On 9/11/16 Thinking of Hearts Broken and What Love is

9/11 brings to my heart the thought of broken, family deceased, perished in heinous smoke. I would much rather think of love today and to a measure broken hearts.  I wrote this as part of my last book.

The illusion of two single individuals loving in monogamous commitment may most easily be seen in the ideas of unrequited love or the cessation of requited love or although potentially unique in one’s lifetime a broken heart can reveal to a human being a greater detail of what love actually is by having one’s heart broken by another person who was never actually in love with them. 

This may sound like a bizarre equine Hellenic gift.  The pain that comes in thinking one was experiencing mutual love validated in burden and vulnerability from its impetus.  Sometimes this comes in our classroom locker years, sometimes with mortgage debt or tragedy of untimely death.  In it is a core understanding that love is a mathematical equation of reciprocity where the energy offered to better the other exponentially betters the self.  This occurs not in the act of the other’s reciprocation in kind to offer, but in the self’s internally generated consciousness with the common universe. 

This may sound lofty or contrived naïve bullshit, but in my experience that is how a person knows she or he is participating in love, because when you give you get.  Knowing where the getting is coming from might be tricky.  We so often associate the feeling with the other person.  The other person appears to allow us to feel this way or give us this feeling.  We might treasure them above any being for this dynamic, but that is not what love is. 

Love is an equation of one’s relationship with the self that is broadened by the other.  We gain access to doors inside our relationship with the self that do not open in isolation.  The other does this for us sometimes even when we are not doing this for them.  This often happens not because we are not trying, but because the other person’s relationship with his or her self is not opening his or her internal door.  We may do this for them and they may not do this for us.  Thus the record industry.  This is how one can so severely confuse mutual love for unilateral.  When combined and each person chooses to open that door the grandeur of the universe to humanity is revealed in ways like nothing else.

Volition can shift at any moment.  The crucible of the now holds that any relationship including marriage exists only in the choice in the now.  We can choose to close or open that door at any moment.  The Meme, god, the marital contract, or sex do not manifest or perpetuate the bond.  The bond is created in the choice on the table of the now.  When love shifts from unilateral or reciprocal to unrequited our ability to morn a broken heart and love another displays our most beautiful universal potential.  Love did not have to be encompassed in that individual.  We were never only loving that individual.  They were never only loving us.  Love is not encompassed in the self or the self we perceive our being to be. 

When our beloved dies we go on loving them in a way that yes transforms, but lives.  Our door can still be open without her or his body.  An airplane into a building, cancer, a bullet, a bomb, a car, a blocked ventricle, our heart knows not the rules that say you stop here.  We are born to love relentless, to bond, and to burst into a common universe.  In this way even tragedy can help show us what love is. 

Some may choose to only love one individual, some a few, some many.  The options are not as pertinent as one understanding that only what is empathetic to all that we are (our self, partners, others, progeny, society, (i.e. the universe)) is the love that truly connects us as the whole.  This requires the release of individuality our own and our partners.

We are in love and she or he leaves us.  She is engrained in our ego, a solidified envisioned component of our mandatory self.  Extracting her damages our ego, carves it out unimaginable that only she can fit.  Depression, rationalization, bartering through a grief process may try to stuff fluff into that hole or control an impossible scenario to plug her back in there, but that is all ego, all self. 

The path of love is to love as deeply and as passionately as one chooses in the moment of now.  Hearts break, volition changes or continues, but all one can do is have our say to let the other know how we feel and let that human go to choose us or not.  Pining and wanting and torturing the self to comfort that part of the ego one has placed specificity outside the individual as part of the ego only shows the non-necessity of the ego as an entirety.  The whole image of the ego, the whole painting, the words chosen, the faces chosen, they are all optional and a discretionary illusion.

The path out of heartache like that is to take that specificity out of the image of self one carries, trading the next body in to mask the pain is a common solution.  The psychologist William Glasser might call this the person we picture in our quality world in Choice Theory.  The better option is to accept the now, to lose the ego entirely.  Love where one can.  Love the universe through the self when no one is there. 

When facing that vast warehouse of loneliness, when the darkness crimps its prognathous jaw, we try to see the unending possibility, the lack of lines in the darkness, the absence of ego in what can be.  That is the beauty of the darkness loss can bring a person, the possibility that in the absence of the other the self perceived as so mandatory, so essential, the complete opposite is a place of growth. 

The predecessor image of the beloved acted in ways as a limit, a box our love had to conform.  She or he was a line to construct a peristaltic wall in the warehouse constricting and challenging us to either evict such malignant addictions or suffer a lack of growth.  With him gone in the nothing, the universe opens, and that at times can be god damn beautiful.  We begin to actually understand the relationship of the self by better assessing what the love we experienced actually was on a structural level.  We evaporate blame.

In this broken hearts are some of the most powerful and gorgeous experiences in the human journey.  We grow to shed the ego by understanding the blurred lines of the self dissolving into offering our volition fueled love to the whole in the consenting form that presents in our now.  We learn to let go, not to attempt to own another or be owned, but to be, to simply be.

The sexual act reverberating through our most powerful mental process of orgasm may be a representation of the potential concurrent emotional portal connecting the single-self as the spiritual universe opening through sexual connection.  We are eternal in both tangent planes, but the closest some of us may come to tangency is through intimate emotional sexual bonding exploding through the orgasmic transcendence of our biological form.  The flood and aftermath is often love.  This act, this experience is at the core of human social structure for so many reasons, but none more so than this.  We cannot control love.  We cannot control the universe.  All we can do is choose and be.