Love in an Anxious Age

Creating an Ally out of Shadow

To say we are living in an age of anxiety is to soothe the near-panic we likely feel just by glancing at the news. Go deeper at your own risk.

If you’re not looking at the news to sustain a refuge on the island of your own sanity, far be it from me to urge you back to our real estate. We all do what we must to make it through the day, the week; our life challenges remain no matter how we address the inner confrontations.

I should feel remiss of late not writing more about yoga traditions and apparently less about political worlds, at least according to one constructive critic’s email. Somehow, I can’t distinguish the spiritual from the worldly to which I reply, that’s right, I can’t, I don’t, I will not.

I am wholly willing to affirm our differences, just not our separation. That’s the issue we need to clarify if we’re to understand each other as human beings.

I find myself squarely within a world that evokes---or at the very least should evoke anxiety about the present and whatever future awaits humankind. For all the mess we’ve made, the current one seems decidedly worse. Is there room for disagreement about this? So now what do we do?

You might also be telling yourself, as I am, that there is refuge in love, in connections that hold us together no matter the category of hurricane assigned to our current shared social, political, and worldly malestrom. We long for some (any) certainty to hold the world together (loka-samgraha), as Krsna puts it (Bhagavadgita, 3.20) when he is at last asked why he chooses to carry on at all in this mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.

Not all about which we are certain is cause for comfort and even if love cannot mitigate the power of death (or inevitable taxes), our longing to be held---not too tightly---but held in a surety, a steadiness, provides irrefragable affirmation. We want the light to hold us. But how will that feel?

We want an affirmation as much as we want the love from which that longing emerges. This is why love can hardly be distinguished from courage, though they may appear distinct. It is the longing that holds them together, the longing that they share. We want to affirm that the courage to love will somehow measure the anxiety we cannot deny. We’ll do anything to deny that anxiety. That may be the problem we should be addressing.

This power to feel the difference that makes all the difference is at least one meaning of the Sanskrit word “bhakti.” Bhakti is usually translated “devotion,” “love,’ sometimes “loving devotion” or “sharing” but the verbal root /bhaj, means to divide, distribute, or apportion---to get one’s piece, to receive (or offer) one’s share. It’s important to see here how the connection we want is defined by our ability to notice the difference we need to make to experience ourselves more fully.

Whatever connection or even union may be suggested by bhakti, as much importance is laid on the space created by difference and in that opening is where bhakti points to the longing rather than any final achievement or completed goal. To say the longing is itself the goal may be the most human thing we ever say. And for that matter the truest “divine” come into human experience. But it’s not so simple a thing to experience difference when what we want as much is connection and, dare I say, completion.

We are creatures made of the unfinished longing that we wish not to be provisional or contingent even though time and mortality makes it so. Our pursuit or claim to the unconditional, particularly unconditional love, is defined by the irony of its provisory---as mortal beings made of change our desire for a sweetness in the changeless compels us to seek what is not actually on offer. To say we love unconditionally is the condition by which we attempt to surpass rather than embrace our mortal terms. Best not to deny life with claims devised to assuage anxiety as a natural condition of living itself.

In other words, we don’t want what we are as limited, mortal, conditional beings; we’d prefer to say we are more than or not only this conditional being. If the claim of the unconditional is our first condition, we could allow the longing we feel to be its own goal. But then we’d still being living with some or another experience of anxiety, which seems by definition to be unwanted. And so we’ll do almost anything we can to overcome or deny the anxiety that accompanies the deep desire for connection.

If love is the light---the “answer” to our longing---then anxiety is its shadow. We love and yet we feel anxious loving, anxious to be loved. Can light exist meaningfully without shadow? Only if we claim some “pure” light or, at the very least reject its pure contrast, its absence as darkness. Living with the presence of that sort of anxiety is no small matter. Ask Godot.

Light with shadow is more aligned to literal meaning of “bhakti” because bhakti does not merely admit to difference and to some role for boundary, it is the point being made--- despite the bhaktas’ wish to resolve whatever is between light and shadow. We are divided beings if being human is being a bhakta. It is in the very definition of the word.

“Yoga” is what is proposed as the means to a “required” resolution, but we’ll have to take that up another time. Admitting that anxiety is as essential to our longing as the love we feel appears a step too far. Unless you are willing to take that step. Yoga philosophers are almost unanimously committed to “fixing” the “problem” of our anxiety. Good luck to them.

Without difference we can feel no love, at least not as mortals embodied in real forms of difference. We can deny the difference only if we are willing to deny that embodiment is the real form of our existence. If there is more to us than our conditional bodies, that too may be a form of longing more than fact. It seems plain enough that we can be soulful without claiming that there is soul surpassing our mortal experience.

Most of us are too anxious to admit this soulfulness is all we are. And who can blame them? We want more certainty than that, the kind that does more than merely manage our anxiety. Of course, our anxiety can destroy us but without it how would we know the experience of the “divide,” the bhakti that is the longing holding together across the divide of light and shadow?

This is why anxiety is as much a certainty as love. They define each other as the shorelines, the space of in-between that is bhakti---bhakti is the feeling of the in-between.

Certain yoga traditions make bhakti provisional, at best heuristic, to their higher goals of completeness, usually in the form of some or another knowledge. Śankara is unambiguous on this point because in his non-dualist view, difference itself is a kind of ignorance (literally unknowing, avidyā) or superimposition (adhyāsa) over the true state of affairs. He proposes that we are different until we realize we are all in all, only the same oneness that is the universal and never have we actually been otherwise. This defines Śankara’s ultimate truth and he tells us very little about what happens if we arrive there other than it’ll be bliss without conditions. (Feeling suspicious?) With this knowledge (jnāna) dissolves all feeling if by that we mean any kind of experience in which difference still remains. Good luck with this. Let me know how it feels.

The bhakta Ramanuja retorts some centuries later that one does not become the sugar we taste but rather receives its sweetness when the experience of separation is finally dissolved. Ramanuja’s point is that there is a God with whom we merge but who we do not become, what is resolved is the longing as anxiety and what remains is the love that connects, that merges. God will provide what we can’t. (Other theistic traditions offer variations on this yogic theme of ultimate connection, umm, yoga.) And I’m gonna have to wish you luck with this too.

It’s always fascinating how much we seemingly need to believe just to live. If God is your jam, jam on. Anxiety is real. If someday you find yourself in a “better place” do let me know, though such a belief may prove more language game that soothes than a truth we experience. We can ask Wittgenstein about that too in some better place.

What we find in these contrasting traditional views is a need, a claim, a response to the human experience for the want of certainty, completeness, resolution. The philosophers proffer solution because that longing is intended to be met. Our mere mortality is not enough to reach such fulfillment so instead they offer a sublime oneness (nondualism) or a God that provides the “necessary” relationship. Something has to bridge the divide and make the connection because otherwise the anxiety remains, it is for them too real and has to be shown as false.

Let’s take this a bit further to be clearer.

Without a “divine” as the traditionalists of yoga would have it, we are left only with a longing that can’t be completed---and such a denial of “perfection” (purna, paramita, etc.) apparently won’t do. At least not according to the vast majority of yoga traditions. (I want to say “all” but am anxious to make any such assertion nor will I succumb to accepting the irony of “all” as another certainty meant to quell the possibility there is more or that I’m just wrong. Ahh, uncertainty has come to the rescue.)

Even for those who grapple with impermanence as a principal assumption (I mean here our pals the Buddhists), there is an irresistible longing for certainty provided in their claims to realization. Buddhas have, at the very least, solved the anxiety problem of our longing. But even more precisely, they claim to have resolved the longing itself. No more thirst, no more suffering. Noble truths at work. You may find consolation in this possibility or even the belief in such awakening as your preferred form of consolation. But make no mistake, underlying the claim is that our anxiety is the shadow of the light we wish with all our hearts had none.

But what if we have the courage to drape ourselves in the anxiety that is the shadow of love’s illuminative longing? What if we can dance with the longing as the division, the bhakti, within our nature that opens the space, that brings us into the hall of consciousness (citsabha) in which bhakti doesn’t reduce or resolve the distinction between love and anxiety but rather empowers us to live with ourselves. What if the love we feel in the anxiety that comes with being human is enough.

We would have to learn how to live adorned in anxiety rather than in pursuit of its elimination or focused attenuation. This is another reason we see Śiva dancing and meditating so vividly draped in the serpents (sarpa), with snakes (nāga) who are also called in Sanskrit ahi, which of course is cognate to the German angst and the English anxiety. Śiva adorns himself with anxiety so that he can live with himself. Living with yourself might be the hardest thing we ever do. That is no small matter to contemplate. This is a yoga that requires a more radical affirmation of our humanity.

We can deny our anxiety or we perhaps learn to wear it like Śiva his nagas, his ahi: as a twisting, turning, albeit dangerous and precarious embellishment, a reminder that the love we experience as longing is inextricably entangled with the anxiety that defines our soulful difference in this mortal coil.