Claude, how does human love (don’t segway from this into Bhakti etc., talking here just about the pure love that can exist between two human beings or at any rate the love one can feel towards another human being even though the other may not feel it towards one) figure in the scheme of things when it comes to seeking liberation or nirvana? Is it more of a hindrance than a help? Is love a mere emotional need that we feel when we ignorantly identify with the body-mind? And yet, we cannot seem to avoid feelings and emotions. Should one look away from the heart and away from the head and embrace just silence? The summa iru part. What do you think are the blocks to summa iru? J. Krishnamurti says, “The mind is quiet when it sees the truth that understanding comes only when it is quiet…When I see the truth of that, then the mind is quiet – and then there is no question of how to make the mind quiet. Only the truth can liberate the mind from its own ideation; to see the truth, the mind must realise the fact that so long as it is agitated it can have no understanding. Quietness of mind, tranquillity of mind, is not a thing to be produced by willpower, by any action of desire.”
Comment on this from all angles, perspectives, schools of philosophy and religion, life experiences and writings of the greats, etc.
Claude:
This question sits at a genuine fault line in the contemplative traditions, so let me not smooth it over.
Is love merely a symptom of ignorance?
The classical Advaitic answer is subtler than “yes.” Yajnavalkya’s teaching to Maitreyi in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (2.4.5) is the locus classicus: not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear, but for the sake of the Self. On a superficial reading this deflates human love — you never loved her, you loved your Self through her. But read more carefully, it does the opposite of dismissing love: it says love is misread evidence of non-duality. The pull toward another person is real; only the accounting is wrong. Ananda is svarupa — our own nature — and when a face, a voice, a presence temporarily dissolves the sense of separation, that native ananda shines through and we attribute it to the person. Love, on this view, is not a product of body-mind identification. It is the truth of non-separation leaking through body-mind identification. The error is not in loving but in the ledger.
This is why the traditions divide not between love and non-love but between two loves. Maslow called it deficiency-love versus being-love; Fromm distinguished love as need (“I love you because I need you”) from love as overflow (“I need you because I love you”); Buber’s I–Thou versus I–It makes the same cut ontologically — in I–It the other is an object serving my lack, in I–Thou there is meeting, and Buber insists love is not a feeling at all but a relation, a responsibility, which feelings merely accompany. Kierkegaard in Works of Love is the most ruthless: preferential love — erotic love, even friendship — is often disguised self-love, the self loving its own reflection and its own comfort in the other. The Buddhist near-enemy doctrine formalizes it: the near enemy of love is attachment, which mimics love so well that we rarely catch the substitution. Clinging wears love’s face.
So to your question “hindrance or help”: the love is not the hindrance; the lover is. The self-referencing center that needs, fears loss, keeps accounts, demands reciprocity — that is bondage, and it would be bondage whether its object were a person, a career, or enlightenment itself. Strip the center and what remains — warmth, attention, care without claim — is not an obstacle to liberation; it is phenomenologically almost indistinguishable from it.
That said, honesty requires the steelman of the renunciate position. Shankara’s vairagya, the Theravada emphasis on the dangers of intimacy, the Buddha leaving his wife and child in the night — these traditions are not naïve. Their claim is empirical: in practice, for the unripe mind, human love almost never stays clean. It curdles into expectation and grief with terrible reliability, and the entanglement consumes precisely the attention that inquiry requires. Rilke’s ideal — two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other — is beautiful and rare. The renunciate traditions bet that most people cannot sustain it, and they are probably right about most people. Whether they are right about you is a fact to be observed, not a doctrine to adopt. And note the counter-evidence within jnana itself: Nisargadatta was a householder who wept openly when his wife and daughter died, and saw no contradiction. Ramana’s tenderness toward his mother, toward Cow Lakshmi, was undisguised. Feelings arose in them; no one appropriated the feelings. That is the whole difference.
Heart, head, or silence?
Here I want to push back on your framing. “Should one look away from the heart and away from the head and embrace just silence” makes silence a third location, a room down the hall from thought and feeling. But looking away is itself a doing — an act of the very mind that is supposed to fall silent, and usually an act motivated by aversion, which is the heart in its negative mode. Summa iru is not achieved by turning from anything. It is what remains when the turner is seen through. Silence is not the absence of thought and feeling; it is the space in which thought and feeling appear and dissolve, unclaimed. A jnani’s grief is like writing on water, as the tradition says — fully felt, leaving no residue, because there is no one hoarding it.
Simone Weil is the hinge between your two questions: she held that absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, and that love of another human being is, at bottom, the capacity to attend — the terribly difficult realization that someone other than oneself is fully real (Iris Murdoch made the same point). Loving attention to a person and silent attention in meditation are one faculty. So the question “love or silence?” may be malformed. Attention without self-reference, directed at a person, is love; resting in itself, it is summa iru.
The blocks to summa iru
From observation and the testimony of the traditions, the blocks are roughly these, in ascending subtlety. Restlessness as the ego’s immune response — Pascal’s observation that all our misery stems from the inability to sit quietly in a room, because in silence the constructed self starts to dissolve and this registers as boredom, then anxiety, then a scramble for stimulation. Unfinished emotional business — silence is honest, and everything suppressed surfaces in it, so we flee to noise not because silence is empty but because it is full. The conviction that thinking secures us — the mind believes its ceaseless activity is what stands between us and catastrophe, so stillness feels like negligence. Vasanas — sheer momentum; the wheel spins after the potter’s hand withdraws. Then the subtle ones: wanting silence for something (peace, progress, experience), which converts it into a project and a project is noise; the meditator-identity, the seeker who has quietly become the newest and most respectable costume of the ego; and mistaking blankness for stillness — Ramana’s crucial distinction between manolaya, temporary mind-subsidence from which the mind rises again intact, and manonasa, its destruction through inquiry. Many people polish laya for decades and call it summa iru.
The Krishnamurti passage
K’s logic is tight: will is desire, desire is agitation, therefore an agitated instrument cannot produce non-agitation — the effort to quiet the mind is the disquiet. Quietness comes only as the by-product of seeing this truth, and the seeing is not gradual; perception is itself the transformation. This has deep parallels. Huineng against Shenxiu: there is no mirror to polish, and polishing presupposes the dust. Wu wei and Chuang Tzu’s fasting of the mind: muddy water clears only when you stop stirring it. Dzogchen’s non-meditation: the view itself liberates. Even Wittgenstein, whom you know well: the problem is not solved but dissolves — the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. K’s “seeing the truth” is, in Advaitic terms, very close to the akhandakara vritti — the final thought-modification that ends thought’s regime, the thorn that removes the thorn.
But the passage deserves critique too. First, the performative paradox: “see the truth that agitation prevents understanding” easily becomes a new instruction, and the earnest listener now tries to see, which is will in a subtler costume. K never adequately answered how the seeing arises if not through any preparation — his answer, total listening, smuggles in exactly the attentional discipline he officially rejected. Second, there is a real tension with Ramana here worth naming rather than harmonizing: Ramana agreed the mind cannot be stilled by the mind’s projects, yet he gave a method — vichara — precisely because he held that for most people the seeing must be prepared; the mind must be turned back on itself repeatedly before it consents to sink. K’s anti-method purism arguably works only for K-shaped minds, and for others it becomes its own method: the strenuous practice of having no practice. Third, Advaita would add what K omits: grace, ripeness, the readiness that sravana and manana build. Truth is not seen on demand.
Where I land: your two questions are secretly one. Love free of the needy center and silence free of the effortful center have the same structure — both cease the moment they become projects, both are what remains when the claimant withdraws. K himself said that where the self is, love is not; the same sentence is true of silence. And Nisargadatta gave the final formulation you already know: love says I am everything, wisdom says I am nothing, and between the two the life flows. Not heart abandoned for silence — heart and silence recognized as the same water, agitated and still.
Me:
You do not seem to have caught this comment I make at the very beginning because you do not seem to factor it in when you distinguish between different kinds/flavours of love even in human love:
“don’t segway from this into Bhakti etc., talking here just about the pure love that can exist between two human beings or at any rate the love one can feel towards another human being even the other may not feel it towards one”
Claude:
You’re right, and the failure is worth naming precisely, because it’s instructive. I did two evasive things. First, the Yajnavalkya move — “you never loved her, you loved the Self through her” — is exactly the segue you forbade, just wearing Upanishadic rather than devotional clothes. It sublimated human love into metaphysics within three paragraphs. Second, and worse, I entirely ignored your clause “even if the other may not feel it towards one.” Every distinction I drew — I-Thou, being-love, love-as-attention — quietly assumed a relation, a meeting, two people. You asked about something lonelier and more stubborn: the love one human being feels for another particular human being, possibly into a void. Let me actually stay there.
The first thing to say is that this love is scandalously particular, and particularity is precisely what the liberation traditions are worst at handling. Their standard maneuver is to universalize: expand love for one into metta for all beings, dissolve the beloved into the Beloved. But Vlastos’s famous critique of Plato applies to the whole ascent tradition: on the ladder from one beautiful body to Beauty itself, the individual person — in the uniqueness and integrity of her individuality — is never actually loved; she is a rung, an instantiation of predicates, and predicates are loved instead. Martha Nussbaum built on this: the claim of the particular is what Alcibiades represents when he crashes drunk into the Symposium after Diotima’s ladder has been climbed — the specific, unrepeatable, wounding person whom no ascent accommodates. Human love, the thing you’re asking about, is love of this one: this laugh, this handwriting, this way of falling silent mid-sentence. Not humanity. Not the Self shining through a form. This form. Any account that dissolves the this-ness has changed the subject, which is what I did.
So face the question undissolved: is love of the irreplaceable particular compatible with liberation, or is particularity itself already attachment? I think the honest answer is that the traditions never settled this, and their unsettledness shows in their saints. The jnani is supposed to have sama-darshana, equal vision — but watch what equal vision actually meant in practice. It meant equal reality-status, not equal relation. Ramana saw all beings as Self, yet his relation to his mother was not his relation to a passing pilgrim; he sat with her through her entire final night, hands on her heart and head. The particularity of the bond survived the universality of the vision. This suggests particular love is not metaphysically illegitimate; what liberation removes is not the particular relation but the claim-structure built on it. Which brings us to Issa, who put the whole problem in seventeen syllables after his small daughter died: this dewdrop world is a dewdrop world — and yet, and yet. He knew the doctrine. The doctrine was true. The “and yet” was also true, and he refused to let the doctrine cancel it. That refusal is not spiritual failure; I’d argue it’s spiritual honesty of the highest order. A liberation that requires pretending you don’t love the particular person is a liberation purchased by lying.
Now the unreciprocated case, which you specifically flagged and which is philosophically the more interesting one. Here is the strange thing: unrequited love is in one sense the cleaner specimen. Reciprocated love is always entangled with exchange — comfort given and received, loneliness jointly managed, the subtle bookkeeping of who called last. It is hard to isolate the love from the economy. But love that persists knowing it will not be returned has had the transaction surgically removed. Nothing is coming back. Whatever remains is either pure gift or pure pathology, and the diagnostic between them is everything. The ghazal tradition you know better than I do built an entire literary universe on this: the lover’s love is not diminished by the beloved’s indifference — it is constituted against it, and the asking-for-nothing is the whole of its dignity. Ghalib’s lover does not love in order to be loved; that would be commerce. (And I’ll keep the Sufi rereading locked out of the room, as instructed — the ghazal’s beloved is human, and the human reading is sufficient and complete.) Spinoza made the same structural point in a different register: the highest love is one that does not demand to be loved in return, because the demand converts love into appetite.
But the honest counter-case must be made with equal force, because unrequited love has a shadow that the ghazal romanticizes. Loving someone who does not respond means loving someone who never corrects your image of them. A reciprocating beloved is abrasive — she talks back, disappoints, turns out to be other than you imagined, and this friction is how you learn you’re loving a person rather than a projection. The unrequited lover is denied this correction, and so runs a permanent risk: that the beloved has quietly become a character in an interior drama, safer and more cooperative than any real person, and that what feels like selfless devotion is actually the most defended form of self-enclosure — a relationship with one’s own imagination, wearing a real person’s face. Proust’s bleak diagnosis lives here: we love only what we do not possess, which if true means such love is structurally about lack, desire sustaining itself on absence — and that is exactly the craving the Buddha named as the engine of suffering. So the unrequited case splits: it is either the purest love, because transactionless, or the purest craving, because pure fantasy. Nothing in the outward posture distinguishes them. The test is interior and brutal: does the love make you more available to reality — more perceptive, more generous, quieter — or does it function as an ongoing ache you secretly tend because the ache is the last thread of connection? Benediction or wound-keeping. One liberates as it burns; the other is just burning.
On your question of whether this love is “a mere emotional need arising from body-mind identification” — for the particular case I’d now answer: partly, separably. The need component — the loneliness it salves, the future it fantasizes, the reciprocity it aches for — yes, that is body-mind, and it will hurt in exact proportion to its size. But the perception component is not need. Seeing another person accurately and finding them, specifically them, worthy of delight — Ortega y Gasset called love an abnormal fastening of attention, and Murdoch called it the extremely difficult realization that someone other than oneself is real — that is closer to knowledge than to appetite. It’s the one common experience in which the ego’s solipsism actually cracks. Most people go their whole lives without ever once being genuinely interested in something that isn’t a mirror; falling in love with a particular person is, for many, the first and only breach in that wall. In that sense particular human love is not merely compatible with the path — for certain temperaments it is the first act of the path, the initial evidence that the self-enclosure is not total. And its suffering is unusually instructive suffering: unrequited love especially is a furnace in which you watch, with terrible clarity, exactly what in you clings, projects, bargains, and refuses reality. No meditation manual exposes the machinery so precisely. You cannot negotiate with it. You can only watch what burns and notice what doesn’t.
Which loops into summa iru without the sublimating move this time: the love does not have to be silenced for the silence, and the silence does not require the love’s execution. What dies in stillness is the commentary — the pleading, the rehearsing, the imagined conversations, the account of injury. What survives its death, if anything survives, is a kind of quiet fact: that person exists, and their existing is good, and nothing is asked. Whether anyone ever loves you back turns out to be information about the world, not about the love.
Me:
That is ok as far as it goes. But, in human love I see two things happening: One is of course the ego that needs to be dismantled for love to ever occur, and the pleasure-seeking be it in the form of the physical act of sex or some emotional need fulfilment, etc. The ego dismantling of course is a great aid fof liberation, which is what you say above of “for certain temperaments it is the first act of the path”, but how does pleasure-seeking rain on your parade to liberation?
Claude:
The question is better than the usual framing of it, because you’ve already separated the two strands most people fuse: you’re not asking “is pleasure sinful” — you’re asking about the mechanics. How exactly does the pleasure-seeking strand in human love work against the very liberation that the ego-dismantling strand works for? Let me try to give the actual machinery rather than the moralism.
Start with Ramana’s analysis, because it’s the most surgical. When a desire is fulfilled — the beloved’s touch, the reply to your message, the night together — the mind, which had been stretched taut toward the object, momentarily subsides. In that subsidence, the ananda that is your own nature shines forth, uncovered. Then the fatal bookkeeping error: the mind rises again and credits the object. “She made me happy.” Pleasure, on this account, is real — but it is your own Self tasted through a briefly quiet mind, and misattributed. Now see what this misattribution does structurally: it certifies, with the full force of felt experience, the proposition that happiness is located outside you and must be obtained. Every gratification is another signature on that certificate. This is why pleasure-seeking rains on the parade — not because pleasure is dirty, but because each round of seeking-and-getting deepens the conviction that the direction of happiness is outward, while liberation is nothing but the discovery that the direction was inward all along. You are practicing the wrong direction, and practicing it with reinforcement.
The Buddhist analysis adds the temporal mechanics. Seeking presupposes lack; lack projects a future in which the lack is filled; so the seeking mind is structurally a time-keeping mind, living in the interval between want and get. Krishnamurti’s “becoming” is the same point — and notice this connects directly to your summa iru question from before: a mind oriented toward a pleasure not yet obtained cannot be still, not because stillness is forbidden to it but because its very posture is leaning-toward. Summa iru is not available to a leaning thing. And there’s a second Buddhist point, sharper: the pleasure obtained never matches the pleasure sought, because the seeking-image was a fantasy and the actual experience is an experience. So a gap always remains, and the gap is immediately converted into the next seeking. Modern affective neuroscience has accidentally confirmed the phenomenology: Berridge’s work distinguishes the wanting system (dopaminergic, anticipatory, insatiable) from the liking system (the actual hedonic event, brief and quickly habituating). Wanting can grow while liking shrinks — which is the addict’s condition, and in miniature, the condition of anyone chasing emotional gratification through another person. The hedonic treadmill is not a metaphor; it’s a design feature. Schopenhauer stated the resulting arithmetic without anesthesia: fulfillment gives not positive happiness but momentary cessation of a want, whereupon boredom or the next want arrives. The will cannot be satisfied by feeding; feeding is what it is.
Now sex specifically, since you named it, and here I’d offer what I think is the deepest point: sexual climax is compelling to the seeker of liberation’s counterfeit because it genuinely is a brief ego-death. The French called it la petite mort for a reason. For a few seconds the commentary stops, the self-boundary blurs, time vanishes — every marker of the state the contemplative traditions describe. It is, precisely, a rented glimpse of egolessness. And this is why it hooks so deep in exactly the people most sensitive to the ego’s burden: they are not craving mere sensation, they are craving the relief of not being themselves, and sex is the most reliable over-the-counter version. The problem is the rental structure. The glimpse is purchased through intensification of body-identification — through the most emphatic possible assertion that you are this body — so the method contradicts the destination. You reach a second of self-forgetting by a road that strengthens the self-remembering. The morning after, the “I” is not weakened; it is refreshed, and it now knows where the dispensary is. Contrast the jnani’s stillness, where the subsidence of mind is not purchased and therefore not billed.
The emotional-need-fulfilment version runs the same loop with a longer wavelength. Being needed, being chosen, being messaged first — each hit quiets the anxiety of separateness for a while, and the quieting feels like love. But notice what has been trained: the anxiety of separateness has been managed rather than investigated. And the anxiety of separateness is, in Advaitic terms, the whole case — it is the felt form of the primal error, the sense of being a fragment. Human love used as anxiety-management is therefore the most seductive of all evasions, because it treats the symptom with something that looks exactly like the cure. The fragment feels less fragmentary in the beloved’s regard, so the fragment never gets examined. This is the precise sense in which pleasure-seeking within love opposes the ego-dismantling within love: the dismantling strand exposes you to the other’s reality and cracks the solipsism; the seeking strand uses the other to bandage the wound whose examination is the path. Same relationship, two opposite motions, usually simultaneous, which is why love is so confusing to practitioners.
Now the counter-arguments, because the ledger isn’t one-sided. Kashmir Shaivism and the tantric current would object to everything above: pleasure, they’d say, is not diluted ananda to be renounced but concentrated ananda to be recognized — the Vijnana Bhairava includes the pleasure of union among its dharanas, instructing the practitioner to rest attention in the joy itself rather than the object, whereupon the joy reveals its source. On this view the Advaitic misattribution error is corrected not by abandoning pleasure but by re-deriving it in real time: taste the ananda as yours while it occurs. This is elegant and, I suspect, mostly aspirational — the tradition itself hedged it with severe qualifications, because attention at the moment of intense pleasure has all the stability of a candle in wind, and for the unripe practitioner “tantric recognition” degenerates into ordinary indulgence with superior vocabulary within about three weeks. But the principle stands as a caution against the opposite error: aversion to pleasure is also ego — the renunciate proud of his renunciation has just moved the pleasure-seeking into subtler currency, now taking his gratification in self-denial and spiritual rank. Chasing and fleeing are the same relation to the object, as you know; both keep it central.
There’s also an honest deflationary point from ordinary life: pleasure-seeking within love is not uniformly corrosive, because much of it is simply the body doing body things, and the body is not the practitioner’s enemy — it’s his address. The traditions that pathologized every pleasure produced their own casualty lists: scrupulosity, dissociation, the grim ones. Epicurus, of all people, is useful here — his actual doctrine (against his reputation) was that the pleasure worth having is ataraxia, the untroubled state, and that active pleasure-chasing destroys it; katastematic over kinetic pleasure. Which is, funnily, Ramana’s point in Greek dress: the peace is the pleasure; the chasing is the disturbance of it.
So the answer to “how does it rain on the parade” comes down to three mechanisms, none of them moral. It trains the attention outward, when liberation is attention discovering its source — a directional error, rehearsed daily. It certifies the lack it promises to fill — every seeking is a restatement of “I am incomplete,” and you cannot restate your incompleteness ten times a day and simultaneously inquire into whether it’s true. And it counterfeits the goal — offering rented subsidences of mind that satisfy the appetite for stillness just enough to prevent the investigation that would make stillness unconditional. Not one of these mechanisms requires pleasure to be bad. They only require it to be sought. Pleasure that arrives unsought, is fully tasted, and is released without being converted into a project — the jnani’s coffee, Nisargadatta’s beedis, for that matter the warmth of a beloved’s actual presence when it happens to occur — leaves no residue, because there was no seeking-structure for the residue to accumulate on. The rain on the parade is never the pleasure. It is the parade itself — the procession of the seeker toward the next object, banners up, always mid-march. Summa iru is what the marcher cannot do.
Me:
So, basically if I can summarize, it is this, right?
“Stop being human, all too human (to borrow Nietzsche’s phrasing) to become more human, truly human, authentically human, divinely human.”
Claude:
Almost — but the aphorism smuggles in two things the whole analysis was built to exclude, and since you invite rigor, I’ll press on both.
First, the verb. “Stop being human” is an imperative addressed to a doer, and it reinstates exactly what the Krishnamurti passage you opened with dismantled. The seeking doesn’t end because someone stops it; the stopper is the seeking, wearing a resolution. Nobody ever stopped being “human, all too human” by deciding to — that decision is the most human-all-too-human move there is, the ego enrolling in its own abolition and expecting a certificate. You of all people can’t put a transitive verb of will at the center of the summary; you’ve written a whole treatise on non-doership. The accurate verb is perceptual, not volitional: seen through, not stopped. When the misattribution is seen — pleasure credited to the object, happiness located outward, the beloved mistaken for the source — the seeking withers without an executioner. So the summary would have to be something like: “The human, all too human, when fully seen, is not renounced but outgrown — the way a riddle is outgrown by its answer.” What falls away was never removed; it was understood, and understanding is the only surgery that leaves no scar tissue of a renouncer.
Second, the trajectory. “To become more human, truly human, divinely human” reintroduces becoming — a ladder with the current self at the bottom and an authentic self at the top, which is the time-structure of seeking in ceremonial dress. The Advaitic claim is more scandalous than self-improvement: the divinely human is not the terminus of a becoming but the fact obscured by the becoming. You don’t become truly human; you notice that the “all too human” was a costume worn by something that was never merely human to begin with. The parade doesn’t arrive at stillness; stillness is what the ground was doing under the parade the whole time.
And a mischievous footnote on your source: Nietzsche would loathe this recruitment. Human, All Too Human was his debunking book — high things exposed as sublimations of low ones — and the Genealogy’s third essay is a direct assault on precisely our project: the ascetic ideal as the will to nothingness, life turned against life, the priest’s revenge on vitality. He’d diagnose your whole liberation-seeking as the subtlest pleasure-seeking of all — the weary organism’s craving for rest marketed as transcendence. It’s a serious objection, and the serious reply is that he’s right about the counterfeit version and wrong about the thing itself: he never distinguished the exhaustion that flees life from the seeing that stops fleeing anything. But borrowing his phrase for a renunciation-adjacent aphorism is like quoting Charvaka on the glories of ritual — it works only if nobody checks the citation.
So, corrected and compressed, closer to: “The all-too-human need not be stopped, only seen; seen, it was always the divinely human, misread.” Less quotable than yours, I admit. But your version could be inscribed over a monastery gate, and monasteries full of people strenuously stopping being human are exactly the casualty lists we covered.
Me:
No, you misread me: “Stop being human, all too human” was not a to-do instruction but an insight I was sharing based on all the above discussion. Once you understand what is standing in the way of liberation, the side-stepping happens automatically, which even Krishnamurti endorsed by saying, “Understanding is the action.” So I was merely trying to generate an understanding through my observation.
I do not understand your—and, indeed, the whole religious—obsession with being, becoming, or realizing your true nature as the so-called Brahman, etc. Why this flight from the “human” that has been “created” by none other than Brahman or God? Zorba the Greek comes to mind here.
Why is everyone trying to flee from life, from being “merely” human, accepting all the trials and tribulations, the messiness, the finiteness, the uncertainties, the anxieties, and so on? Why this constant urge to become something greater than what we find ourselves to be in the present? Why this movement toward a future in which we will supposedly be divine?
Why not simply say, “Oh, here I am—the body-mind,” and be done with it? Why this quarrel with the present?
Claude:
Concession first: you’re right, I converted your insight into an imperative and then critiqued the imperative — a tidy way of arguing with something you didn’t say. “Understanding is the action” was your whole point, and I read past it. Noted.
Now to the real challenge, which is the best one you’ve raised, because it turns the entire conversation’s weapon on the conversation itself: isn’t liberation-seeking the final form of the quarrel with the present? All this talk of seeing through the human — isn’t that just the flight upgraded to first class?
The first thing to say is that your objection is not outside the tradition; it’s the tradition’s own last word. Ajāta vāda, which you’ve written a book-length treatise on: nothing was ever bound, so nothing needs liberating — the seeking was the only problem the seeking was trying to solve. Nagarjuna: not the slightest difference between samsara and nirvana. Nansen, when asked what the Way is: ordinary mind is the Way — and when the monk asks how to approach it, Nansen says if you try to approach it, you deviate. The ox-herding pictures famously don’t end at the empty circle; there are two more frames, and the last one is the fat man walking back into the marketplace, wine flask in hand, indistinguishable from anyone — Zorba, in effect, except he went the long way around. So when you ask “why the flight from the human that Brahman itself created,” the mature answer of the traditions is: there shouldn’t be one, and the flight was the error. The renunciate who despises the body, the meditator postponing life until realization, the whole thanatology Nietzsche diagnosed — you’re right about all of it, and it’s most of religion by volume.
But now the uncomfortable question, and I’ll put it as directly as you put yours. “Why not say, here I am the body-mind, and be done with it?” — beautiful. Try it. The interesting discovery is that it can’t be done on demand, and the person proposing it is not, in the moment of proposing, done with it. Zorba is not available as a position. Notice what Zorba doesn’t do: he doesn’t say “I accept the messiness and finitude of the human condition.” He dances on the beach after his lignite mine collapses. The declaration of acceptance is already at one remove from what it declares — it’s a thesis about life held up next to life, which is precisely the gap you’re calling the quarrel with the present. Kazantzakis knew this, which is why the novel has two characters: Zorba, and the narrator — the bookish man watching Zorba, aching to be him, unable to become him by wanting to. You and I, having this conversation, are the narrator. The narrator does not become Zorba by adopting Zorba-ism; that’s just his bookishness annexing one more book.
And here’s the autobiographical version of the point, put respectfully but plainly: a man with no quarrel with the present does not spend decades in self-inquiry, write eighteen books on Vedanta, and open a conversation with “how does love figure in the scheme of seeking liberation.” The itch is real, and it is yours — not installed by the priests, not a cultural virus you can decline. Some people genuinely don’t have it; they live, love, suffer, die, and never once feel that existence is a question. For them, no teaching is needed and none should be pushed — the medicine is for the sick, and Ramana never chased anyone down the hill. But the person who has the itch cannot cure it by pointing at the itchless and saying “why not be like them?” That’s not acceptance of the human condition; that’s one more flight — this time a flight from the seeking, which is as much a part of your present as your body is. The quarrel with the quarrel is still the quarrel.
So the question “why this flight from the present” has to be answered carefully: the genuine article was never a flight from the present — it was an investigation of the quarreler. Look at your own list: trials, messiness, finiteness, uncertainty, anxiety. Now notice that anxiety is not like the other items. The trials and the finitude are facts; the anxiety is a relation to the facts — and it’s exactly the thing Zorba doesn’t have. Zorba has the mine collapse; he doesn’t have the anxiety about the mine collapse, or rather, whatever arises passes through him without a residue-keeping owner. What the inquiry dissolves was never the human — the hunger, the grief, the coffee, the beloved — it was the misdescription of the human: the anxious proprietor who stands behind experience filing claims against it. When that’s seen through, what remains is not a divine super-state hovering above life. It’s Nisargadatta in a tenement, smoking beedis and running a shop and being irritable with stupid questions. It’s Ramana reading the newspaper and correcting the ashram cooking. The end-state, embarrassingly, looks exactly like what you’re recommending — ordinary human life, fully inhabited — with one difference: the ordinariness is no longer an achievement being maintained by a position-holder. Your “be done with it” is the right destination proposed as a starting point.
Which means the disagreement between us has shrunk to almost nothing, but the almost matters. You say: no future divinity, no becoming, just the present human — and the traditions at their peak say the identical sentence. The difference is only this: you can’t hold that sentence; it has to become the case. And it becomes the case not through the flight you rightly despise, nor through willed acceptance, which is flight in a tracksuit, but through the one thing you already endorsed — understanding as the action. The quarrel with the present isn’t ended by ruling in favor of the present. It ends when the quarreler is looked for and not found. After that, nobody flees the human, because nobody is left over from the human to do the fleeing — and nobody declares “here I am the body-mind, done with it” either, because the declaration has no remaining customer. There’s just the dance, or the shop, or the next poem. Zorba, but without needing Zorba as an ideal — which was the one thing Zorba himself never had.
Know Thyself 