Love and Enlightenment
By Kali Ma, Santa Cruz California
Guru Rinpoche Birthday Weekend 2005

It is our nature to long for love, as love is our nature. Most Westerners desire romantic love above everything. The ideal of “the one,” of endless passion, of fulfillment, of having all ones needs met, being understood and truly seen, having companionship, having support, having cooperation, having entertainment and the mutual pleasuring of one another are all parts of this vision. There are many aspects of this vision that are profoundly conditioned by our society, by our family and life experiences. There are many aspects of this vision that arise from a primal desire for enlightenment which also happens to be about understanding, fulfillment, truly seeing, having one’s needs met, and in it’s own way, it is about the one; becoming the one in order to be able to be the one for others. This desire for romantic love, whatever it is composed of, can be a profound motivating force for the path.

Upon encountering an opportunity for love, anyone can see that to be in love one must master their emotions, their mind and thoughts, their communication, their relationship with needs and desire, and one must clarify ones perception. These are all the things one must do also to be enlightened. These are all the fruits of meditation. The two are actually inseparable. Love is an expression of the awakened being-ness.

Most people, because they have not mastered their emotions, mind, thoughts, and communication, nor their relationship with needs and desires, nor their perceptions, have very confused relationships. There is so much unnecessary suffering in relationship. But this suffering has causes and when the causes are removed and new causes are created then suffering abates and love abounds. Anyone who truly desires to love, and receive love will have to, because the nature of love, become more enlightened. This is how many people come to the path. This is how many people discover its richness.

Love is naturally a non-dual state. It has joy and pain, self and other and all dualities blurring together, in contradiction, juxtaposition; in a fantastic flurry of two becoming one. But since most people’s vision is so clouded with dualistic view, they relate to love in dualistic style and therefore cut out its very life force. Then everyone is surprised, hurt, and disappointed by what has happened and they “fall” out of love.

People fall out of love because they do not understand love. They do not understand love because they do not understand mind, emotions, self; they are ignorant of the nature of existence itself. It is possible to stay in love. It is possible to maintain love and cultivate enduring love, but it takes work. It takes a special kind of work, the “inner work,” as we say.

We have a strange relationship with “work,” we are love/hate about it in our culture which is so obsessed with producing, consuming and achieving. However work can actually be a great delight, in fact all sentient beings work. Squirrels work all day gathering food, and investigating smells and sustaining their life. Banana slugs work all day on pilgrimage to the next meal, socializing with plants, leaves and other insects. Work is an expression of the creativity and artistry of existence. Existence is in motion. It is alive, creative, evolving itself, dissolving itself. Love requires work. Relationships require work. But the fruit of such work is exquisite, the fruit of that work is the ego-less-ness and insight that animates love itself.

Practitioners take responsibility for the inner work, the work of relationships and the work of caring for one another. They take this responsibility with delight because they know, from experience, that it is the thing that matters most in life. The view of love in our culture is the same as the view of mind and emotions, there is an unconscious belief that they are just supposed to happen on their own. They just are what they are. We just “feel” certain ways and are sentenced by that. We just “can’t” get over certain thoughts and are tormented by that. We “fall” in love and then “fall” out and the whole thing is just some mystery that is biologically determined or determined by some out of control fate of what was “meant” to be. While it is true that things do have their own qualities, timing, and self-manifested occurrences, this is actually only one half of the truth. When we look a little deeper with awareness, we realize that reality is greatly responsive, fluid and interdependent with our views, intentions, actions and inactions. The work that must happen in relationship is the work of clearing up ones views, purifying ones intentions and perfecting ones actions and inactions in order to cultivate love.

Love is like a garden and we must be good gardeners if we want to it be in full bloom. We must pull out the weeds. We must be conscious of which seeds we are watering, if we do not want spiky cactus, and want soft colorful roses instead, then we must use our emotions, words and actions to water, sun and cultivate those roses. Most people, having ignorance of the need to do the work of loving, and ignorance of how to do enjoy that work, or even how to do that work, are very poor gardeners. They are unconscious of the causes they are creating and then surprised by the effects. They are unconscious of the mastery it takes to receive, cultivate and flow with grace.

In some spiritual paths Love is seen as a barrier to spiritual work. This is because different spiritual paths have different methods for enlightenment. In one very popular method of our time, the sutric or renunciate method, love is seen as a barrier to enlightenment because that method is focused on removing all potential distractions in order to learn to meditate in the most accessible, direct, simplified manner. In some ways, it is easier to be one-pointed when there is nothing else in your life but your meditation alone in some cave in some mountain far away from culture. The fruit of this method is to be in the concentrated state, the meditative, one pointed state, where mind is open-ended and clear. However in the Tantric work, the path begins in that state.

The Tantric path begins in the one-pointed, empty state. The one point is the desire to grow. This one pointed intention then is taken into all aspects of life and all of life is related to from this view. It is a view that parts the red seas of ones life. It is a view that separates the wheat from the chaff. It is the view that extracts the essence from every situation. Accompanied with training in the inner yogas and training in the teachings, this view is so powerful that everything can be turned into the means for realization. Love, relationships, and romantic connections then become a very powerful opportunity for growth. When they are related to with the Tantric view and the motivation to grow, Love reveals itself as possibly the most accelerated path to awakening. This isn’t actually true for everyone, though everyone wishes it were true. Because love is so powerful and affects people so greatly, it can actually be a great obstacle to growth and obstacle to spiritual path. It is a path of fire, because you can get confused and fall off balance and be burned. To take love as a path to enlightenment takes great discipline, a lot of work, extreme clarity and most especially all the supports of a spiritual path like the Three Jewels.

The Tantric path cannot be taken in pieces; it is a system, wherein all the parts have a gestalt effect. It happens in the same way that when we isolate properties of a plant and extract them to make allopathic medicines, we get ‘side effects” because it no longer has its own nature-given counter balancing properties. When we attempt to practice only part of the Tantric work, by identifying the love as a part of spiritual growth, without practicing the rest of the path, by mastering mind and emotions, then it is easy to repeat old habits of relationship rather than enlightened love. To know love as a path to enlightenment would require that one understands the foundation for such a path, which is the whole of the Tantric view, path and fruit. In this way, one’s whole life evolves, one’s whole being evolves and therefore ones style of loving does too. In this way one addresses the whole of one’s mind, emotions, pictures, perceptions, and reality habits, all the components of relating and relationship.

The Tantric Siddhas whose relationships are the inspiration to lovers everywhere, held their desire to grow above everything the result was an extraordinary kind of living, very alive and beyond their pictures. Their loving relationships tested, refined and showcased their enlightenment in a way nothing else could. Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal, Machig and Topa Bhadra, are two examples and there were many others. The love affairs of awakened beings are famous because of their endurance, clarity and power to hold the vision of their love beyond all obstacles. Lovers of love. They remind us that the path of love and the path of enlightenment were never separate. They remind us that a life beyond duality and all neurosis is a life of ultimate connection and also the ultimate dissolution.

Without Love
Enlightenment is pale and incomplete
Anyone who has said otherwise has either never been enlightened,
or never been in love
Without the passionate sharing of enlightened vision, enlightened, touch, enlightened conversation, enlightened affection- Enlightenment is wasted.
Enlightenment is overflowing by nature
it generously shares itself
it circulates with all that is

Passion is within all existence
rain is passionate for free falling
earth is passionate for sky
monks are passionate for deities
Tantrics are passionate for their consorts
life is passionate for death
existence is passionate for itself

When it is expressed in love
Enlightenment seeps outside the self and pours out into all directions
self is melted away finally since love is enlightenments completion
and this passionate flow of the juice of life
oozes out like hot lava,
it drifts out like gentle clouds,
it spins out with the precision and sharpness of a thousand daggers,
initiating everyone who smells its sweet aroma, receives it searing spike,
or bathes in its sacred waters.

If I had to two choose between the two
enlightenment or love
I would not be such a fool
there is no such choice to make
Since love is the inner nature of enlightenment
and enlightenment is the inner nature of love.