Love in the Time of Impermanence

Auteur

Matthew McKay, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, professor of psychology at the Wright Institute, cofounder of Haight Ashbury Psychological Services, founder of the Berkeley CBT Clinic, and cofounder of the Bay Area Trauma Recovery Clinic, which serves low-income clients. He has authored and coauthored more than 40 books, including The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook and Seeking Jordan. The publisher of New Harbinger Publications, he lives in Berkeley, California.

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How to continue to love in the face of pain and loss

Résumé
How to continue to love in the face of pain and loss

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INTRODUCTION

Love Lives On

Death is the mother of beauty.
Wallace Stevens

Everything we know and count on and love is impermanent. That truth crashed down on me in 2008. On an early autumn day that year I learned that my twenty-three-year-old son had died.

Though Jordan was gone, though I could no longer hold him or hear his voice, my love for him remained a living thing. It nourished me and kept me going. It was a blanket that protected me from emptiness and nihilism.

I wondered at love’s strength, its unwillingness to die with the body, its resilience in the face of every kind of change and loss this world can throw at us. And I wondered what love actually is, what it’s made of. What do we mean, I questioned, when we say we love something? Why, for some, does love die or disappear, while for others even death has no dominion over their love?

As a psychologist and couples therapist for more than forty years, I have witnessed the death of love. Many times. I have seen how emotional pain deadens the will and desire to express love. How it turns caring into anger and contempt. But I have also seen how we can learn to love in the face of monstrous pain and loss. I have learned how some keep love alive in the crushing maw of impermanence.

That is the purpose of this book: to learn to know what love is and how to keep it--even when you hurt, even when things are taken, even as you walk daily in the shadow of uncertainty.

Love in the Time of Impermanence grew from years of seeking and exploration after Jordan’s death. But it also came from our living relationship--and from Jordan himself. I learned to talk to him in spirit. For more than a dozen years I have channeled and learned from my son in the afterlife. The books Seeking Jordan and The Luminous Landscape of the Afterlife are distillations of hundreds of “conversations” between us. The book you are now reading is a collaboration. Jordan’s words are offset in boxes and offer the wisdom of a soul who has lived many lives and who understands our fate of love and loss.

We offer this book to you so that whatever changes, whatever is taken or lost, your love will live and be untouched.

1

What Love Is

Love is the most important thing on Earth. It’s what all of us seek. We build our families, as best we can, on a foundation of love. Our most valued relationships have love at their core. Our communities, even our countries, are held together with love. And our connection to God, or the Divine, is often described as love itself. Yet for all its power and centrality, love is hard to describe much less define. The idea of love seems at once too ephemeral to hold but also too big to corral with language. And when we try to describe it, we are often forced into greeting card clichés because love is conflated with experiences of harmony, romance, sexual pleasure, and joy. Yet love is none of those things.

At its root, love is just one thing. It is relationship itself. It is the connective tissue that binds us together, that creates oneness and belonging. It is a gravitational force that connects you to friends, colleagues, family (blood and genetics don’t connect families), a community, a land, and all there is (the Divine). And love isn’t the emotion or pleasure you take in those connections--love is the connection itself.

All of our core values, the things we hold dear, derive from love--of self, of others, or of the Divine. If you examine what truly matters to you, what your life is about, love is the force behind all of it. For example, all efforts at self-improvement, at personal growth and learning, are motivated by love of self. Everything you do to build and support your relationships is driven by love of others. The work you do and the people your work serves can be a reflection of love. Creativity is an act of love; the appreciation of beauty is an act of love; the great pleasures of the body (athletics, food, music, dance, sexual expression) can all be acts of love. And spirituality--the awareness that we belong to each other and to all--is born from love.

We arrive in this world naked and alone, suffering amnesia for our place of origin. What starts to heal that aloneness is love. Love from and for our caregivers; love of a place, of familiar rooms and streets; love of proximate souls whom we are drawn to; love of experiences that bring us joy. The threads connecting us to everything outside of self are made of this same quest for entanglement. Our survival in this difficult place depends on seeing and acting on love.

In the same way plants are heliotropic--always moving toward the sun--we are amortropic, orienting always toward attachment and love. This amortropic orientation reflects a basic law of quantum physics: our world does not have separability; objects that have ever interacted are forever entangled. What happens to one soul entangled by love affects the other. Forever. No matter how far apart in space or time they may be. So we are drawn toward each other by love and once entangled, remain so forever. This is the source of all connection.

LOVE’S OPPOSITE

Knowing a thing’s opposite can illuminate the thing itself. If the essence of love is connecting, the opposite of love must be the severing of connection. Hate can’t be the opposite of love because hate is a form of relationship. There’s a painful but deep connection between those who hate one another. Selfishness is sometimes thought to be the opposite of love. But the focus on self doesn’t block relationship; it merely distorts it into serving only the self.

The true opposite of love is the silence of abandonment, the judgment that says you are cast out, you are not one of us. It is any credo that separates people into good or bad, into tribes where you either belong or you are dangerous and foreign; it is any judgment that dehumanizes and rejects.

The rooms where we feel safe are defined by the familiar, the faces we know.

Everything outside seems dangerous. The people we don’t know could do anything, say anything. We protect ourselves by deciding they are evil.

But the mere thought that there is good and evil creates evil. Because it is the means by which we separate ourselves from the other. Reject the other. Dehumanize the other. Separation--the delusion that we are not all one--is what evil is made of.

There is no them. The room that seemed so small that it contained just a single life holds everyone.

Any belief that separates and severs relationship takes us in the opposite direction from love. And any act that disconnects, that breaks the belonging between souls, sets our course away from love. So in love’s opposite, we also see love’s essence: it is the bond that holds us, that moves us toward the experience of being one.

THE REACH OF LOVE

Because love is relationship, it isn’t limited to the connection between souls. We can love objects and places as well as living beings.

The beautiful things that we come to love--whether it’s light shimmering in the leaves …