by Gina Cerminara

I remember when I was going to college I saw a little item in the college paper which went like this:

Boy: Do you love me?
Girl: I love everybody.
Boy: Leave that to God. We should specialize.

When other items of far greater importance in my college curriculum have long since escaped me, I cannot imagine why this one should have made such a lasting impression; but the fact remains that it did.

The boy was right, of course; we must specialize. The conditions of the drama in which we are all acting require that we narrow our attention down to one person, at least for a period of time. In our Judaeo-Christian culture people are theoretically expected to pick out one mate and live with him or her for so long as they both shall live, though in practice, as we all know, it often amounts to no more than for as long as they both can stand it. In any case this narrowing of attention and scope has many good effects, however painful it may sometimes be. It keeps people to task, and it is educative in many subtle and obvious ways.

But the girl was right, too. She “loved everybody,” she said, though in all probability she only thought she loved everybody. . . . “Loving everybody” is an illusion common among idealists, churchgoers, and meta-physicians, and one that is quickly shattered when put to any truly rigorous test. But none the less we must all ultimately come to the point of really loving all living creatures, and it would seem that the many vicissitudes of love have this end in view.

To lose a beloved person by death, for example, is a very painful experience. Ferenc Molnar, the Hungarian playwright, wrote feelingly on this subject. He related an old Greek legend about a couple who loved each other dearly. One day they did a favor to a god who was traveling in disguise. The god, later making his identity known, offered to grant any desire they wished. The two looked at each other, and of one accord spoke, saying that they desired the great boon of dying at exactly the same moment, so that neither would know the pain of separation. This was Molnar’s favorite story, he said, and anyone who has experienced the grief of loss can well appreciate its pathos.

In Buddhist lore there is the equally touching story of the woman who had lost her husband and not long after her only son by death. Half crazed with grief she sought out the Buddha asking him to restore her son to life. The Compassionate One looked at her with deep pity in his eyes and said, gently, “If you will bring me a grain of wheat from a household where there had been no death, I will restore your son to you.” Eagerly the woman began her search from door to door and from village to village. But in every household where she made her query she learned that here, too, there had been death. Finally the woman understood the lesson that Buddha was trying to teach her. She knew now that death was a universal experience and sooner or later loss comes to us all. She knew too that she must put aside her grieving and begin to live her life anew.

There are many lessons to be learned from loss, but perhaps one of the most important ones is this: that there is something lovable in all creatures, and the love that has been concentrated in one person can be distributed to many. This is, like most things, far more easily said than done, especially when one has been for years the recipient of a warm affection and when there has been a companionship that cannot be easily replaced. But perhaps one must learn to be a more active giver of love, especially to those who are needy of it whether these be neighbors and friends or whether they be strangers whom one makes the effort now to find.

Another one of the painful vicissitudes of love is to lose the beloved to another human being. Can a man love two girls at the same time? Someone asked an “Advice To The Lovelorn” columnist. Yes, came the answer, until one of the girls finds out. . . . The moment of finding out can be a very terrible one, especially to a marriage partner, whether woman or man, in a relationship of long standing. The experience can in fact be far more devastating to some people than loss by death; for while death is irrevocable, at least one can usually cherish the memory (of the illusion!) of an inviolate love, whereas with love lost to another person, one feels a sense of betrayal and rejection which is very difficult to bear.

This is true even if one feels that the new love is destined to an early conclusion. There is comfort to be found perhaps in the Japanese fable of the two teardrops who met on the stream of time. “Where do you come from?” asked one teardrop of the other. “I am the tear of a woman who lost her beloved to another woman,” was the answer. “She should not have grieved so, “ replied the other. “I am the tear of the woman to whom she lost him.” But, while the ironic truth of this fable applies in many and many an instance, it does not apply in all; to say nothing of the fact that the most enduring kind of fortitude cannot arise, or subsist, merely upon the disaster of a rival.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, a triangle is almost inevitably a shattering experience, and it is certainly a very common one. From the point of view of reincarnation, some light can be brought to bear upon the problem if we recall that in our many past existences we have had close bonds of affection with many people. Should one of these people, at a certain juncture of our life, chance to come again within our sphere, the ancient attraction is likely to flare again; and all considerations of loyalty or propriety can swiftly take flight. This is not to be considered as an excuse for infidelity; it is only to be considered as a partial explanation of the causes of it.

But once again, whatever the underlying reason, and whatever its point of origin in the past or in the present, the fact remains that this vicissitude, too, is educative. For the two who are entering the new and sometimes illicit relationship it imparts on the one hand a new excitement and a new luster to life. It is on the other hand a test of conscience, character, and all the basic values by which they live. For the third person, the excluded one, it is a severer test of every resource of endurance, philosophy, and character than for the other two. Frequently the experience can result in new and sometimes shocking self-knowledge. Often the emptiness in the life can lead to the cultivation of new talents and new interests, and to ventures which would never have been attempted otherwise. So, from the long perspective, the devastation of being the odd angle of a triangle can be seen as a marvelous prelude to expansions of consciousness. Ultimately, of course, the experience can serve to teach the great, the difficult, and the subtle lesson of detachment. It is not a kindergarten lesson, this, but one that only near-graduates can learn: the lesson of releasing a beautiful thing, and relinquishing it willingly either to life itself or to the enjoyment of another.

There is another very widespread vicissitude of love, and that is the loss of it not by death or to another person, but by disillusionment.

A woman once testified in an annulment hearing in St. Louis that her husband had misrepresented himself to her before marriage, and that he had married her only for her money. In taking the case under advisement, the judge commented that if he were to grant annulments in all cases where there was misrepresentation, he would be doing nothing else—that all marriages were based on some kind of misrepresentation. . . . He had, I believe, a valid point.

In each of us is the understandable wish to appear well in the eyes of others. The masquerades we indulge in may range all the way from the most flagrant kinds of self-disguise down to the most innocent kinds of camouflage. But in addition to the weaknesses and defects of which we are secretly aware, and which we hope others will not notice, there are all those hidden weaknesses of which we ourselves are unaware and which only the tests and the emergencies of life bring to the surface. Many a woman thinks of herself as sweet, loving, and patient in the early years of marriage; but a husband’s unfounded jealousy or a child’s annoying behavior may cause her little by little to manifest qualities that are anything but sweet, loving, and patient.

Emerson has some interesting things to say apropos of this matter in his essay on Love. He is discussing the destiny of lovers. “But the lot of humanity,” he says, “is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them as to all. . . . The soul which is in the soul of each, craving for a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. . . . Their one flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. . . . Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, or person, or partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere. . . .”

Emerson’s thought here brings to mind a very striking passage in one of Plato’s dialogues. We pass from the love of one beautiful object to another, Plato says, until finally we are capable of loving the beauty that is shining through all objects and persons, and of loving that supreme beauty which is God Himself.

Any person who can even tentatively accept the theory of reincarnation, and who feels that it is incumbent upon him to work diligently upon his own evolution, can find both solace and inspiration in this idea. If one of the purposes of our evolution is, as Plato suggests, as do also Christ and Buddha and all great religious teachers, that our love must become all-embracing, then the immediate sorrows of a particular love are less crushing to the spirit. The purpose of any loss of love is that we shall know expansion. A broken heart leads to a vessel of greater capacity.

You have lost your beloved by death, or to another person? Then let your love flow to other persons in a similarly painful situation, all over the world, and let it take practical, serviceable form. You have lost a much cherished child? Then remember that every living creature is the child of someone. Choose whichever category most appeals to your sympathies—crippled children; children orphaned by war; the grown-up children of Skid Row; the displaced children of revolution; or the little creatures in the city Animal Shelter, children of some mother cat or dog, helpless and lonely and terrified in the human jungle we have made. Let your love extend to them. You have been disillusioned in your love? Then remember Emerson’s telling phrase: you have thus been put in training for a love which knows not sex, or person, or partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere.

It is an odd thing that the educational systems of all civilized countries should pay so much attention to the development of intelligence and no attention at all to the development of love. Perhaps it is because love has for so long been disparagingly regarded as a passion and as an emotion; and intelligence has long been considered to be the obvious superior of these. But what we have failed to take into account is that intelligence, too, has its two lower levels: the cunning of self-preservation and the shrewdness of self-advancement. Only at its highest level does it become intellect, the capacity to solve objective problems of science or of society.

We must come to realize that love the passion and love the emotion likewise have their higher level: love the quality, and it is this which we must all seek to cultivate.

Krishnamurti was once asked to sum up his teachings. He did so in six simple words: Learn to think and to love. And it is this commandment that to me seems almost the epitome of the practical reincarnationist philosophy.

Both the quality of love and the capacity of intellect need to be consciously developed. We have, I believe, many lifetimes in which to develop them. Little by little, through our sorrows, our losses, and our many mistakes, both our insight and our sympathies enlarge. From the personal to the universal, from the selfish to the unselfish, from the passion to the quality, in ever-expanding concentric circles our love nature expands, concurrently as the light of our understanding increases. Finally there is that perfect balance of love and of intellect which is called wisdom.

And this is the purpose, I believe, of our many lives and our many loves.

Excerpt from Many Lives, Many Loves

See Part I here.