Erotic and Divine Love

Divine Love, Loneliness, and Oneness

If divine love or bhakti is the true goal of human life, it may also be pointed out that its opposite, loneliness, is the central problem of the human condition. Love is essential for a happy life.

After food, shelter, and clothing, love is our most basic necessity. The greatest torture is a life without love.

The worst punishment in any prison system is solitary confinement, for loneliness and isolation are intolerable. For those who have been subject to solitary confinement, solitude as a punishment is worse than a death sentence. Solitary confinement is brutal. It is torture by definition. It destroys the mind, body, and soul by attrition.

English novelist and reformer Charles Dickens, after having visited prisoners condemned to solitary confinement at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, 1842 wrote, "I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers.... I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”

Loneliness is the greatest form of suffering. Without love, the human condition is empty. Without love, life is not worth living. Without love, self-awareness brings only fear: fear of death and further isolation.

Human beings, as opposed to animals, have spiritual needs. Love is the most important of all spiritual needs. But, unfortunately, many of us live without love. Or settle for a debased version of love. Love does not imply “being loved,” but loving. What is love? Before discussing bhakti or “divine love,” we might consider the meaning of “love.”

According to St. Paul, writing in Corinthians 1.13: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong-doing, but rejoices at the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. ...Faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.”

Again, the problem is not merely being loved. Rock stars and movie stars surrounded by devoted fans soon tire of the attention and complain about the lack of love in their lives. They find that no amount of sex and adoration cures their loneliness. Love is not simply about being loved, but giving love.

Love is about giving, not receiving. In his work, “The Art of Loving,” Erich Fromm claims that “love is an active, self-originating, not socially or internally pressured voluntary act through which we overcome our sense of isolation and separateness and regain our integrity and our relation with divinity.”

Love is active, not passive. Love implies care, respect, and acts of dedication: a voluntary readiness and responsiveness to the needs of the beloved. True love is absent exploitation. In a mystic sense love of God develops through surrender; the realization that we cannot know divinity. We may only enter that realm through surrender, dedication and love.

In his discussions on surrender and dedication, Shrila Shridhar Mahārāja once pondered the relation between the word “lava” and the word “love.” “Is lava love?” he mused. As a poet, finding hidden meanings in word-play, he suggested since true love implies a dedication and self-sacrifice that may burn like lava, there must have been some connection between lava and love. Real love means “die to live,” he said. Since both lava and love burn deeply, there must have been some connection.

Christian “love” is often confused with “charity.” In fact, in differing editions, the word agape from the Ancient Greek ἀγάπη, is translated as “charity” or “love” in the above quote from St. Paul. Christians often make reference to agape as the highest form of love, superceding both filial or brotherly love and erotic love. Christian Theologian C.S. Lewis in the “Four Kinds of Love” considers the idea of agape to describe universal, unconditional love of God. And yet Mr. Lewis as other Christian theologists stops short of a fuller definition.

Just what is love of God? Apart from the idea of charity, Western Christian theology hasn’t much to say on the subject. One may sacrifice one’s self to help others in a life of charity and prayer as did St. Francis, which is no doubt laudable. But how exactly does one love God? Only the bhakti school of Rupa Goswami enters into the subject in depth.

And without a deeper understanding of divine love, of love of God, we are attracted by other, more mechanistic solutions to the problem of loneliness and alienation. When, in fact, it is our separation from the spiritual center that drives our sense of loss and loneliness, we seek “wholeness” through a variety of desperate measures that in the end only drive us to further alienation.

The most compelling of solutions to alienation is the search for “one-ness.” But “one-ness” itself implies the destruction of love’s dynamic. Love means proper harmony between subject and object, between the Super-subjective Supreme and the individual souls through surrender. One-ness with the center also means the destruction of the self. Love is dynamic. It implies the existence of opposites. The interpersonal dynamic, the interchange of give and take that occurs in a loving relationship is absent in one-ness, which is, ultimately empty and void. We seek nirvana without understanding the inner meaning of that word. Vana refers to a forest; nir is mere negation. Nirvana effectively means “nowhere,” as if the pain of material existence in the “forest” of birth and death were such that “nowhere” provides relief.

According to this view, the “one-ness” of “nowhere” is superior to the loneliness and alienation of the material world.

But the ONE-ness of “nowhere” is a superficial solution. It is superficial because it is only temporary. The supression of ego demanded by merging into One-ness is artificial. Sooner or later the immortal soul craves love and love is expressed through the interchange that is only made possible with person-hood.

So it is that the Hegelian dynamic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis finds its resolution only through love. THESIS: I am, ANTITHESIS: God is. The loving exhange between God and soul is the SYNTHESIS: spiritual relationship expressed through transcendental sound and the sacred dance of divine love. This love has nothing to do with the mundane erotic principle; it transcends filial love, and even the Christian principle of agape, which pales by comparison.

And yet, we settle for ONE-ness.

Like opium, One-ness eases the pain. One-ness is attractive for it offers fast temporary relief from the pain of material existence. We find One-ness in the arms of a sexual partner, taking temporary solace in the relief provided by erotic love which is exploitation by another name. Oneness is attractive for it slakes our desire for belonging, our need to be a part of something, to lose our self.

We can become one with a sexual partner for a time; or even applying a shadow of the agape principle we can lose ourself in a cause or an organization. Our sense of dedication can be applied to a tribe, a community, or even a race or a nation. We achieve “One-ness” by giving up our ego and discovering a greater identity through social conformity.

We give our self to the group, the tribe, the cult or the religion. Society absorbs us completely. We become one with community, nation and creed. But this abandonment of individuality through one-ness is a form of suicide.

We find the solution to alienation in “fitting in.” We become a part of the machine. And the more we artificially dissolve our own ego to conform to social unity the more we subsume our loneliness and develop “One-ness.” And yet, all at once it becomes clear that I am not “one” with my race, my community, or my family. Over the course of time it becomes clear that I have my own identity. With this realization comes a great shock of disappointment. Loneliness returns, only more intensely, for I can no longer lose myself in the group as before.

And even as one develops one’s own own personality and identity, the group, family, or society may miss the once useful cog in the machine. At times, any society can become oppressive and seek to prevent any defections. It may seek to maintain the artificial state of “one-ness” by erecting walls between the members of the society and “outsiders.” The artificial state of one-ness may be enforced by informers, induced by threats and terror, propped up by propaganda, clever slogans and branding, and even social media bullying. This is true both of dictatorial systems where the methods are overt and democratic societies where the methods are more covert.

Alexander Solzhenitzyn pointed this out in his famous address to the graduates of Harvard in 1978 where he said, “In the East our spiritual life is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West commercial interests suffocate spiritual life. In both worlds, our most precious possession, our spiritual life is trampled: by the party mob in the East and by the commercial mob in the West.”

The individual who yearns for an end to loneliness finds “one-ness” in society. Totalitarian societies achieve one-ness through brutality; democratic ones allow apparent space and freedom of movement, but still demand an overwhelming degree of conformity. In totalitarian societies one sacrifices individuality for the good of society; in democratic ones “equality” is sold as the means of “one-ness.” In either case the result is the same: the loss of individuality and the merging into the one-ness of the mob. Conformity and equality promise the outcome of one-ness and liberation from loneliness and individual freedom and responsibility. Loneliness and anxiety are eliminated through the conformity of routine.

But do these mechanistic solutions really relieve our loneliness and alienation? Unfortunately the “one-ness” achieved through social integration does not last. And as societies become more fragmented into demographic groups and tribes, social integration becomes a myth. Disintegration is the new norm, even as we are encouraged to participate in uniform activities, ritualized social life, sporting events and state holidays, national games and dances. Even as we are encouraged to join websites and be part of the group societies are becoming more and more fragmented. Society acts as a balm for alienation only as long as we can “lose” ourselves in the group, but as groups become more and more fragmented they begin to war among each other along racial and national lines causing even deeper feelings of alienation.

Finally conformity is overcome by boredom and the need to express our individuality. The routine of conformity in the end drives us mad. Social “one-ness” is a sham that does nothing ultimately to overcome the problem of loneliness. We may be absorbed in the forgetfulness of self that social milieus provide only for a short time. The pain of loneliness wants stronger anaesthesia.

Those who cannot absorb themselves in the “one-ness” provided by conformity in family, society, and nation seek stronger anaesthesia in the form of real pain-killers. Witness the opioid epidemic in the United States, the drug wars of Mexico, international trade in heroid, cocaine, and marijuana, or the more traditional abuse of Vodka and Whisky.

When “one-ness” cannot be achieved through other means, people seek to destroy their loneliness through the ecstasy of orgiastic trance states achieved through the use of drugs.

It’s interesting that the word “ecstasy” means ex stasis, “being outside one’s self.”

Drugs kill pain. They can temporarily dissolve the ego. But drug-induced ecstasy is also short-lived. With drugs, one may enter a trance state or experience a temporary feeling of “one-ness” with God or the universe, but such feelings are ephemeral.

And the attempt to return again and again to such a state leads to addiction. Desperate to overcome the condition of emptiness and aloneness people are driven to addiction and death through the use and abuse of such drugs.

The endless search to continue such ecstatic states of “one-ness” lead only to a vicious circle of alienation and loneliness followed by ecstatic trance states of one-ness and again loneliness.

One-ness, again, is artificial. Destruction of the ego is not a tangible goal, since ego is an innate aspect of our immortal existence. The proper solution to loneliness is not found in one-ness but in love, specifically, divine love, or bhakti, beyond the mundane erotic principle and even the bland ideas of compassion embodied in agape.