The secret of the fox
On the trinity of love
In a previous essay, I mentioned the importance of love as the mechanism by which humans inject meaning into the world.
The universe itself is devoid of meaning. If it were not, humanity would not have been able to project so many mutually exclusive meanings onto it. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that these meanings have come from us, not from some external source.
We invent our gods, not the other way ‘round.
Almost everything in the world is meaningless to us. If it’s not affecting us personally, we probably put no importance on it. We can read during our morning coffee or tea that 40,000 children die needlessly every day because of our indifference, and we shrug. Sad, perhaps, but not our problem.
But some things—and some other beings—have enormous meaning to us. It might be a partner, our children, our pets, an ideal, an organization we helped build, a religion or a specific religious group. Whatever it is, to each of us as an individual, there is something or someone of great importance.
Because this importance varies from person to person, it cannot be something intrinsic to the object or being. If my cat had intrinsic meaning, then she would be as meaningful to you as she is to me. That she is not means that the meaning must be coming from somewhere else, not from the cat herself.
Where does meaning come from?
On the most basic level, things have meaning to us because we need them. But this is entirely a matter of immediate need.
For example, I need good air to breathe. If my air supply were cut off, I would probably give almost anything to get it back. That’s pretty damned important, right? But is that the same as meaning?
In this moment, there is more than enough air for me to breathe. Truly, I have a surplus. So I do not sit around thinking about how meaningful air is to me.
This is true for most of our basic needs—the ones at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. Once they are filled sufficiently, we generally stop thinking about them.
But then what? Is that enough?
For most humans it is not, which is why Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, created the psychotherapy technique called logotherapy and wrote a book about it called Man’s Search for Meaning.
In it he made clear that having meaning in one’s life is as essential as having food, water, shelter, air, or sleep.
How do we invest meaning in the world?
If we need meaning—and we do—but the universe has no intrinsic meaning, then how are we to find meaning in the world?
The answer is that we create it ourselves by making things important, and we make things (or beings) important by investing ourselves in them.
We sacrifice our own needs for theirs.
The more we sacrifice for another, the more we pour ourself into that being, the more important that being becomes to us, and the more meaningful.
Of course, it is not enough simply to sacrifice for another. We must do it for the right reasons, voluntarily, and with the right attitude. If we fail in any of those, we are more likely to create anger and resentment than meaning.
Love is an action
Love is an action, not a feeling. There is a range of feelings associated with love, but these are not love itself. They are products of love.
These same feelings can be generated in other ways, too. When someone shows us true love, we often begin to feel love for that person out of reciprocity, a strong human trait.
Another way in which we can get the feeling of love is infatuation. Infatuation occurs because of the collapse of the ego boundaries, which is a fancy way of saying that we and the object of our affection feel like the same person.
If investing part of ourselves in others creates meaning, and that brings forth the feeling of love, then how much more will it do so when we believe that we have merged with the other?
And yet, the infatuation invariably wears off as the ego boundaries reassert themselves and the illusion of oneness dissipates. But if during this period of infatuation we made sacrifices with the right attitude for the beloved, then the infatuation may segue into a real, lasting love.
This, the way of emptiness states, is the purpose of infatuation: to lead people to enact love, and in doing so to find true love.
A mother is triggered biologically by birth to feel love for her infant. And this strong feeling will usually cause her to sacrifice for the child, which may, we hope, lead to real love as the biological imperative wears off.
But if she does not act out the love through sacrifice, sometimes the biologically-produced feeling of love wears off and there is nothing there to replace it—or worse, resentment is aroused. Such situations typically lead to ugly, even fatal, consequences for the unloved children.
We have all seen this happen, unfortunately.
The Trinity of Love
How, then, does love work?
The way of emptiness views love as a trinity. Love has a mechanism, an input, and an output. Or we could say a behavior, a price, and a reward.
The mechanism of love is self-sacrifice
As I stated above, the mechanism of love is sacrifice for the beloved. We put the needs of the beloved above our own immediate needs. The more we do this—with the right intent and attitude—the stronger our love will be.
The reward of love is wisdom
The reward for love is wisdom and maturity. In order to truly serve the beloved, we must see through our beloved’s eyes, feel our beloved’s needs. When we do this, we expand our awareness of the world. It widens, broadens, deepens. We become able to see it from outside our own selfish needs, and we can see ourselves more clearly as well.
True wisdom requires more than love, but without love there is no wisdom. Wisdom is just a word for knowing the right thing to do, and we cannot know the right thing unless we can see clearly from multiple perspectives and from outside of our own selfish needs.
So it is the getting outside of ourselves (or getting over ourselves) that love requires that brings with it wisdom.
And wisdom is power. It is power most of all over the self. It is the state of maturity, of adulthood. The acquisition of wisdom is, at least in this philosophy, the true objective of humanity: a world of adults.
The price of love is devotion
When we sacrifice for another, whether that other is a lover, our children, our parents, a friend, a comrade, or just someone we met, we may bring forth in them a dependency upon us.
We become responsible, then, for filling that dependency until we are no longer needed by the beloved. In short, we cannot release ourselves. Only the beloved can release us.
This commitment to another is devotion. It’s a part of the sacrifice, and it is what strengthens the love and causes it to persist—as long as we don’t fall back into selfishness and resentment. Right approach is key.
The secret of the fox
The best description of the trinity of love that I’ve found is in a book ostensibly (but not really) for children: Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
In it, the Little Prince has traveled from his home asteroid and had a series of adventures on Earth, among them a chance meeting with a fox.
The fox convinces the Little Prince to “tame” him, by which he means to show him love. In doing so, the Little Prince causes the fox to develop an emotional dependency on the Little Prince. Thus, when the Little Prince announces that he must return to his asteroid, the fox is very sad.
Earlier in his adventures the Little Prince had come across a rose garden and been crushed by the realization that the single rose on his asteroid, which he loves and believes to be unique in all the universe, is but a common flower.
But the fox tells the Little Prince to go back and see the roses again, and then to return and the fox will tell him a secret.
The Little Prince returns to the rose garden. This time he sees clearly:
"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."
The Little Prince now understands that it is the mechanism of love—the “taming” of the fox—that have given the fox meaning to him and made the fox unique.
"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you—the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.
It is difficult to imagine a clearer explanation than that of the mechanism of love and how it invests meaning in another. It is through the sacrifices the Little Prince made for his rose that his rose becomes unique and important: invested with value which brings meaning to his life.
The Little Prince returns to the fox, who tells him his secret, and that secret is precisely the trinity of love:
"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
Is this not wisdom, love’s reward? It is only through the heart (love) that one can see clearly (be wise).
And then:
"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."
Here is the mechanism of love: self-sacrifice. It is the time you have wasted—that you did not spend in selfish pursuits—that invests the beloved with value and meaning.
Finally:
"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose..."
And here is the price of love: devotion. We become responsible forever—until released by the beloved—for those we have loved. Not loved in the petty sense of desired, wanted, or needed. Loved in the truest sense: sacrificed for.
Poured ourselves into. Made dependent upon us. Created a true connection with that cannot be broken without causing the beloved to suffer.
That’s a bit frightening. Many of us are commitment shy. But in his book, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran gives perhaps the best description of the price we pay when we refuse to love:
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
The way of emptiness is the way of love, and we shall laugh all of our laughter and weep all of our tears.