Love, Loss and Dukha
Enjoyment without Preconception

Excerpted from Kali Ma’s book, The Tantric Siddhas, to be published in 2006.

One
Enjoyment without Preconceptions and Loss

Before the meaning of my teachings on love and enlightenment is confused, we must contemplate together that love and enlightenment will never exclude the dual nature of existence. To realize absolute reality is not to pretend relative reality does not exist. To realize non-duality is not to exclude perception of apparent duality. To realize the secret of love and enlightenment does not mean that the pain of existence does no longer exist. Hot and cold still exist. Even in the state of love or enlightenment, if your arm were chopped off, it would hurt. If your lover dies, it will hurt. When you lose your marriage, it can feel like a death. To feel and be alive are not excluded in enlightened awareness. Emotion and feeling are not some plague of impurity that disappears in some sterilized version of realization. Even given all the teachings and trainings of all the Dharmas, life is still beyond our control. We have such a great influence, but we are not dancing alone, we are dancing with the most masterful dancer of all, life-itself. Even when we know all the steps, new dances are always been thrown at us, and we must dance the dances that arise. There will still be pain, change, loss and the unexpected. But we can have an enlightened, loving relationship with pain, change, loss and the unexpected. The most important part of enlightenment and love is the art of letting go. This is how we finally know life and death. Death gives us the courage to let go and experience loss. We know that our great Guru, death, is watching us, testing us, waiting for us, and preparing us. It is teaching us of the void, of non-existence, of impermanence, of dissolving forms. It is informing us of how to be fully alive by embracing it in all its forms. It is informing us how to love by teaching about death of the self, about the grave commitment that life and loving is, it is informing us of many truths. It is shining the mirror of impermanence on us so that we can love more fully, more completely, with more commitment. In Tantra, awareness of this principle is called, enjoyment without preconception.

To have enjoyment without preconception is to have enjoyment without delusion. The delusions one would be without include the delusion of grasping, of aversion, of denying, of striving, of separation. Most essentially it means, to have awareness of death, impermanence, and the nature of things. It is represented by the skull cup, which is held in the hand of the Tantric Deity. The skull cup represents the ultimate impermanence of form, of our body and the individuality that we identify with it. It is white bone, filled with frothing red essence, symbolize that enjoyment without preconception is an expression of the red and white essence, the two and one reality.

One of the Tantric Siddhas, Kapalika was once deeply and passionately in love. He and his lovely wife had great companionship, laughed often and pleased each other. When they argued or fought, it caused them great sadness because they wanted only to be together in happiness. They had beautiful children, whom they loved to love. They lived a very full life together, until one day, their son died from the plague. Kapalika was so heart broken he went to the boy’s freshly dead body, and held it in his arms, rocking it, crying and crying. While he was there, someone came to him and tried to speak to him, but Kapalika was so overwhelmed with his grief, that at first he did not hear or even notice this messenger. Finally the messenger got his attention and told Kapalika his horrible news. While Kapalika had been there with the boy’s body, his wife had also died.

We can all barely to begin to imagine, the shock, grief and pain that rippled through the stunned man. He lay there weeping while his wife’s body was brought. He was so incapacitated by his sorrow that he did not perform any funeral rites for his son and beloved. An enlightened Yogi, who was living in the cremation grounds saw all that was happening and took pity on him. The Yogi came and performed the rites for Kapalika, who lay convulsing with sorrow on the ground nearby. The Yogi saved the bones of these bodies, as was traditional in the Tantra, he saved the skullcap of the wife. The Tantric Yogis who lived in the cremation grounds used what was available in the charnal grounds for all their practical purposes. The white cloth that wrapped the dead bodies for their clothes, thigh bones of dead animals and people as instruments, smaller bones as ornaments and skulls for drums and for cups to eat and drink from. It was a profound and irrefutable symbol for ones enlightened relationship with impermanence and death, and therefore with life. The Yogi gave this skull cup of the wife to Kapalika who held it, in his depressed and broken state, for days without rest or reprieve.

After many days of sorrow, he was starved and dehydrated and the Yogi goaded him into movement, insisting that Kapalika find some nourishment or at least go somewhere else to die. He began to wander, with the thought that he should look for water, clutching the skullcap of his deceased wife, near to his heart. But he was too grief stricken to walk and fell to the side of the road only a few feet from where he entered it. Some villagers passing by saw him and his ragged appearance, holding the skull bowl, and mistook him to be a Tantric practitioner begging for food. So they poured wine into the skull bowl as an offering and went on their way. This stunned Kapalika. But somehow his body moved and he drank the wine. He drank the wine from his wife’s skull. Can you imagine the intensity of such an act? In that moment, where his love and memory of her was so strong, and the reality of death and impermanence equally strong, he became enlightened.

For Kapalika to love from that moment on, would be to love without pre-conception. To enjoy love without denying death, impermanence and the pain of existence is to enjoy without preconception. This kind of love is without the necessity of protecting oneself from hurt, because the inevitability of life’s qualities is accepted. With such awareness, grasping does not arise. With such awareness, denial is cut through and the pettiness of aversions and litany of complaints or arguments that arise from aversions, are dissolved. Relationship is very different when one recognizes the groundlessness it is built on. It has more life to it, in the way that when, in the uncertainty of courtship, one feels the primordial impermanence and feels things are out of ones control. In that period there is an exhilaration to love. The exhilaration that dies, bringing the death of the “Honeymoon” period with it, when the illusion of permanence, and knowing someone and “having” someone arises.

Two
Love without Preconceptions and Dukha

To love without pre-conceptions is also to love outside, beyond and inspite of our pictures. By pictures, I am referring to concepts about what relationship should be like, what your partner should be like, who you are and who other is and what reality is. These pictures must be dropped for love to live. Love is not a still portrait; it is a living energy.

Pictures make it difficult to love the one in front of us in the moment. Doubts arise in the mind of pictures, is this the one? is this real love? does this mean that he is not the one? maybe somebody better is out there who fits my ideal better!? …someone who will fulfill all my needs and do what I want and agree with me… Pictures birth all kinds of dissonance between ourselves and our beloved. When they do something that we do not like, when they do not fulfill our desire or need, rather than dealing with this directly, ordinary minds deny the situation by occupying oneself with a conceptual crisis. This is made to possibly mean that they are “not the one, this person needs to know how to behave in relationship, who is this person, where is the woman I married, this is not the partner I fell in love with, this person is a jerk, or self-centered, or annoying or clinging…” all sorts of concepts fly out like weapons to protect you from the dukha you are witnessing.

After Buddha was enlightened his very first teaching, the first thing he had to say to the world after years of severely austere spiritual seeking and deep yearning for truth was: all of life is dukha. Dukha is an interesting word, that is often translated as suffering but actually means, “ill-fitting wheel.” It is as if we are driving a car with three round tires and one square one. It can go forward but it is awkward at best. He taught that all of life has dukha when one has the state of clinging.

Clinging to pictures and conceptions causes dukha, things do not completely make sense or feel right. Instead of clinging to pictures, one can relate with the one in front of you as they are, one can relate to things as they are. This is a choice that must be made over and over again until it is imbedded in you. Most people in relationship, relate with their partners as an object to fulfill their needs, to fill out their pictures, to give them what they want. In life you will not always get what you want. In live you will not always be in control. If you are not clinging to what you want, not clinging to control you will have much less dukha, the un-necessary suffering falls away.

To enjoy without preconceptions is to open to experience fully what is in front of us without the endless assault of “shoulds,” how this person “should” be, and what it means that they are or aren’t. It means to be present with the one in front of us as they are and to relate to that on its own spontaneously arising terms.