The question of love ... by Visuddhacara

A human being is a lonely being. It seeks love and understanding. It seeks to find this love from another human being, in the arms of another human being. It yearns for somebody to be its companion in the journey of life. But is is not uncommon for a human being to find heartbreak instead, to have its dreams shattered, its heart broken. Have you had your heart broken before? Do you not feel like your world has collapsed then, that everything's over and life's not worth living anymore?

A human being does not understand that a happiness that depends on another is never secure or steady. It is shaky and vulnerable. For another might change and what would happen to its love then? And even when the love is sustained and grows, there's always the inevitable separations that must come about through death. And a human being might well ask: "Why must we find love only to die?"

But because of its great loneliness and deep yearning, a human being seeks love even if it knows it must suffer for it. It feels, rightly or wrongly, that "it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." For a human being is a lonely creature. It must find love, even if it has to lose and to die. It must take all the happiness it can get in its short life on earth. It must make the most of it. Must it not?

We must understand a human being, its need to love and be loved, its craving for love. And two lovers too, we know, can find their joy and happiness, albeit not without the pain and agony that must accompany such love. They can support and comfort each other along the journey of life. They can travel together.

But can a human being transcend the need for such kind of love? Can a human being live alone and still love all beings? Can a human being love without any need for sensual gratification, without any expectations or rewards from any quarter, without a psychologically dependent kind of realtionship, the type of love that depends upon another behaving in a certain way towards one, and if that human being changes and stops behaving in that way, then the love turns sour, turns bad? Can a human being transcend the need for such a kind of dependent love? I think it would be most difficult for a human being, most difficult, in fact, for all human beings, to transcend the need for such kind of love.

But it is good for a human being to give some thought, to consider more deeply the question of love, so that understanding, it can love more understandingly, more knowingly.