what is love?
(someone had posted this question so here’s an answer…)
Nothing original here, just something that I keep relearning every now and then from countless sources and experiences…
Lc = Lt – S
Where
Lc –> Love as conventionally known
Lt –> True love – pure, unconditional, our natural state, our very being – something that can never be figured out, but only experienced, and even then is best forgotten and rediscovered… every single day.
S –> Selfishness – narcissism – causing implicit expectations – and then love gets measured as the adherence to our own predefined images, based on our conditioning.
Of course there’s no doubt that I myself am a selfish chap, and consider selfishness as a useful and inevitable thing 😉 but imo its quite important to get the facts straight. However if the above equation is right, then this selfishness is also a baggage that prevents us from living our true nature, so it might be worth attempting to reduce atleast an infinitessimal amount of it every day 🙂
Selfishness however isn’t constant, it keeps fluctuating with time, everyone would’ve surely experienced every now and then unforgettable moments of true love when the S factor gets lost in the background!
True love is no doubt the experience of being alive …truly and completely alive!
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I’m writing all this not as any authority on the matter but just to record my current findings on the subject based on various literature or experiences over the past years. I happened to surprisingly recall more and more things as I started writing – which unfortunatelyextended the length of the post! Though I’ve reduced the useless habit of writing down anything and everything, there’s still ‘a bit’ of the habit left.
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Love – Kahlil Gibran
I think Kahlil is trying to say here that there’s a lot more to life than the obvious.
However in most cases, I feel all such descriptions, however eloquent, but by themselves might well amount to the equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes where we might all agree that they’re very beautiful poetic words, though actually having no clue what they actually refer to 🙂
But since I have the bad habit of writing, I sometimes can’t resist adding to the chaos myself and this is one of those times… 😉
So my understanding is that he is giving a kind of metaphor for love actually being a process. Deepak Chopra (according to my friend who reads his books) has described God as a process… and if one agrees that and that Love is God – then definitely love is a process. In fact I’d say love is a lifelong process of transformation – a kind of process of alchemy – that transforms an individual.
———–
“No action is more fascinating than the action of self-transformation. Nothing on earth can compare with itsdrama or its value.”
– Vernon Howard
———–
The beginnings of the lotus are in the slime of thedepths. Its development and blossoming are in responseto the light of the sun. The lotus symbolizes thedivine possibilities of human nature.
– The Dhammapada (edited by S.
Radhakrishnan)
———–
IMO the light of the sun above refers to love.
I believe such transformation has to be experienced by each individual for himself/herself. Reading poetry or literature or listening to sermons or singing mantras/bajans or rituals or yoga or pranayaama may or may not help – I don’t know. For me atleast I feel they have certainly been entertaining/useful in other ways, but have been misleading rather than helpful indiscovering love. I suppose every person has his/her own means – like JKsays – “truth is a pathless land“. Certainly love is truth as well, so maybe he might as well have said love is a pathless land. 🙂
I used to think that romantic kind of love shown in the movies is totally contradictory and misleading to the whole idea. It seemed to be more of a kind of possessiveness than real love as the following comment reflects:
———–
Love without freedom is possessiveness.
Freedom without love is loneliness.
– Osho
———–
But here is an article that showed that even that can be a means to love! 🙂
On Being In And Making Love!– Suresh Jois
But in this context, Ayn Rand probably makes a lot of sense…
———–
To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I’.- Ayn Rand
———–
Experiencing true love, even for a moment – as anyone whohas experienced it might acknowledge – can make a person crumble down and weep tears of joy and deep gratitude for the tremendous privilege of being born as a human ( which tragically we happen to be blind to most of the time!)
It can happen to anybody, anytime, under any circumstances -considering the fact thateven the most cruel persons like Ashoka or Angulimalacould find it![or a machine, in the movie Terminator;-) ]
But definitely its not a once in a lifetime experience – its something to be rediscovered again and again and again…
—————–
“Learn and forget. learn and forget!”
– Morehei Ueshiba, (Art of Peace)
—————–
…and maybe we will be able to live knowing that we are never separate from it.
—————–
“It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.”
– Jonathan Livingstone Seagull
An interesting post by Shruti: all about love. The title may be a bit misleading 😉 as the situations described refer only to the romantic notion of love, but it makes good reading anyway esp her review of what seems to be a very good book (now on my todo list). And the diversity of comments received make good reading as well.
Today I was waiting for my wife to finish her shopping and saw a group of old ladies trying to catch a rickshaw for a while. Suddenly something clicked, I just put the bags in my car and my wife wanted to continue to buy some things, I went and offered the ladies a lift in my car. They were quite surprised, asked if I was associated with whatever organisation they had just come out of attending some function. Then I took them and dropped them off at their houses a few kms away. On the way they were wondering whether people do such things nowadays, one of them said yes there are such people also, and one more person said yes they’re quite rare. But well atleast today they were really happy. Their hope that such people exist was renewed 🙂 It turns out that the son of one of them was also named Sanjay and also worked in my company! 8) Small world… throw away inhibhitions and insecurity, and gradually strangers lose their strangeness…
(Came back later and picked up Vijetha & Amma, they hadn’t missed me much, heh heh)
Another interesting thing this evening was when I visited Vijetha’s home, there were a group of kids playing on the street. We’d bought some snacks for Vijetha’s newphews, and I’d kept some more biscuits inside my car. But somehow I went to the car and brought out a pack (nice new brand of biscuits that I wanted to try out) and called one of the newphews and told him to distribute it among all his friends and walked away… its really fun this… er… maybe experimenting in kindness!