Between Poetry and Sex: The Stillness of 'Dhammic' Love
Between Poetry and Sex: The Stillness of 'Dhammic' Love
- Jatin Mathur and Ravi Jonwar
Poetic and Sexual Love
However, both of these forms of love are commonly considered exclusive - which is not always the case. Poetic love may end in a sexual encounter or Sexual love may lead to spiritual experience. Interestingly, the unifying force in both these kinds of love is that both require you to lose ‘yourself’ in the other person. You prioritize the other person over your interests and desires. You lose yourself in this process. Sexual love being behavioral and bodily seems non-humanistic hence considered demonic and primitive while poetic love is intellectual and rhetoric hence regarded as godly and supernatural. In poetic love, you value a person while in sexual love you value experience. The poetic love may involve sacrifices but often involves guilt or repentance while the sexual love gives you momentary fulfillment. Poetic love is based upon relationships that are often caught up in the Institutions and structures of society; while sexual love seeks to free you up it tends to ignore structures. Many can't imagine themselves moving beyond boundaries and hence negate the love beyond boundaries.
When a person gets to know these generally considered contradictory aspects of love and connection in life, one experiences stillness. One tries to get over emotions and seeks to understand life then one takes refuge in the mind and becomes anxious after being hit by reality. As humans, we tend to be struck in this binary between Poetic love and Sexual love, where it seems impossible to transcend this binary. Believers of each kind discard the presence of other. Whether it's poets who appropriate their desires in poems or sexually motivated individuals finding poetry in intercourse. Despite the exclusivity of these two ideas of love people find ways to negotiate poetry and sex with each other. I here make an attempt to bridge the gap between these two ideas of love and it forms the foundation of ‘Dhammic love’ or ‘conscient love’.
Dhammic love
In my experience, there is another kind of loving, which I have called 'Dhammic love', a concept inspired by Buddhist philosophy, particularly the idea of conscient living—a mindful, present-centered approach to life. This form of love is different from both of the above-described forms of love. This third way of love entails no suffering. It is a more mindful way of loving people. It is highly momentary without any regret of the past or obligations for the future relationship. This kind of love relationship seeks a mutual experience of awareness and acknowledgement of impermanence and uncertainty of life and events. It is about experiencing everyday experiences of being loved and prioritizing others in a relationship rather than expecting a desired outcome. It is a detached way of loving a partner where you see them as your co-travellers who may have different destinations. However, that doesn't mean that you don't enjoy the interactions you had with them during your mutual journey. We are mostly attached to our partners in a way that we want them to alight the bus along with us. This way of loving undermines their freedom and reduces them to mere organisms of pleasure having no agency of their own, rather we make attempts to control them and their decisions about their life. You may ask what kind of love is it, when two people are not attached to each other? Would they even feel anything at all? Isn't it depressing and disappointing that a person in whom you have invested your energy and emotions chose a different direction? To be honest, it would be painful but not depressing. If you had focused on those moments of love and immersed yourself in the sea of emotions rather than thinking about an ending. I am not asking you to stop expecting a future out of the relationship but what I am trying to convey is the idea that, where you stop anticipating for it over the present and mutual opportunities of love and pleasure. This love relationship is more like a romantic novel or fiction. The story contains where every page contains words which correspond to certain meanings which evoke certain emotions. It can be love, pain, happiness or peace but we are in this habit of expecting a certain ending and we anticipate it, we think about it, we plan about it or fantasize about it and often we miss opportunities that present offers.
We read every page, accept those words and feel what they correspond to if it is elation, excitement or pain you feel along with characters and you are not worried about the perfect ending but the very page. There are novels where the ending is painful or it's not what you expected, however, does it decide the quality of the novel? No, it doesn't; rather it is that every page and very emotion you feel that makes it a better read than a perfect ending without the depth of words. The same analogy can be applied to understand Dhammic love which relies upon the depth of experiences, and emotions rather than the endings. It may be momentary but it leaves a mark on your consciousness that you are grateful to the person for fulfilling experiences of love rather than attachment to the mutual future.
Read more on Love: You are 'too right' to be loved.
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