I was feeling a great tenderness the other day, something I’m not used to. It was like two channels of energy hit me simultaneously: love and the feeling of loss. To love is to lose: the object of your love inevitably will change; you will lose it. If it is a person, they will leave you or die, or they will change and the connection will no longer be the same. If it is an idea, or ideal, principle–or a place, a food, a habit, a mood–it will change. It will not endure in the form you presently love it in. The relation cannot remain the same in a world filled with, defined by, motion.
So this horror of loss coexists necessarily with love. And I understood in a flash the image of Mahakala–Great Time: you have to internalize this. To love, you must make your peace with loss. You must be destroyed in every moment you love: there is no other way, which is not characterized by delusion. To love is to die; to see is to be blinded.
I have been confused by the macabre nature of much Tibetan art, but if you view it as no more and no less than an accurate portrayal of life as it must be lived on the plane of existence, then it all makes sense.