(i) Love: Love – both secular and divine – has been revered as the ‘cure-all’ for just about everything. So why has it not done its job? To understand this, one needs to comprehend that for love to exist at all there must be separation between ‘me’ and the person, the persons, the object or the god that ‘I’ am to love. Not for nothing is the statement ‘Love is a bridge’ promoted abroad for all and sundry to take in. My question is: A ‘bridge’ between what two shores? Who are the two ‘I’s that are separate? Do ‘I’ exist, actually exist? ‘I’ may be real, but am ‘I’ actual? If ‘I’ am an illusion then any ‘bridge’ will only reinforce ‘my’ existence ... my very ‘real’ existence. If a person is said to be ‘egotistic’ or ‘ego-driven’, then a goodly dose of love is advised to ameliorate the phenomenon. Yet the persona – the identity, the self – is still in existence ... a loving and lovable persona, of course, but still here. ‘I’ am the ‘spanner in the works’ and to cover my ‘self’ over with a coating of love is to gild the lily. ‘I’ still lurk around, shielded now by love, wreaking my mischief in disguise. Also, intrinsic to the nature of love is its – always unfulfilled – promise of eternity. Our life here on earth has a time-span, so what use is a spurious Eternal Bliss in some conjectured After-Life? Love has produced wars, murders, rapes and violence since time immemorial ... it staggers me that it still retains its credibility. To kill for ‘Love of Country’ or ‘Love of God’ is surely proof enough for any discerning person. Then there are those ‘Crimes of Passion’ that are brought about by love’s constant companions: possessiveness, jealousy and envy. If these examples are too extreme then what about the heartache, the longing, the pining and the yearning that all peoples report as accompanying love’s bliss? This leads to the search for ‘True Love’ which, supposedly, does not induce these unpleasant characteristics so common to everybody’s experience of love. ‘True Love’ is simply a fiction ... it is impossible to manifest it here on earth, hence the notion of an After-Life to encompass it. To repeat: Love never delivers on its implied promise. It never has done nor ever will. Its days are numbered, as more and more people are beginning to notice that love itself – not the human being – is failing to live up to its reputation again and again. (ii) Compassion: It is a little easier to question Divine Compassion as it reveals its secret agenda more readily than Love Agapé. First of all the word ‘compassion’ comes from the Latin root ‘Passio’ which relates to the Greek root ‘Pathos’. ‘Compassion’ then, literally means ‘communal pathos’ or ‘pathos in common’ ... in other words: Sorrow in common with the other, or others. In order to feel compassion – for compassion is indeed but a feeling – one must first be in sorrow oneself. All of humankind is, at base, living in sorrow; all normal people therefore seek consolation and solace to help them live through their sadness, their loneliness, their grief, their despair. This has been the way for century upon century, without anyone questioning the validity of this entire process. Compassion – the consolation and solace engendered – does absolutely nothing to eradicate the original sorrow. It is merely soothed and thus covered over which, to the one in grief, is a welcome reprieve from the anguish of despair. This factor is not what is under dispute; what is worthy of question is the ongoing feasibility of consolation and solace as being a permanent ‘cure-all’ for sorrow. Obviously it is not. The Enlightened Beings manifest Divine Compassion – considered superior to secular compassion – and tout it as being the ultimate ‘cure-all’ for humankind’s sorrow. Unfortunately for the success of Divine Compassion, no-one in these thousands of years has ever been cured. Temporary or partial cessation of suffering, yes ... but the total extirpation of sorrow, no. The reason for the failure of Divine Compassion is obvious: It also has its roots in sorrow – Universal Sorrow – this time. Read any of these Master’s words assiduously and you will find reference to them sitting in Aloneness. From this Aloneness they feel a sense of Oneness with all sentient beings ... a ‘bridge’ between persona’s again. Thus the same game as is being played out on the secular level is being played out on the divine level. They have only transcended duality, not expunged it. A Self is still in existence keeping separation going and necessitating a bridge to others ... and all of existence. As a Self is still operating, then Good and Bad, Right and Wrong are still ‘alive’ ... simply covered over with a coating of love to protect the new persona. (iii) The Truth: ‘The Truth’ is not all that tricky to question ... for it is but a delusion born out of an illusion. There are two ways to approach The Truth: through Love or via Beauty. Enough has already been said, for now, about Love’s shortcomings to regard any Truth arrived at via Love to immediately come under a cloud of outright suspicion. So to question Beauty: Western philosophers have long been of the opinion that in order to ‘do’ philosophy correctly, one must study and master the higher realms of mathematics. The reason for this is that to feel assured that a particular philosophical hypothesis is sound it must have an ‘elegance’ – identical to the ‘elegance’ of a mathematical equation. ‘Elegance’ is the mathematician’s and philosopher’s favoured word for Beauty. Many a time have I read in a philosophical treatise the author extolling the virtues of the ‘elegance’ of the particular theory. Beauty, they all state, contains The Truth ... it is intrinsic to the nature of Beauty that it points to The Truth, just as it is intrinsic in the nature of Love to promise Eternity. Or the same as is intrinsic in Suffering that it is Good for one – it implies that it ‘makes one stronger’. These are all feelings ... and just because a feeling makes it seem Right, it is not necessarily correct. A feeling – an emotion or a passion – is a feeling, not a fact. Feelings, whilst being very ‘real’, are not actual. Eastern philosophers opt for what Westerners consider to be the more esoteric approach to The Truth ... which amounts to a spiritual search for meaning. Although Western philosophy is also – at root – spiritual, it is considered to be more exoteric – and therefore more likely to be true. ‘No-Mind’, ‘The Void’, ‘Emptiness’ and so on are the Eastern philosopher’s discovery of their version of The Truth as revealed to them in their super-charged imagination. I say ‘super-charged’ because their meditation practices are designed specifically to ‘still the mind’ and ‘stop thought’. If conducted successfully, imagination has a field day and conjures up all kinds of visions ... it is pertinent to this subject to realise that a pious Christian will have visions of Mr. Jesus, not visions of Mr. Krishna. The same applies to a fervent Hindu, in reverse: a vision of Mr. Krishna but not of Mr. Jesus. A devout Buddhist will have visions of Mr. Buddha – and his Teaching of No-Mind, The Void and Emptiness. All these versions of The Truth are, quite obviously, culturally determined and therefore not a fact. A person living in actual freedom has no way of being side-tracked into this mine-field of delusion as it is the identity and self that generate imagination. I lost the faculty to imagine when I dissolved the Self ... I simply cannot visualise anything in my ‘mind’s eye’ for I do not have one. I have no imagination whatsoever.
