Love in the Abyss

"A thought transfixed me for the first time in my life. I saw the truth as it is set into a song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.  The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.  Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart. 'The salvation of man is through love and in love.' I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved."

-Victor Frankl

            Love is the ultimate truth and ultimately the meaning to life or the means to self-actualize.  Looking at the Auschwitz prisoner’s living conditions through the lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/maslow.html), I would conclude, as a scientist, that every person should have died. Yet some lived… And not just lived, but were also able to self-actualize in that monsterous place.  I reflected and meditated about what it must have been like for Victor Frankl on the day he had his epiphany about love. 

On that day, the weather was freezing cold; he was hungry, improperly clothed, and had no shelter from the elements. His body was eating itself from lack of nutrition; everyone he knew had been murdered.  Around him, people were giving up on life; he was treated like a rat; his life work was lost; his odds of living were 1 and 26, and his human identity was a number.  He should have died, but didn’t because he had one thought that sustained him and that was love.  What better evidence does humanity have that the meaning of life is love? When all else fell away from Victor Frankl, it was in the contemplation of his beloved that he was sustained.

The lingering question I had for Frankl is why did he call love a goal?

I speculated for some time and realized that love is a goal because it just does not happen. One has to make it a goal and set off to achieve it. Our soul mate does not just come along and we live happily ever after. We learn love lessons each time we see that we failed ourselves or another person.  Our soul mates and relationships really are mirrors. They show us how to love more deeply by reflecting our failures and flaws back to us. It is through facing these painful lessons that love is really achieved and learned. When we fail to learn through our failures and see the evidence as a reflection of us, we fail twice and, as a result, experience love aversion.

For instance, most psychologists will say that infidelity in a relationship is a symptom of a much bigger problem. The truth is that everyone, when a relationship explodes, endures moments during which they feel like victims. Victims do not see their fault in the relationship, learn nothing, and assume the role of a victim. Unconscious victims are not activated and focused on learning anything. Victims are caught in an emotional loop exploring nothing, but their own pain. As a result, the victim loses trust for others and continues to make the same mistakes in the next relationship. Only when we set the goal to love, reflect on who we are, and tear down all the lifetime victim-centric barriers and defense mechanisms we set against love are we able to understand the highest truth.

If Victor Frankl can spend three years in a concerntration camp and be sustained by contemplating his beloved, can we not face the dark chambers inside ourselves that are preventing us from achieving life's ultimate goal?

I thank him for facing the inhumanity of his situation, for moving past it to the new life waiting for him on the other side, and for being brave enough to let these experiences move through him and manifest into words on paper so that all of us might benefit from the realization which was borne of so much darkness.

Amber Stubbs