Enlightening Nonsense

What’s love got to do, got to do with it

What’s love but a second-hand emotion

(What’s love but a sweet old-fashioned notion)

What’s love got to do, got to do with it

Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken

—Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got To Do With It”

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The way most of us look at and experience love it is nothing more than, as Tina Turner says, “A second-hand emotion” and just like second-hand smoke, it can be just as harmful. Second-hand smoke damages our bodies, as we hold onto the deception that we are somehow safer because we don’t have the cancer stick in our mouth. Second-hand love damages our awareness, as we hold onto the deception that this is something that is eternal when it is really no more than a cheap high from a drag on a flesh drug that will burn down as quickly as a morning hard-on.

Happiness, sadness, anger, joy—these are emotions and first-hand ones at that. But how is love expressed? If your lover buys you the pendant that he has noticed you eyeing for months but never made any indication that he did, that may be one expression of love; or someone who will do anything to get into your pants. If she yells at you because she was so nervous that you would hurt yourself with your crazy stunt inspired by the show Jackass of spreading honey on your genitals and then sticking your pecker in a beehive, this may also be an expression of love; or a plea for you to seek psychological help.

Perhaps love may express itself without the usual body manifestations of the more base emotions. When you are angry, if you are not a Passive-Aggressive Pussy (PAP), your body will probably tighten up, you might scream and yell and you may feel it more localized in your extremities and head and the surface of your body. If you are a PAP, you will keep your voice calm and condescending and only your asshole will tighten up.

If you are sad, you may feel the expression deeper inside of you, in your heart or solar plexus. Even if you are balling your eyes out, it somehow feels more silent than anger.

If you are happy, you will tend to feel a rising energy that will go to your head and fill it like a helium balloon, making you feel like you will soon float off the ground. It is hard to sit still when you are really happy.

All of these emotions may not take on different expressions but, for most people, they take on varying degrees of the same general physical pattern and hormone dumpage. But love? Yelling, crying, puking, hollow, full, half-and-half with a little sugar… Is this really even an emotion or a total freak-out? But second-hand love is second-hand, whether it’s an emotion or not. And, unfortunately, that’s all that most have experienced.

Even our linguistics in expressing love falls short. “I love you”…“I am in love with you”… or the most pleasant “fuck you” there is—“I love you but I am not in love with you.” The specific that makes all of these, even the “in love with” expression only second-hand are the pronouns.

First-hand love overflows from you like the water from a fire hose held by a 90-lb. weakling who gets sand kicked in his face at the beach because he was too cheap to order the Charles Atlas strength program for twenty-five cents as advertised in his Spiderman comic book in 1972. It flows in all directions, with the idea of controlling its stream as impossible as a politician keeping his word.

The sun shines on Mother Teresa and Adolph Hitler both—neither one with more gusto—and if it doesn’t shine on Adolph’s head that’s only because it is shoved too far up his goose-stepping ass. First-hand love doesn’t care about politics, religion, color, country, creed, crassness, behavior, misbehavior, morals, immorals, murals or more eels, because all these things require a “you” and first-hand love isn’t concerned about pronouns or nouns or adjectives or any other parts of speech.

A deeper first-hand love also drops the “I” and then you no longer are in love…you are love itself.

I was bathing in Osho one day and was feeling so overwhelmed in love, less for his words of wisdom and more for his very essence. I said to him, “I am feeling so much love for you and I don’t know how else to say it but, ‘I love you.’ I’m almost ashamed to say this to you. If one is enlightened, can they still feel love for another individual?”

This is what he told me…

“Until one is enlightened, the best he can do is direct his love towards an object and this is beautiful; there is no shame in this. When enlightenment is experienced—and notice I didn’t say, ‘When you become enlightened,’ because at that point there is no more ‘you’—one no longer can direct love to a single person like a flashlight but it is now projected like a lighthouse for all to imbibe. ‘You’ ceases to be and love takes its place.

“It is like a devotee of Jesus or Buddha or Krishna; while one still views himself as separate from God, the best he can do is be a devotee. When he realizes that he is God, it is foolish to continue to pray to an idol.

A wave takes pride in its height and width, its color and the amount of bubbles it holds. But the moment it realizes that it is the ocean itself, how can it still take satisfaction in these trivial distinctions? On some level it is very humbling; it realizes that every wave is also the ocean. But unlike how the shallow ego views the world, it understands with depth gained through experience—and not the shallow memorization of scripture—that sharing power with others doesn’t diminish ones own strength, but only enhances it.

“You have said that you love your sannyasins and you have been very critical of priests and politicians. Are you telling me that you love them all the same?” I asked.

“With enlightenment, your being doesn’t lose its preferences, but it does lose its identity with your ego personality. I might talk vehemently against the manipulations of the priesthood, whether they reside in the Vatican or the White House, but this is just my energy matrix expressing itself in the way it flows, like a river flowing downstream.

If you saw a river flowing upstream you would get tired just watching it. You would think, ‘Enough already! Just relax and go downstream!’ But this is how most people live their lives because they have become so out of touch with their natural flow. And it is exhausting. There is no more ‘I’ and so ‘I’ cannot be angry or happy or loving or unloving.

“This is a hard concept for one to understand when all they can grasp is that love requires a container and they falsely believe that the container is somehow real. Just like a pitcher of water, the pitcher only serves to distribute the water and has no value of its own, besides perhaps aesthetically. It is only a carrier of water.

“Man has become like a closed-off pitcher which miserly dribbles a little water here and there, seemingly afraid that if his contents run out—whether it take the form of information, service, money or affection—he will be without purpose and no longer of any use. So he decides in a form of triage who should receive his water and who should go without.

“When you are a pitcher who defines your very worth by what you can contain and distribute, it is impossible to understand the life of a hose that never holds onto the water and, despite seeming to spray it haphazardly, never runs dry. The hose has no fear of running out of water for it knows it is neither the container nor the water. The hose doesn’t even have its own shape until it is filled from the inside; the pitcher holds its shape, whether it is filled or empty. The hose can be dropped, dragged, stepped on, kicked—and still it always remains open and ready to let love flow. The pitcher is very fragile, unbending, frozen. It pours at the same speed whether it seeks to fill one empty glass or a dozen. And it requires being treated in a certain way for it to keep pouring; if you don’t take care of it, it will no longer share its love.

“Parents meter out their love like a pitcher. They say, ‘If you don’t hold out your glass just right, Mommy and Daddy won’t fill your cup with love.’ Teachers meter out their knowledge like pitchers. They say, ‘If you don’t sit quietly in class, I will not fill your cup with knowledge.’ Priests meter out religion like pitchers. They say, ‘If you don’t behave in such and such a way, I will not fill your cup with God.’

The Master is a hose. He will drench you whether you bow down to him or not. He does not pour his contents out to everyone in the same way like a pitcher but this is not based on your behavior but your ability to swallow what he offers. The contents are the same; only the receivers’ stomachs differ.

And if you decide that you no longer want to drink him in, he will not force you out by cutting off his supply to you. Instead he will float you out on the wave of his love, even to the doorway of the next Master whose elixir you may find more to your taste. When the sannyasin is ready to drown in the Master, he will have discarded his meager pitcher and become a hose himself.

“When trapped in the mind of a water pitcher, you see enlightenment as an endpoint, as the most efficient way of distributing your water. But understood as a hose, enlightenment is just the starting point and whether you are going to be a vehicle to quench the thirst of the dehydrated or a beautiful fountain in an emperor’s palace, this is subject to change; like the water itself, it is malleable.

“And the minute you try to grasp the water, it slips away through your fingers. You can wash in it but you cannot possess it. The only way to do this is to freeze the water into ice. But this will expand and break the hose and then you will no longer be able to do your work.

“Those who have gotten caught up in dogma have frozen the water because they want to hold onto the river like a photograph. But a snapshot can only hint at the beauty of a river; it can never capture it fully. Freezing a river destroys it as a river, for it is the very flowing, and not its form and direction, that defines it as such.

I have said, “I love you” to countless people, and by this I don’t mean “a lot” but meaning only to those who don’t hold the title of “Count.” Actually, there were two counts that I told I loved. Count Chocula, the poster vampire for Count Chocula cereal, and Count von Count of Sesame Street fame.

But to the countless, more often than not, they were words second-hand at best and at worst devoid of meaning, like Super-Cali-Fragil-Istic-Espi-Ali-Docious. Some of my empty babbling might have been a conditioned reflex from my parents who gave me a Scooby Snack every time I said it. And while I take pride in the fact that I have never thrown those three words around frivolously for the sole goal of getting some Vitamin P, it is possible that my desire to be in love was controlling my mouth more than my heart.

As a general rule, and by this I don’t mean it applies to most things but that a General in the military gave this rule to me, if I don’t initiate the “I love you” then it is most likely second-hand. When Roach told me, “I love you,” I rebounded it like a yoga soldier repeats his teacher’s mantra line in “call-and-response,” but never really felt anything, even second-hand love. It wasn’t until we were saying goodbye for the last time that she said, “I love you” and I said it back and meant it. What I meant was that while on some level I might have thought that she was a hypocritical, castrating yoga poser, my soul loved her soul for coming into my life and stirring up the dust that I wasn’t able to get to on my own with my cheap DustBuster.

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So I was sitting on my couch with Slow Duck and I was in a dilemma. Just like with Osho, I was feeling tremendous love for her but I knew it could not be contained in pronouns. I debated with it. And finally I said, “Fuck it.” She was like, “Why did you just blurt out ‘fuck it’ for no reason?”

I thought quickly and said, “I had just remembered the punch line to the joke, ‘What do you do with a 20 lb. turkey that you bought for Thanksgiving and only after defrosting it do you remember that you are a vegetarian?’”

I then told her, “I love you,” to which I received the awkward silence that makes you want to stick your head in a giant metal fan and create Splatter Art. I continued, less to save face and more to clarify what I was feeling. “But that is not really an accurate description of how I am feeling. I feel immersed in love when I am with you.” And then it hit me: this is what “I am in love with you” really means:

That you and the other person are bathing in a pool of love together.

I had a flashback to the time I took a bath with a really dirty girl, and by this I don’t mean she was kinky but filthy, and how the water got really funky and I was thinking that this was about as romantic as the time I went Bungee Jumping on a first date and shit my pants.

After the next time I told Slow Duck I loved her and she responded with, “Thanks,” while a part of my old ego was again ready for Splatter Art, I felt like the lighthouse that Osho described. Being with her had helped me access my inner light source and whether she responded in like or not, I couldn’t help but to shine on, you crazy diamond!

In our last couple of days together we exchanged, “I love you”s, and while it still didn’t feel 100% right, I accepted that words are a “reducing valve” and that our love could not be effectively “petrified in language,” as Aldous Huxley wrote in The Doors of Perception.

I walked into the bank a few days ago, and by this I mean a repository of worthless paper that the collective unconscious call “money” and not a mound of dirt on the side of a river. I usually stop in solely to say hello to my friend Quiche who works there, as I rarely have anything to deposit besides sperm and this is not one of those type of banks, despite the fact that I have blown a few loads there.

Seeing me, Quiche said, “The love of my life.” I’m guessing she was being facetious but it was also possible that all my talk about taking her in the vault and banging her had finally worn down her defenses. I had come in prepared to drop my latest carefully crafted bomb on her, “Judging by the smell, I now know why they say, ‘Real men don’t eat quiche’,” but what she said totally threw me out of my foul, disgusting, tasteless, dirtbag mode and into a deep state of self-reflection.

I realized then and there that “the love of our lives” is really ourselves, not in the narcissistic sense of love for yourself but the love that is yourself. Others do not have the power to create, enlarge, dissipate or diminish this love. But they do have the power to encourage us to let it out of hiding, to hand us a hammer so that we can smash the pitcher that seeks to contain and meter out our love and become like a father on a sunny summer day, spraying all of the laughing neighborhood children with his hose, and by this I don’t mean penis. And perhaps in our short time together, this is the real gift that Slow Duck had given to me, and by this I still don’t mean penis.

“A river flows for the love of flowing. And this energy, this force, this strength of a river comes from its source, its original source.”

—Osho from Krishna: The Man And His Philosophy (p. 715)