Hi everyone,
What is love?
In my opinion the word 'love' is one of the most misused words in English. God is love, My mom loves me, I love little puppies, I love my girlfriend, I love to go to the park, I love ice cream, I made love this evening..... and so on.
The word 'Love' is used differently in all these sentences.
There are very different emotions that get lumped in with love.
1. We use the word love to express our need or desire for anything like ice cream or music or anything else. A simple
desire becomes translated as love.
2. We use the word love to express our sexual attraction for someone. When we feel
attracted to someone like a girlfriend or our wife or husband, we term it as love. Very often it is just raging hormones and a basic need for gratification, but it is expressed as 'love'. Even the act of sex itself is often called love making!
3. We use the word love to express our attachment or fondness for someone. 'I love my mom' for example. We become attached to people because of their relationship with us or because they have helped us or have been a part of our lives for a long time. We therefore cannot imagine life without them. This is really an
attachment to a person or thing that we have become habituated to, but we call it love nevertheless.
4. We use the word love to express compassion for someone or something. I love humanity or I love animals. There is a form of love that is unconditional and does not express any need or desire in ourselves. That is the true love. Like when we help someone who is suffering or we care for some children living in another country, or we prefer to allow migrants into our country even though it may make things difficult for us, or we care for animal welfare and cannot see them suffering. This is compassion and is the only form of love here that does not express a need. It is about satisfying a need in the other person not in oneself.
Of all these, the fourth is the one which we can term as 'God is Love'. The other three are just desires, attractions and attachments.
The fourth one is a natural force that rises from us the same way that gravity arises from different planetary bodies. It depends on the spiritual level of the person. Different people will have different capacities for 'love' depending on how developed they are spiritually. Some people will have very less of it, some will have more and some others will have great capacity for love.
What ever love we are capable of as individuals we will express the same love to everyone. Something like gravity is the same to all objects. It will not change for different people.
Of course, we can be attracted and attached and also love some one. For example, we could be attached to our parents and also love them to whatever capacity we are capable of. We can be attracted to and attached to and also love our wife of husband. We can also love someone or something without being attracted or attached to it.
I agree that 'love' is just a word...but using it very loosely to refer to the act of sex, attractions and even attachments, can be misleading and give our needs and desires a sense of nobility that they do not deserve.
Just some thoughts.
Cheers.
Sriram
