A passage from the book “About The Innermost” by Samuel Widmer
How strange it is, what we do with love, and how respectable it becomes. Our love for god, our love for those close to us, our love for our partner, our love for the family. How daintily we have divided it into love which is profane and sacred, into duty and responsibility, into obedience and the readiness to die for the native country and to trick death by doing this. Priests talk about it, and also generals, when they plan wars; politicians and also the average man who suffers constantly because of it and who complains about it. All of them are occupied with it.
Jealousy and envy nourish this pseudo love and relationship is contained in its prison. It flickers over the canvas of every cinema and the magazines are full of it. Every radio and every TV station daily broadcasts its pattern of conditioning. When death takes this love away from us, we hold it tight in photo albums or as a painting, which keeps our memory of it alive. And religious beliefs help many as well, to cling to them further. Generation after generation is brought up according to these images of love, and suffering goes on without end. The continuation of this love is pleasure, and with this, comes pain as well, always through the back door. But we try to avoid the one and hold on tight to the other. We want love, but not death, which goes hand in hand with it. We want the new, but not the destruction of the old, which must precede it. This continuity is the stability and security in our relationships. No change is allowed because relationship is habit. Habit is security, and that brings worries. We hang on to this never-ending machinery of pleasure and pain and this thing we call love. In order to escape the weariness and the surfeit which come from it, we create religion with its beliefs, military structures with their endless wars, the pleasure-industry with its possibilities of escape, and all the romantic kitsch, which keeps us functioning at an immature and childish level. Also romance offers a wonderful way to escape from all the facts of pleasure and suffering. And, of course, as a last chance to escape and hope, there remains God, whom we have also made into a respectable and profitable entity.
But all that is not love. Love has no continuity. It cannot be carried over into tomorrow, it has no future. What does have future, is memory and memories are the ashes of all that is dead and buried. Love has no tomorrow, it cannot be trapped in time and made into something respectable. It is, when there is no more time. It contains no promise, no hope. Hope brings despair with it. Love does not belong to any god, and neither does it go with thought and feeling.
It is not produced by the brain. It exists outside of us. A brain which is empty, which is free from possession and identification, which is nothing, can receive it. It lives and dies every minute. And with it, the awakened, liberated mind, which receives it. It is a terrible thing, because it is destruction. It is destruction without tomorrow. Love is destruction. Life and death are one in it. It is the inevitable. And because of that, it is home.