REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA Chapt 19.

Reflections On King Solomon And The Buddha - Section 2

Chapter 19 - Flying Closer To Earth

by Ira Rosenberg

Let's look for relatively selfless intentions closer to daily life. Let's not be Luftmenschen. What about love? Certainly in love one's intention can be for the sake of the other. But "the other" can always be considered a mental construct -- a projection of the self. Wishful thinking about who the other is or can become, so common in love, speaks from our own needs and presumptions. By this reasoning, even sacrifice for the sake of the beloved, if the beloved was a projection of one's own wishes, would be considered a selfish act -- and has often been so considered.

And it's the same with wisdom. The selfless intention in wisdom, which purports to be or do for the sake of "humanity" or "the environment" or the "planet earth," rests on an opinion about what will truly serve, it rests on conviction, personal faith, and the strength of will to hold one's creative insight in the face of opposition, sometimes against the ruling paradigms. And this requires more, not less self-will. Therefore, neither kavannot, mitzvot, love, nor wisdom can be selfless. This is precisely what Solomon saw. They carry a self reference with them everywhere they go.

And I saw all the deed of God, for a person will not be able to fathom the deed that is done under the sun, because though a man toils to seek, he will not fathom, and even if the wise man claims to know, he will be unable to fatho

(Ecc. 8:17)

What purpose, then, do love and wisdom serve? If they are inevitably flawed by the imperfection that is structured into reality itself, what relief, release, redemption can we hope to achieve in them? Does love overcome dukkha? Does it have transforming powers? Constant love, Christian love, even in its individuated, self-referential form, puts itself out this way; it purports to resolve dualities, to reconcile enemies (Matthew 5:43-44.) But what are we looking at phenomenologically when we speak of constant love? All we can know of love comes through experience. The constancy of the emotion and the integrity of the experience and what it leads us to do or refrain from doing are two different things, though boasted of and sung by poets and mystics.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

O, no! It is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken...

(Shakespeare. From Sonnet 116)

The love that lies behind the constancy of the emotion of love -- even if we assume the emotion to be constant -- may not be all that constant. We drift in and out of love with our principal others. Judging by our behavior, when something goes wrong we are usually briefly estranged -- and this happens frequently enough. When thing go well, we fly to union, but union doesn't last. As the pseudonymous Solomon recognized in the Song of Songs:

I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake; I sought him but I could not find him; I called him but he gave me no answer.

(Song of Songs 5:6)

How do we manage to call it love even when we are repulsed or find our lovers repugnant? We do it by holding the memory of all the separate approaches and separations in a single bigger basket. We love the abstraction of love. As Rogers and Hammerstein put it:

"Falling in love with love is falling for make believe. Falling in love with love is playing the fool."

In this they even echo the Solomonic criticism of "folly."

The constancy of the feeling of love is an accretion, an assemblage, a residue built up from many experiences of turning, principally our turnings from separation to approach where the appreciation for the other soars and strengthens. And in moments before we plummet into deepest intimacy, where the overpowering visceral draw of the other makes us feel love in any or all of its four forms, we feel and commit ourselves to its eternal verity. But these powerful turnings toward union with the beloved can only occur by virtue of the reality of an equal number of turnings away from intimacy toward distance, toward isolation, renunciation, revulsion, or solitude. If everything is changing -- because "this too shall change" -- love is changing too. This is the insight of the Song of Songs, the ceaseless rhythm of approach and separation, a rhythm wound into the universe, an intrinsic rhythm of life: lovers must part in order to renew their love.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely. Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

(Song of Songs, 2:14-17)

Memories of this variability in the rhythms of love are what we suppress when, in recollection, we compose the longer view of love's durability. But Solomon makes love simple in its four manifestations:

Two are better than one, since they have good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his friend, but woe to the one who falls and has no second to lift him up.

(Ecc. 4:9)

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Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)