On Love and Craving: A Reply to “Loving the Eternal”
A reader’s reply to last week’s post, shared with her permission as this week’s continuation of the conversation.
I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote this in response to the Attachment blog. What I find most challenging about that teaching is an ongoing confusion about the difference between love and craving. Or, as several of my teachers have said to me quite pointedly: “There is a difference between to love, and to want to have.”
For instance, if we love ice cream, this does not benefit the ice cream. In fact the more we love ice cream, the worse it is for the ice cream.
Do we sometimes “love” each other like that?
What do we love, and what do we crave? Do we know the difference?
At the beginning of Secret of the Love of God (from Music of the Soul, p.171), our Guide begins by saying:
“That which one yearns for, he loves. And this yearning makes Allah great by transforming the depth of poverty in the yearning of Allah’s slave, the slave’s need and longing to give Allah everything, what his heart truly desires.”
How does this, or does this not, apply to ice cream — and do we know the difference?
Perhaps this is the test. We were instructed in the previous post to “unattach from the form, and love the inner reality underneath it instead. Not the shape love takes, but what love actually is, underneath every shape it’s ever worn.” When I apply this to my longing to have ice cream on a hot day, or a beautiful dress I want to buy, or the attractiveness of someone who is not my beloved and never will be — what does it mean to look not at the shape the love takes, but at what that love actually is?
When I look at what that love actually is, it’s nothing more than a craving of the nafs to have its favorite pleasures. This makes clear to me that a tremendous amount of what we call love, including in most music and poetry, is not what Sidi is referring to as love. It’s the intense desire to have what gives us pleasure — and this very clearly includes other people, our “love interest.” Love? Or want to have?
The theme of this gathering is the Deep Love: The Heart of Sidi’s Message. That’s different from the Deep Craving to Get What We Want, right? The relentlessly acquisitive instinct of the nafs al-ammarah is not what we mean by love.
Or is it? Is the medicine the same?
“To heal, the invitation is simple to say and hard to live: let it go. Release it. And in the space that opens up, turn toward the presence of Allah, accepting Allah’s reality in place of whatever you’d been holding onto instead. This isn’t healing as fixing something broken. It’s healing as redirection — turning from an attachment that can’t hold you the way you need to be held, toward the One who can.”
The invitation to the acquisitive nafs that loves ice cream, nice dresses, and the unavailable beloved is to let them go — to renounce what we “love” in the form of wanting to have, and open a space inside ourselves for something non-material, even non-conceptual, that will be more satisfying: Allah.
On a practical level, what seems most difficult is the withdrawal phase, the time of intensely wanting what we want, and not finding anything called “Allah” that hits the spot of yearning for that gorgeous man, that delicious food, that beautiful clothing. Sitting there in remembrance just doesn’t seem to cut it when I’m burning with desire for the chocolate, the man of my dreams, or the dress on sale.
I do believe this is potentially the great value of our gathering, a time and place where that redirection can take place, that “turning from an attachment that can’t hold you the way you need to be held, toward the One who can.” A time and a place where, insha’Allah, there is enough holiness in our midst that we’re able to let go of the cravings of our nafs, and experience an entirely different level of satisfaction in the heart.
What does it take to accomplish this, to create a gathering that gives us a chance to kick the habit, an experience that lifts us beyond whatever we crave, into what we truly love? What does it take? Let’s find out together. I suspect it takes teachings with strong transmission, strong dhikr circles, true sohbet, opportunity for khalwa and for zawiya time, and most importantly our own himma, to taste the love beyond the wanting to have.
InshaAllah that’s what we mean when we say: Come, take a drink of the Deep Love together.
