I’m a Lover

I’m not a farmer. I’m a lover. You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover.
-Bo Diddley

This essay is intended for one one-in-a-hundred people at most, and while you know if you are that one-in-a-hundred, I don’t. I say this because research shows that only about 1% of the general population is concerned with what I’m writing about, so I’ll be lucky if even that one-in-a-hundred person reads what I have to say. It has to do with asking a question. It turns out that the answer isn’t relevant, just the question, since it is the question that points to who you are, and the question that contains the truth.  This is a very personal point that leads, if followed to its inevitable conclusion, to the transpersonal, to the no-self, where all questions and answers dissolve into an ocean of no water.

Questions are ships on which the seeker sails on the ocean of no water. Under way, the seeker/sailor wants to maintain the integrity of the vessel. Is this or that question still sea-worthy? The seeker descends into the hold, inspects the hull, checks for and aft, ascends to the masthead of the question. In the process, a leak is discovered. There is some rot in the planking of the hull. A storm approaches, or a whale. The possibility of shipwreck is considered, perhaps for the first time.

The main question is, “Who am I?” by which I really mean, “Who are you?”

If you are unhappy with me addressing you in condescending familiarity as “you,” Wanda, George, Omar, whatever, then remember that you are everyone in the essays you read, including me. You are only badgering yourself into a new insight. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t believe that you exist, but if you did, I don’t see how you would believe that I exist, as a haranguer of you or otherwise. I’m not here to harangue because I’m not here. There is only you, reading this essay. In fact, even if I were to insult you so much as to call you a flea, we might recall Meister Eckhart’s words: “Any flea as it is in God is nobler than the highest of the angels in himself.  Things in God are all the same: they are God Himself.” He also called people asses. What a jerk.

If you are the one-in-a-hundred for whom my words are intended, it’s because you are a little disturbed about something—you may not know what.  Something seems wrong.  Christopher Isherwood wrote, “It’s only when the sheer beastliness of the world begins to hurt you – like crushing your finger in a door – it’s only then that you’ll be ready to take this step.”  Therefore, you are open and curious, willing to suspend your disbelief and habitual thinking for a bit, and yet you are intent on testing what you hear against your own experience and will take nothing on anyone else’s say so, including mine.

Isherwood went on to write, “It was essential to try ‘this thing’ out for yourself.  If, after a reasonable time, you had found nothing, then you were entitled to say that it was all a lie – and that the great mystics were madmen or hypocrites.” I don’t have anything to say that you don’t already know.  As the flea-man Eckhart preached, “I beg you to be like this so that you may understand this sermon: for by the eternal truth I tell you that unless you are like this truth we are about to speak of, it is not possible for you to follow me.”

I don’t know what to tell the rest of you, other than feel free to wander in other readings and other fields.  I won’t mind if you do and it won’t matter in the least.  All manner of things shall be well.

I’ve taken what I have to say from people of all ages and all places.  None of it is mine – none of it but the truth of it.  The truth of it, if there is any, is all mine and all yours.  There is no copyright.  It’s a birthright.  It is the perennial philosophy, the perennial Sophia, the perennial wisdom, which finds its expression in every wisdom tradition and every person, and yet transcends all traditions and all people.

Some time ago, never mind how long precisely, my mother-in-law introduced me to a couple in the retirement community where she lives.  The husband asked me what I do, as people will.  I was tired of my usual answers to this question because they weren’t really true: I have such-and-such a job, I’m so and so’s husband, I’m a Democrat or a Republican or a whatever. I’ve noticed that such answers invite people to put me in a box about the size and shape of a coffin, and then they nail down the lid.  So instead of my usual responses I just blurted out, “I’m a lover!”  The husband, a rather elegant older gentleman, eyed me with some interest and said, “I tried that once.  It didn’t work out too well.”  I saw his wife standing behind him, nodding her head in agreement.

I’m not an expert on being a this, or a that, an employee, or a scholar, or a writer, or a father, or a husband, or a son, or a man – I’m especially not an expert on being a real man.  I’m not an expert on anything, with one, single, exception.  I’m an expert on love.  So if you are interested in that subject, then today is your lucky day, since you are going to hear from an expert.

The topic is tricky, though, because the love I want to tell you about is different than the type the older gentleman was talking about and different than the kind you usually mean, perhaps, speak of love.  “Love,” of course, is just a word, a pointer to the thing itself.  Other words are available as long as we don’t take them too seriously and mistake them for the thing they point to.

Some people use words like god, instead of love, or Christ consciousness, Buddha nature, the absolute, or ultimate reality.  Thomas Merton used the phrase “the ultimate and inner divine ground beyond all articulated differences.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson used the words “Oversoul” and “soul” in parallel with the Hindu words “Brahman” and “Atman.” But all of these words are signposts, not the destination; maps, not the territory; grocery lists, not the groceries; menus, not the feast.  Sometimes we are like goats that eat the menu, but never the food.  Let’s not be goats!

Another reason this topic is challenging is that the kind of love I want to talk to you about is ineffable.  By definition, no one can describe it.  Nevertheless, some of the most revered people in all of history, past and present, have attempted to describe love. Without a single exception, they have all failed. Go ahead and give them all big red F’s on their report cards! Report cards, though, also have a category called “effort.”  In this, the sages, saints, prophets, and mystics get an A plus. When the saint, exhausted by the effort of trying to describe love, is given an F, even the failure is so transcendent that the effort echoes down the ages in celebration.

Just a word of caution here. It is well to note that the saint’s description of love sometimes strikes the authorities as dangerous. Love, this aspect of life that is most true, is paradoxically also most threatening to secular and religious dogmatists. The would-be saint is labeled a heretic, and the world saves its worst punishments for heretics, celebrate them though we will. Beware, ye would-be saints! In bringing the truth to people, be funny! Otherwise, they’ll kill you.

So: love.  How will I talk about it?  If I can’t say what love is, I can at least say what it isn’t. St. Paul had it partly right when he wrote that love does not have envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, and it does not delight in evil. Here he is part of that time-honored apophatic tradition that points out what something is by saying what it is not.   But Paul goes off the rails when he says that love is patient, love is kind, love is – well, you can read his list for yourself. It’s in the Bible. Love is not these things because it isn’t anything. True love doesn’t have any qualities at all.  It knows nothing, it has nothing, it wants nothing, and it is nothing. It doesn’t do anything.  How about that?

Paul writes that love keeps no record of wrongs, which is right, but love keeps no record of rights either. Where would it find the space to keep any records? All things come in pairs of opposites like self and other, right and wrong, patience and impatience, kindness and viciousness, up and down, thing and not-thing. All such opposites, which means all things, are dissolved in love, not by love. In love, there were never any records, rights, or wrongs in the first place.

Love isn’t desire. They say love is blind, but that’s not true.  Desire is blind.  Caring is blind.  Hunger is blind.  Believing you need Biff, Scooter, or a scooter is not love.  Love isn’t the easing of loneliness.  In fact, true love is often most deeply encountered in silence, stillness, and solitude – even in the midst of the din of the marketplace.

While I cannot say what love is, I can say what love is like: love is like a rose that cannot withhold its fragrance from any who pass by.  Love is like the sun giving its warmth and light to all who pass beneath. Love is like the branches of a tree whose shade cools any who pass below without consideration of good or bad, this or that, self or other, book or cover.  The tree even gives its shade to the one who comes to cut it down and if there is any fragrance in the bark of the tree, some of it is left indifferently on the blade of the ax.  I don’t mean by this that we ought to go looking for pain, abuse, and suffering: there is plenty to work with already, don’t you think?  There are some situations and some suffering it is good to walk away from if we can, but we might at least ask: who or what is the one who is suffering?

Love is like the sea. The sea gives. The sea can take back what it gives but it gives and takes back without caring in the least about giving or taking. Love doesn’t care either.

Love is like the space in a room or the air around the earth. It holds everything without holding anything. It just is. You don’t need to do anything to get love – the empty presence that holds all.

Love is like a smart phone. Have you ever been talking to someone on your phone and a moment comes when you need to check a date on your calendar or look something up on-line—like the cure for love? And you check your pockets and wander around the house looking for your phone? Love is like that: you already have it, clueless though you may be about it.

But even that doesn’t quite say it right. Love is also not like a cell phone. You have the phone (or maybe it has you), but love is not something you have. Love is not something you do or something you need or something you get. It’s what you are. But we forget. We’re dazed and confused. The truth is veiled by the “ten thousand things” as the sages say. We think there’s vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, maskers and anti-maskers. World organizers and let-the-world-organize itselfers. Not really. There is only love.

So I’ve said what love isn’t, and I’ve said what it is like.  Can I hint at what it is? At the very least, love is a transparent emptiness, unobscured by any veil of desire or fear, attraction or aversion, caring or hating. Love is an abyss, a pure void, a nothingness. Don’t get attached to these words, nor too appalled by turning them into concepts. Love has no conceptions, yet all things are conceived in love. In love not even the abyss, as it is conceived of as an abyss, exists.

One of the most famous and ancient descriptions of love, as I’m using the word, comes from the Chandogya Upanishad.  It says, “There is a subtle essence that is the source and substance of all things.  It is the reality of all that is, and the foundation of all that is.  That essence is all.”

One of the two great purposes of life is to orient ourselves to this central truth: that there is an ultimate reality, a love, that can’t be expressed, but that can be realized. More correctly, it can’t be unrealized. It’s the only thing that doesn’t come and go. The second great purpose of life is an idea that has sent heretics into excommunication, martyrs to the stake, and me to my room.  It is the answer to the question asked at the beginning, “who are you?”

In the Satipatthana Sutta, one of the talks from the Pali Canon attributed to Gautama Buddha, we learn that we are not our actions, our bodies, our perceptions, our sensations, our feelings, our mind; we are not our ego, thoughts, notions, concepts, or ideas.  Well for heaven’s sake, what are we then?  Are you not astonished by this list? The Buddha, like Paul, makes an apophatic declaration – a declaration of what you are not.  In India, the phrase is “neti, neti,” not this, not that.  It is entirely fine to enjoy an ego, just like it is fine to have a car.  Take care of your ego, keep it clean and lubricated – I lubricate mine with Jack Daniels.  Just don’t identify with it.  It isn’t you!  You are not that!

The Buddha, being a wise if not board-certified psychologist, was almost entirely silent on this question of who we truly are. But his was a radiant and pregnant silence that spoke the ultimate truth beyond words and time and space.  With rare exceptions, he did not go beyond his apophatic declaration because he knew the next step was to enter the realm of direct apprehension where words no longer serve.  In the deconstruction of all your prior false identities, your true identity becomes manifest.  Your true identity is an absence – an absence more present than presence and an emptiness more full than fullness.

Since I am not as wise as the Buddha, I will foolishly name your true identity. It is simply this: not only is there a subtle essence – an unqualifiable love – that is the source and substance of all things. Thou art that. You are the inexpressible ground. You are the Christ consciousness, the Buddha-mind.  You are the godhead itself. You are the abyss. You are love.

We have here a case of mistaken identity.  You think you are a man or a woman or a Zen master or a trouble-maker or a human being on the planet Earth.  But these are the masks which the truth-seeker tears off and tosses into the fire of purgation in order to reveal what is underneath.

Now you can see that the question, “who are you?” annihilates itself. We might say the answer is “love,” but now you know that “love” means there is no “who,” no “you,” and nothing to get all be-verby about in the second person singular – or plural, for that matter.

Lest you think this is a silly enterprise only for silly boys like me and Ralph Waldo, here is Byron Katie who, despite her name, is a woman:  “As I gaze out at the sky on this perfect day, I don’t even know it’s a sky until mind names it.  In that moment, it comes into existence.  There is no world to see until mind ‘I’s me and begins to produce this, this, this, this.  I love that my mind doesn’t believe my mind.  Without meaning, how can separation exist?  I appear as the old and the new, the beginning and the end, I’m you, I’m everything – this ecstatic pulse, this nameless joy, this dancing without movement, this electrifying brilliant nothingness.”

Walt Whitman wrote, “I contain multitudes,” and by this he didn’t mean just multitudes of people.  He meant solar systems, galaxies, and the universe itself. The universe doesn’t contain you. You contain the universe. You are uncontained. Does the universe have power? No.

But you are waiting for something to happen or for some grace to descend upon you – you are still depending upon some outside agency.  I can tell you that there is no power outside of you – no power.  This does not mean that you have all the attributes that you read about of the super-duper gods, but there is no power outside of you.  If there is any power in this universe, it is in you.

-U.G. Krishnamurti

In the story “Teddy” by J.D. Salinger, Teddy, who is about ten years old, says, “I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all.  It was on a Sunday, I remember.  My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God.  I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”

In the New Testament book of Luke, we read that when Jesus was asked when the Kingdom of God would come, he answered by saying, “the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.  Neither shall they say, Lo, here! Or lo, there! For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”  It’s not what you think it is and it’s not something you get. It’s what you are.

Is it important for you to figure out who you are? Maybe not. But Evelyn Underhill, an expert on this topic, wrote, “Since this alone of all that you call your ‘selfhood’ is possessed of eternal reality, it is surely a counsel of prudence to acquaint yourself with its peculiarities and its powers.  ‘Take your seat within the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus,’ cries the Eastern visionary.  ‘Hold thou to thy Centre,’ says his Christian brother, ‘and all things shall be thine.’  This is a practical recipe, not a pious exhortation.  The thing may sound absurd to you, but you can do it if you will.”

How do you do it? Insultingly, Ms. Underhill goes on to suggest that if you can learn to play golf or memorize baseball statistics, you can at least bring a little of that kind of commitment to figuring out who the hell you are. It’s simple, but not easy. Still, there are ways to get the job done. It’s a DIY kind of thing so you have to be your own guru. The Buddha said, “Work out your own salvation with diligence.” If you don’t do it, who will? If the Buddha ever existed, he disappeared long ago and is nowhere to be found.

We live in a world of illusion. Terrific! Why not sit back and enjoy the show? But if you tire of the illusion then the time has come for disillusionment. Love ends the illusion. Good! What happens after disillusionment? I can only repeat what the real sages say, “Come and see.”

I’m a lover. Now you know that you’re a lover too. Too bad it doesn’t pay very well.