The Only Non-fatal Excess: Love

 

W.B. Yeats nails the truth: “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”

Poison in small amount can be beneficial like nectar. And nectar in excess can be fatal like poison. We tend to jump from one extreme to another in our likes, dislikes, opinions and affiliations. And all excesses are stepping stones to pains, sufferings and alienation. There is only one thing in the universe that isn’t fatal in excess: love. This is the supreme leveler, the ultimate counter-point to all and sundry excesses and imbalances.

Alice Walker gives a very nice little exercise to get the magic potion flowing in your life: “‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.”

I would add, say ‘Thank you’ with a disarming smile. That completes the exercise. You may repent million and one words of yours but never ‘Thank you’. Try it. It’s a very potent bomb-defuser.

Dalai Lama: “Too much self-centered attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering.”

We hit the extremities and find ourselves struggling at the end of the pole. Irony is that all of us know with our practical knowledge that only a balanced central point can give us respite from shaking and the fear of falling over the edge.

In the Cosmic Mirage over there, we hardly have things positioned at one extreme. So leave your perch at the extreme, and surrender to the lure of the midway point. And mind you, love is the counterweight that can help you stay in the middle.

So guys, mix the contradictions. Churn out a paste. Blend the duality. Grind it well. And you get nothing in the so called ‘everything’. Is there any hard and fast line between the so called two ends of our perception? Is ‘black’ only ‘black’? Is ‘white’ only ‘white’? No. They seep into each other and relatively define each other, apparently though, not in reality. Black is less white, and white is less black.

Dark is not just ‘dark’. And light is not just ‘light’. Dark is only ‘less light’. And light is just ‘less dark’. Duality sustains on our sense of ‘ego’ driven by our perception-hungry senses. It turns our consciousness into self-consciousness, thus smartly laying the snare for a limited potential to grow and evolve.

Is there any pure, unadulterated ‘pleasure’? No. Pleasure is a state of having lesser pain. Pleasure has a mild dose of pain in it. Always! Find out a person who has no trace of pain in him. Is there any condition of just having ‘pain’? No. Pain is just having lesser degree of ‘pleasure’. Pleasure carries pain in it, and pain carries pleasure in it.

Our ego, our sense of ‘I’, stretches the point of reality in two directions for suitable dualities wherein things stand compartmentalized and defined almost as contradictions of each other.

Imagine the morning ‘twilight’ when the day’s rising light mixes with the night’s vanishing darkness. The balance! The melting of duality. Observing the phenomenon outside, we have to dispel the fog inside and see the sun of reality in its true avatar.

Is there any state of something being perfectly ‘cold’ or perfectly ‘hot’? No. Cold is just lesser hot. And hot is just lesser cold. The reality just gives the illusion of apparently getting stretched in opposite directions. It’s the see-saw battle. We look this way, then we turn to the other side. By subduing the element of ‘self’ from pure ‘consciousness’, one can get a balanced vision. Then the funny mirage of seeing two avatars of the same thing becomes invisible. And loving self becomes the most natural of an instinct.

If you want to swim, accept drowning. If you want to fly, accept falling. To win, accept loss. To fulfillment, accept emptiness. The duality is bound by almost an unbreakable cord, at least to a disillusioned self cowering under the weight of ego. Pull one, and the other one comes dragging. A win is not a win completely. You are losing something also, in some form or the other. No flight is a flight solely. It involves a fall also here and there. Swimming isn’t floating only. It involves intervals of drowning also. Accept the so called opposite, antipodal, the perceived enemy and the threat. Don’t run away from it. Success is not the absence of defeat. It’s only accepting defeat, learning further and moving on. Accept death and you live. Surrender the ego and you get to master the ownership of your thoughts, actions and emotions. You then control them instead of they deciding your fate.

The two versions of the same thing are inseparable, and are just our conveniently defined two points on the plain of reality. Death is not just death in itself. It is the beginning of life, of birth. Birth is not just birth. It is the beginning of death. Death starts the moment we take birth. After all it’s a process, not an event at the end of life.

Same is the case with the apparent duality of creation and destruction. They don’t exist separately. For an event and happening to occur, there has to be a balance between the two. Like human body survives on the principle of the balance between creation and destruction. New cells are continuously being created and old ones are dying. The circle. It holds the key to the mystery. Here is the end; here is the beginning.

The reality has loops of the so called dualities going side by side, at all points, in all directions, and in all events. The counterweights. The balance. Going on and on in loops. The ever-expanding universe and the ever-dying universe. In loops. In circles. At countless points. Forever. Explosions and implosions. Blasts and suction. Circular loops. Creation and destruction. Creation and destruction. On and on. In circles. Expansion and suction. Going from nowhere to everywhere and from everywhere to nowhere. And passing through the point where you happen to read it presently. 

Enjoy the moment. Take pleasure in the ride. It’s a whole thoroughfare out of nothing. From nothing to everything! Don’t feel puzzled over the fact that the net energy of the universe is zero. At the most take it as something synonymous to godliness. It’s a cosmic heartbeat, with the only difference on the so called time scale. Your heart beats once per second. The cosmic heart beats at the rate of billions of years. It expands, it implodes. Endlessly. So don’t get doubts about eternity. It’s possible. If a clock pendulum can maintain its swing, why cannot the cosmic cycle? When the pendulum is going to the right, it’s creating the potential to travel leftwards, and vice versa. When the universe is expanding, it’s creating the potential to implode. During implosion, it’s creating the potential to explode. Simple see-sawing with net zero energy! Isn’t it the greatest trick by the existential force!

And the seed, the focal point, of this mammoth mirage is love, compassion, harmony, rhythm and a never-ending melody. Love, along with its aforementioned derivatives, is the only thing whose excess never crosses the critical limits because it has to stay one step ahead of a mischance when everything may cease to exist thus stopping the mirage. Till it goes, love and harmony stay in the front, pulling the great show in its wake. Roll in the twilight grey of love where there is no light, no dark. But there is bliss definitely.