, love is always there, always on tap. Man has never created an ounce of energy, nor did he create love. Love and energy have always been, always will be. Perhaps in essence they are one and the same. Why not? Perhaps this mysterious energy which is identified with the life of the universe, which is God in action, as some one has said, perhaps this secret, all-invasive force is but the manifestation of love. What is even more awesome to consider is that, if there be nothing in our universe which is not informed with this unseizable force, then what of love? What happens when love (seemingly) disappears? For the one is no more indestructible than the other. We know that even the deadest particle of matter is capable of yielding explosive energy. And if a corpse has life, as we know it does, so has the spirit which once made it animate. If Lazarus was raised from the dead, if Jesus rose from his tomb, then whole universes which now cease to exist may be revived, and doubtless will be revived, when the time is ripe. When love, in other words, conquers over wisdom.
How then, if such things be possible, are we to speak, or even to think, of losing love? Succeed though we may for a while in closing the door, love will find the way. Though we become as cold and hard as minerals, we cannot remain forever indifferent and inert. Nothing truly dies. Death is always feigned. Death is simply the closing of a door.
But the Universe has no doors. Certainly none which cannot be opened or penetrated by the power of love. This the fool at heart knows, expressing his wisdom quixotically. And what else can the Knight Errant be, who seeks assault in order to overcome, if not a herald of love? And he who is constantly exposing himself to insult and injury, what is he running away from if not the invasion of love?
In the literature of utter desolation there is always and only one symbol (which may be expressed mathematically as well as spiritually) about which everything turns: minus love. For life can. be lived, and usually is lived, on the minus side rather than the plus. Men may strive forever, and hopelessly, once they have elected to rule love out. That high unfathomable ache of emptiness into which all creation might be poured and still it would be emptiness, this aching for God, as it has been called, what is it if not a description of the soul’s loveless state?
Into something bordering on this condition of being I had now entered fully equipped with rack and wheel. Events piled up of their own accord, but alarmingly so. There was something insane about the momentum with which I now slid downward and backward. What had taken ages to build up was demolished in
