The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Ram Dass on Love

“To possess the key is to lose it.”

By Maria Popova

Ram Dass on Love

When you love, truly love somebody, there is no version of reality in which what is good for them is bad for you, no choice they could possibly make that is right for them and wrong for you, nothing they could give you that could make love more complete.

This is a difficult notion for the Western mind to grasp — too easy to mistake for the psychopathology of codependence, too quick to slip into the tyrannical Romantic ideal of merging.

At its heart is something else altogether: a kind of transcendent ego-dissolution under which the self ceases to be and becomes Being.

That is what Ram Dass (April 6, 1931–December 22, 2019) explores in his landmark 1971 book Be Here Now (public library), largely responsible for introducing ancient Eastern teachings to the modern West.

Ram Dass

He considers the paradox of our ordinary experience of loving:

When we speak of falling in love, we might find that a slight restatement of the experience would help clarify our direction. For when you say “I fell in love” with him or her you are saying that he or she was the key that unlocked your heart — the place within yourself where you are love. When the experience is mutual, you can see that the psychic chemistry of the situation allows both partners to “fall in love” or to “awake into love” or to “come into the Spirit.” Since love is a state of being — and the Divine state at that — the state to which we all yearn to return, we wish to possess love. At best we can try to possess the key to our hearts — our beloved — but sooner or later we find that even that is impossible. To possess the key is to lose it.

A remedy for this paradox comes from a central concept in bhakti yoga: the non-dualistic merging of lover and beloved into a single totality of being, a great universal One — a notion best articulated by the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba (February 25, 1894–January 31, 1969), whom Ram Dass quotes:

Love has to spring spontaneously from within: and it is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can never go together: but though love cannot be forced on anyone, it can be awakened in him through love itself. Love is essentially self-communicative: Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.

Complement with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s abiding wisdom on how to love, then, for a Western counterpart, revisit the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm on our greatest obstacle to love.

BP

In Praise of Walking: A Poetic Manifesto for Our Simplest Instrument of Discovery, Transformation, and Transcendence

“That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.”

By Maria Popova

When you walk, you move more than the body — you move the mind, the spirit, the entire system of being. As you traverse spatial distance, you gain vital spiritual distance with which to see afresh the problems that haunt your day, your work, your life. Ideas collide and connect in ways they never would have on the static plane. Pains are left behind in the forward motion. Doubts fall away by the footfall. I do my best writing on foot — the rest, what happens at the desk, is mere transcription. Nietzsche saw the link between walking and creativity. “There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking,” wrote Thomas Bernhard, “just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking.” A passionate walker herself, Rebecca Solnit has defined the act as “a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.”

But no writer has composed a more succinct and symphonic manifesto for walking than the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark in his 1988 chapbook In Praise of Walking (public library).

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.

Clark writes:

Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least
possible baggage, and discover the world.

It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property,
triviality, to simply walk away.

That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations,
so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

But while walking is a hallmark of our creaturely inheritance — we are, after all, “the small bipeds with the giant dreams” — it is something more than our primary means of getting about. We bring a different quality of being to the different ways in which we change our position in spacetime by our own propulsion. Clark makes a vital distinction:

A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed,
while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along
the way.

There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them.

Walking is a mobile form of waiting.

What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance
than what I discover along the way.

Art by Paloma Valdivia for Pablo Neruda: Book of Questions

In a fragment that calls to mind the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s life-tested wisdom on the ideal walking companion, Clark observes:

In the course of a walk, we usually find out something about our
companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.

Hinting at Kahlil Gibran’s admnoition that “in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered [for] thought is a bird of space,” Clark captures something the introverted among us can attest to in the marrow of our being:

When I spend a day talking I feel exhausted, when I spend it
walking I am pleasantly tired.

Echoing Thoreau — that eternal patron saint walking, even in the harshest weather — Clark considers walking as a kind of sacrament to the self irrespective of any outside circumstance or condition:

Daily walking, in all weathers, in every season, becomes a sort of
ground or continuum upon which the least emphatic occurrences
are registered clearly.

Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)

In a verse that calls to mind the ancient art of walking meditation, Clark offers a qualitative calibration to preserve the purity of walking:

We lose the flavour of walking if it becomes too rare or too
extraordinary, if it turns into an expedition; rather it should be
quite ordinary, unexceptional, just what we do.

In consonance with Rebecca Solnit’s insistence that “never to get lost is not to live,” he adds:

To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk.

[…]

Wrong turnings, doubling back, pauses and digressions, all contribute
to the dislocation of a persistent self-interest.

[…]

There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return me to
myself again.

Couple with Lauren Elkins’s splendid manifesto for why we walk, then let Thoreau awaken you to the brute rewards of winter walks.

BP

The Labyrinth of Consciousness: Walter Benjamin on Dreams and the Underworld of the Mind

Searching for the byway to the unconscious.

By Maria Popova

The Labyrinth of Consciousness: Walter Benjamin on Dreams and the Underworld of the Mind

“The logic of dreams is superior to the one we exercise while awake,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote as she considered creativity and the nocturnal imagination. We know that in dreams consciousness hints at the nature of the universe, but we catch only flitting glimpses of what is revealed. And yet that unreckoned darkness is worth dwelling in, for in it we become differently — and perhaps more fully — ourselves.

That is what Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892–September 26, 1940) explores in a passage from what became The Arcades Project — the uncompleted manuscript Benjamin was working on when he died of despair while fleeing from the Nazis. Lost and dormant for decades, this unusual reckoning with life was rediscovered after the war and published in its original form — a swirl of German and French — and only translated into English in the first year of the twenty-first century.

Illustration by Freud’s trans niece Tom Seidmann-Freu from a philosophical 1922 children’s book about dreams

With an eye to those places in Ancient Greece believed to be portals into the underworld, he writes:

Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld — a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades… issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past — unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane.

Turn, passenger, into the narrow lane tonight.

BP

Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Blind Spots of Sympathy

“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others… There is a virgin forest in each.”

By Maria Popova

Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Blind Spots of Sympathy

It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of mystery, in that opaque space beyond absolute knowledge and absolute empathy (which assumes knowledge of another’s experience), some of the most magical things in life come abloom. Those are the places we grow, and grow into — the openings that are our portals to the possible.

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) shines a sidewise gleam on those places in a passage tucked into her superb century-old meditation on illness as a portal to self-understanding.

Virginia Woolf

Challenging the dangerous allure of being perfectly understood and held in perfect sympathy — by others, or by ourselves — she writes:

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you — is all an illusion.

In a sentiment the poet May Sarton — who was half in love with Woolf — would echo in her abiding insistence on solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery, Woolf adds:

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

Complement with James Baldwin on love, freedom, and the illusion of choice, then revisit Woolf on the remedy for self-doubt, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, what makes love last, the consolations of growing older, and her epiphany about the meaning of creativity.

BP

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