“Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.”

-Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

I’ve still yet to finish reading The Prophet by the brilliant philosopher and poet who once was Khalil Gibran, and as a preliminary note, I would suggest it to anyone who is a living human. It is impossible to read this book and not draw something deep from it. It is one of the most wonderful books to meditate on. The idea is that there’s this prophet in a town called Orphalese. He is either about to leave, or all the sailing imagery refers to his dying. At any rate, he is extremely disappointed to leave because he has been with the people of Orphalese for so long, and he has grown to care for them. Also, they seemed to have gained nothing from his presence, and he expresses some disappointment for not having sufficiently taught them before he leaves. As he stands on the cliff watching the arrival of his brothers from over the sea who will take him back to his mother land, the people of Orphalese approach him and ask him for all sorts of advice before he leaves. The one person who seems to understand the divine nature of the prophet is a seeress called Almitra. While the mother says, “Speak to us of children,” and the worker says, “Speak to us of work,” and the judge says, “Speak to us of law,” Almitra says, “Speak to us of love.” What follows is a beautiful poem on the body-stripping nature of love, how it will grind us down until we’re nothing and make something new out of us, of how it will be painful, but only through love are we able to experience the full range of our emotions. He provides the proverb which I’ve quoted above, and it is this proverb which I think encompasses the whole passage of love, as well as the entirety of the book (and I am confident in this without actually having finished reading the book).

Love only desires to have itself fulfilled. In this statement, we seem to see that Love is an entity that is separate from ourselves. I don’t believe Love is the love that we feel ourselves, but the form that is Love beyond ourselves that we are allowed to experience. Love itself is impersonal, and it makes itself personal when we allow ourselves to experience it. Let me provide for you, also, that throughout various other explanatory poems in The Prophet, Gibran repeatedly refers to love as being the source. For instance, when speaking of work, Gibran says that “work is love made visible”. I have a couple of philosophical evidences that support my view on this passage, and my reasons for believing its value as regards the nature of Love.

We’ve been learning about Hinduism in my World Religions class. This is certainly one of the most interesting and beautiful world views I have ever encountered. It seems that the belief of the Hindus, which has stood the test of time since c300 BCE, is an incredibly stable one, which from the very beginning was significant in its claim that it was not more valid than other religions. The belief is that, metaphysically, there is this essence of existence which is called Brahman. Brahman is present in all of creation, but it has no form. There is a Hindu adage that says “Neti…neti,” and it means “Not this…not this.” The concept here is this: if you traveled throughout the entire universe, and looked to the various things within it and said, “Not this,” about all of them, you would eventually invalidate all things and the only thing left would be Brahman. But like I said, Brahman is present in creation. There is a Self that is deeper than our bodies and our personalities. It is the part of us that passes on after this life, either to another life, or to moksha (which is being released from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth to join Brahman…essentially, a place on a different realm even than our Heaven; in fact, Brahman is still higher than Heaven as it is the substance which comprises Heaven just as it comprises the physical universe and all the things therein). From life to life, a piece of us moves on in reincarnation by means of karma (karma is the culminated actions of one life and it fuels the quality of the next life). This piece is called the Self, but it is even deeper than what we might call the Self. It goes beyond our personal identification, and is called Atman.

Here, we approach another concept in the form of an adage from the Upanishads (the philosophical works of Hinduism which helped to separate it from its precursor, the Vedic religion): “Thou art thou.” Atman is Brahman. You’re it. There are no two separate entities of Atman and Brahman. They are the same thing. Atman is just the branch of Brahman that runs into you and is your Self. Atman is like a raindrop and Brahman is like the ocean: both are water, but one is much vaster than the other. Atman is what passes on into the next life, and moksha means that this gets released from having to endure a physical body and is rejoined with Brahman.

One might ask, then, what is the purpose of the Hindu gods? This will be a quick explanation. There are indeed several Hindu gods. One might call this polytheism, but I disagree. Hindu holds (without necessarily saying it) that there is one god who may take several forms and require different forms of honor from different people. From the get-go, Hinduism validates the world’s religions by saying, “God is not the same for everyone.” The various incarnations of God are worshipped by various people in different walks of life and with different interests. Indra may be worshipped by a warrior, and Vishnu may be worshipped by a poet. People can choose which god or goddess to worship and how they worship him or her. They are both the same God, but in different forms with different names. Hinduism may then be considered a monotheistic religion, but it is still deeper than that. See, the form that is God, which takes on the forms of the various other deities, is actually just an extension of Brahman. God is made of the same stuff that all creation is made of. When Hindus worship, really they are giving themselves over to Brahman (or at least trying to). So I would personally call Hinduism monosubstantial (in that its beliefs circulate around a substance, Brahman, as opposed to a god) before referring to it as any kind of theism. Their gods are different forms of one god who is the path to Brahman.

I say all this to you because I think Love is the same way. Love is a thing that underlies life and is the reason for life. Love is huge and plants itself in each of us. Pleasure is an extension of love (though, as Gibran states, not a separate entity and pleasure should not be sought without enduring the full extent of Love’s toll on a person), and our physical bodies are made due to the physical desire for pleasure, for a quick realization of Love (even if it is one-sided in some sad cases). Pleasure, which is Love, makes our physical bodies, and our physical bodies are born knowing pleasure (Love) and pain (we will later refer to this as a state of being far from Love, but still being Love). Our physical bodies are made by Love and know Love. Love has instilled a piece of itself in our creation, thus we are created. In this way, I believe that Love is an entity separate from that piece of it that we feel in ourselves. When we tell someone, “I love you,” we feel that love in ourselves, the personal love, the same way that Atman is the impersonal Brahman made personal. In all things we do, some extent of our personal love is present, because I believe very strongly that we are driven by our desires (desire itself being an extension of Love like pleasure), and whether that desire is spiritual, monetary, physical, political, et cetera, what we do with it is a show of Love. For example, if we refer back to the proverb, “Work is love made visible,” we can break this down to mean that we work because we are motivated for a desire for accomplishment, advance, money (if money is needed, and what is needed is desirable, then money is desirable; this is not to say that we are obsessed with money, but that need is an extension of desire, which is an extension of Love), and so we work and desire is in it, and love is desire, so love is made visible.

Basic idea to pull from all this: There is an impersonal form that is Love, and it underlies all of existence, and all things that happen are extensions of it in different forms and different levels, even war. War is fought because somebody loves something. But this leads me to my next point.

Here, I have to reference Plato’s idea of Forms. I referenced this before when I talked about the line theory. The realm that we are kind of “stuck” in is the realm of objects and physical appearances, and the realm above this is the realm of ideas and the forms, which contains the essence of things in the physical world. For example, there is an essential “chairness” that exists which encompasses the basic components of a chair. This is obvious in the fact that all things that are made to be chairs function as chairs and are recognized as chairs, even if they are by no means similar. There is some perfect chair form which is floating around in the realm of the forms, and we draw from it when making chairs. At the same time, there is some form of moral absolutes floating around up there with the form of the chair. There is some sort of perfect justice, perfect goodness, et cetera. When we say, “That is not just,” or, “This is just,” what are we comparing it to? When we say that letting people live is more just than killing them, we are comparing these things to some perfect justice that exists pretty much beyond our comprehension. We are saying that letting people live is closer to some moral ideal than killing people. Of course, this varies across cultures. This isn’t to say that the ideal changes with cultures, but what is thought to be closer to the ideal changes. As Christian, I sincerely believe that letting someone live is much more just than killing them. I am saying that letting someone live is closer to my idea of perfect justice than killing. However, in a headhunter society, a headhunter might believe the complete opposite. What changes is the idea of the ideal, not the ideal itself. So we perceive justice, but one of us is more knowledgeable about it than the other. I think the reason this is different with physical things is because they are physical and visible as hard objects, so it is easier to comprehend the ideal of a chair because it is perceived the same everywhere. The function of the chair is perceived the same here and in Africa, and so they will bear that “chairness”. Moral absolutes, being formless and subject to societal influence, are blurred more across cultures.

Such is Love. The absolute is there, but we perceive it differently. So if it’s viewed in so many different ways, if here love means letting live, and there love means killing, how can we know what it wants? Well that’s easy. A chair has no desire but to be a chair. Justice has no desire but to be just. Love has no desire but to be love. It desires to be fulfilled, not matter the various ways that happens. It desires to be fulfilled in our actions. If we act out of love, then Love is fulfilled. That is what it wants. Does it matter who is closer to the ideal? I think the reason Love differs from the other ideals is that the absolute is simply the object that fuels us. It is not something to achieve, but something to act out of, and it underlies our actions. We are not trying to obtain Love because we already have it, and it already works through us in every little action. It may be, in essence, the single most important absolute. As long as we work out of love, we serve Love, and it wants this.

For people of piety (in Christianity and perhaps other religions), Love is God. God is this perfect love which underscores all of creation. Creation happened in response to God, who is Love. We try to work in accordance with God’s will (which is our ideal of Love). Let me call acting out of benevolent love being closer to Love, and acting out of malice being further away from it, so that evil is defined only as that thing which is very far away from Love, and therefore simply a level of love (you may remember how above I said that pain is a state of being far from Love). This is an apt definition, I think. If God is the Beginning, then Love is the Beginning, and everything else is either close to this or far away. And remember, even acting out of malice means we derive some personal pleasure, which is an extension of Love, so it is an act of Love, simply at a different distance than acting out of benevolent love. So in this definition, evil is only a different level of Godliness (albeit a far level). Acts of Love are acts of Godliness.

So let’s take a trip back to the headhunter society. The one I have in mind runs around cutting off people’s heads for a couple of reasons. One reason is their creation myth. Two brothers, at the beginning of time, are doing whatever it is that brothers do and one of them accidentally chops off the other’s head. The blood that flows from the dead brother becomes the universe. So they hunt heads in honor of their creator, essentially. Another reason is that the part of the soul that takes vengeance on one’s killer is in the head. So the head of a killed enemy must be taken and emptied (thus, shrunken heads). So what kinds of love are at work here? We see honor and justice in remembering the creator, and desire to not be tormented by a dead person’s soul. These are justice and desire. Both are acts of benevolent love, and therefore acts of Godliness. We may not think it is Godly, but if God is Love, and benevolent Love is fulfilled the acts of the headhunters, then the headhunters have reached a closeness to Love, and therefore to God.

So here we have this interesting logic that derives from the notion of the creation substance in Hindu tradition, which can be properly ascribed to the notion of Love and God in the Christian tradition. God is Love, and Love is personal love, and some level of personal love is apparent in all actions, and different actions are considered a higher level of love in different traditions, and one of these actions which we consider very wrong is one that another considers very loving, and it thus fulfils Love (not just their perception of Love, but Love as the absolute form), and ergo is Godly.

Now this blurs the lines a bit, doesn’t it? Certainly additions can be made to validate any one tradition over another, especially in the case of Christianity. If you want to get apologetic, we could say that the standard of Love is set in the Word of God, and Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of God, proclaimed the morality we follow as Christian as Truth. Therefore, we know that the actions that we consider Godly as Christians are spiritually more godly and closer to Love. We believe to the point of knowing that letting live is godlier than killing, and thus we may invalidate the headhunter concept of morality (go explain this to a headhunter and see if you still come back in one piece). But does it mean that our Christian addition to the argument makes Christianity more valid than headhunter theology? I don’t believe so, because Love is still being fulfilled in headhunter tradition (if a headhunter society either hasn’t heard of or has rejected Christianity), thus God is still being pleased.

I don’t want Christian readers to crucify me on the Hill of Heresy for this post. But are we to say that the person who has never met Christ, but serves Krishna or Rama (two of the ten incarnations of Vishnu in Hindu mythology) is going to Hell? Haven’t they been faithful to Love, and then God? These are just my personal musings on the desire of Love to fulfill itself.