'Love is a time machine': Reflections on Liberation, Morality, and Metta

There was a boy I loved with all my heart who looked a little different each time I met him. He kept coming back to me, and I kept loving him. But no matter how much I loved each of his faces, I kept leaving him because he was a photographer and so couldn't help but try to capture an ever-moving, ever-changing reality that I was (Anicca). One that required him not to capture but demanded to be set free. But before he could do that, it demanded him to set himself free (Anattā). But liberation is a hard pill to swallow, and I am still playing around with it in my mouth. Does swallowing it mean not having a place to leave anymore? I wonder what that is like, or what am I even like, when I am not leaving? Am I my mother when I am not ‘not her’ (Dukkha)?

Anyway, that is how I began asking, what business do lovers have, performing the act of capture anyway? Leave that to the feudal lords and the colonizers and the capitalists and the casteists and the Brahmins. Lovers – like true artists – must set free.

Love must always set free.

Right?                                 Right?

It is a funny thing though (and dangerous), this L i b e r a t i o n, in the sense that it is a cage of its own in the absence of morality. As my beloved Babasaheb, and at some point, the French Revolution told us (of course not in these exact words) that liberty is a useless fleeting concept in space without its besties that are Equality and Fraternity.

When he talks about this conceptual trinity, Dr. Ambedkar asserts – as if entrusting us with a responsibility – “Let no one say that I have borrowed my philosophy [of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity] from the French-Revolution. I have not. My philosophy has roots in religion and not in political science. I have derived them from the teachings of my Master, the Buddha”^[1]. In another speech, he calls himself a follower of Gautam Buddha, Kabir, and Mahatma Phule^[2], which now reads as a prebuttal to the claims of his ideas being ‘re-packaged western liberal thought’ that savarna social scientists would make later^[3], reducing the depths of these translations to a mere borrowing. Moreover, they are not [only] translations of the contextual meanings of our reality to another language as I had once argued in my MPhil thesis, but I do now sense that there is [also] something that exists underneath the literal words or between the lines – whatever you may want to call it. It is political, and it is loving. It is processual, and not divine. It is certainly a truth if not the Truth. Almost as if underneath the obscenities of our cuss words and sophistication of curated critiques – performative or not – there is a deeper politics, a different (yet somehow the same) story going on. That is why I feel that in doing the translations, he is also paradoxically undoing them, undoing words, and reaching out to that reality that we are left with when these very binaries of concepts are dissolved. The meanings embedded in it are not mere explanations but reconstructions of the world carrying histories, visions, calculations, emotion, even intuition. Meanings that encompass the Buddha, Kabir, French Revolution, Phules, Babasaheb and the footsteps of many other lovers woven into the fabric of spacetime.

Having been in a long term battle with the constraints put on my being – some imposed and some (self-)created – I am lately learning to free myself from many. And when all your immediate needs are met and you have more, the meditating head sometimes has a tendency to go in the clouds and look for the transcendental, as such freedom often does not take long to start becoming escape. But I can tell you that love traverses time the way every time I am up there for too long, the image of Babasaheb on my desk, right beside the Buddha, looks me in the eye – as if reminding me what he said about the tests of morality, rationality and paññā (wisdom/insight)^[4] to be applied in my meaning-making of the world around me – to then gently ground me to reality. Other times, it is conditions arising from reality itself that do so. Either way, it is nice to be freed from your own constructed ideas of passive individual freedom. After all, is a woman truly free if freedom has meant only freedom from home or her sufferings within? Will she remain free in a society that runs on systems of oppression and structures of inequality?

I can tell you that love traverses time the way writer Gautamiputra Kamble’s stories in his book Seekers (translated from Marathi to English by Sirus J. Libeiro) travelled to me. They did not answer the questions I was expecting them to answer for me. Well, to be very honest, the answers did come but not in the ways I had wanted them to. For when they reached me, I was in the clouds and wanted to stay there some more. And without ever laying a hand on me, they jolted me out of sleep only to open my eyes to the now. They questioned me, and held me accountable, which, I didn’t realise at the time, was the biggest act of love there is. And if I hadn’t learnt to loosen my clinging grip over my self even a little bit, I swear the answers would have been completely lost on me. But there they were – telling me history does not always necessarily repeat itself, many times it is present there through it all, only hidden in plain sight (or forced to be so). And if one goes on to look closer in the archaeological remains and adopted practices and oral histories and start digging, it isn’t long till one is face to face with its presence in the absences. When Dr. Ambedkar says that the History of India is nothing but a mortal conflict between Brahmanism and Buddhism^[5], it is easy for me to see it because this very conflict shapes where I come from, and continues to exist inside my own home. It is a home that adopted ‘Hindu’ symbols, idols and practices somewhere along the line out of necessary conditions, but one where the statue of the Buddha – of course alongside Dr. Ambedkar – does not sit within a fabricated discourse. It sits as a historical challenge to it. For home is not a static entity hanging without chords in spacetime that is either this or that. It is a process that is grounded in context. In looking within our contexts, we see – amid a brutally erased past and imposed myths and norms – meanings that have survived and are alive, meanings that we see in the Buddha … but also in Ravidas…Kabir … in Phule … Ambedkar…, carrying within them histories of challenging the imposed mythical to seek freedom^[6], and to seek truth.

To always seeking truth.

We do know that much is lost in translations, but a lot is found too, as if this truth travels across time and space, between words and silences, through bodies and minds like a fundamental phenomenon, yet not without a path! Gautamiputra Kamble’s stories also, in many ways, tell us that truth need not be a permanent revelation waiting to reveal itself at the end of your search. It is in that very path you walk on and every step you choose to take. It is in how you live – not as a passive recipient but an active doer.

“I think a lot of us often confuse morality with fixed binaries of DOs and DONTs that cage us from above, handing out judgements of only either good or bad to our being. As if we are living beings (and not becomings) that exist in frozen frames of social media under an omnipresent judgemental gaze ensuring that we are always performing a static, perfect self.”

I think a lot of us often confuse morality with fixed binaries of DOs and DONTs that cage us from above, handing out judgements of only either good or bad to our being. As if we are living beings (and not becomings) that exist in frozen frames of social media under an omnipresent judgemental gaze ensuring that we are always performing a static, perfect self.

But the Buddha does not threaten you or instill in you fear. I would say nor would the Buddha judge you in fixed frozen binaries of good and bad, or right and wrong. Because the Buddha does not capture but smiles lovingly, and in the radical freedom of this smile that accepts you as an ever-moving ever-changing reality that you are, morality becomes the very grass under your feet that you walk on rather than a cage imposed from above. And most importantly, with the Panch Sila (the five precepts) as the guiding compass on your Eightfold Path – you are able to move, walk, and even dance on it, freely, or towards it at least. As I write this, it dawns upon me how easier it is to speak about morality than to actually extend my foot out in the right direction each time. But having a community where you learn to cultivate Mettā (loving kindness), Karuṇā (compassion), Mudita (vicarious joy), and Upekkha (equanimity) does make it a lot easier to practice (with your warts and all). And you begin to learn to determine when to pick up your weapons – whatever they may mean for you and your community – and when you need to drop them.

Why do all my searches lead me to love? Mettā – this concept of loving in Buddha’s Dhamma does not exist as a binary opposite of hate, but it does exist with kindness. And I am not so sure but I do think that Love is Truth. And that it is art, and so it is beautiful – the reconstruction of the world kind and not romanticization of pain kind. I wonder if it is that infinite reality that encompasses our giants, from the philosophers to the scientists to artists, from the Buddha to Kabir to Ravidas to Savitribai and Jotiba Phule to Ramabai and B.R Ambedkar, and speaks to us in ways that, to my understandings, do not necessarily fall in a linear framework of time – one that physicist (and poet) Carlo Rovelli tells us may be, at best, a relational construction and, at worst, an illusion!^[7] Probably what Interstellar told us in some ways and Project Hail Mary in others – that Love, after all, is not outside the bounds of our evolving physics and science. And that if there is something that traverses and survives a collapse of ordinary spacetime, then it is this. Not as magic, but as something that is deeply sentient. And alive. You see, I am beginning to think that we are all capable of traversing time, and that Love is a time machine.