is love what the government tells us to do, die for the love of your country.
Or love as religion , abandon sex for the love of God?
OR sexual pleasure? Depending on your spouse for security, taking care of the kids, worries that your spouse will leave you, or your wife looks at another man causes jealousy?
Can you define what love is without the prejudice of your conditioned mind, can you clear up this confusion that society has brought you.
Love is not having the state of mind, not having the attachment of desire?
CAn you live without a motive or desire?
I don’t believe it is possible to define anything without preset notions of your conditioned mind.
Every idea that one posesses is due to a conditioning from some sort, be it the media, the government, or your own subjective experience. Even your own experiences are defined in terms of a source outside of yourself; your own “ideas” of what is right and wrong and this case what constitutes love will not develop on their own. There are no universal truths to be acknowledged. Theoretically, if someone were to be raised in a society where love is understood to be the opposite of what it usually is, that idea will seem to be just as correct to them as what another societies concept is.
In response to your last question, “can you live without a motive or desire?”, I believe the answer is “no”.
There is absolutely no action one can undergo without some motive or desire. You work for the desire of pay. Pay is motivation because it is necessary to live a comfortable life. Comfortable lives are desired because they are easier.
Related to that argument, I don’t believe there are any selfless acts. It is only possible to do anything if it benefits yourself. Even so called “heros” only act because they receive some sort of reward, more than likely internal, from their actions; someone will put their life on the line to rescue a complete stranger because it is what they feel is the right thing to do and are thus living up to their own expectations.
I don’t believe I can truly answer all of the questions you have poised.
I think you are very courageous in trying to answer my question.
The way of exploring what love is, is first that you must recognize you are conditioned by society, and the things I have said.
Next, if there is desire, is that love? IF you desire something, the you are a slave to that thing. Therefore not love.
LAst, can you live without desires or motives?
Sure you can, but desires and motives are part of living, so you cannot get rid of it. Therefore, you must realize desire is part of life, and realize there is no love if there is desire.
These statements contradict eachother in a sense. What I understand you to be saying is that if you desire something, there is no love. Desire is a part of life. Therefore, love does not exist.
Your premise that if you desire something, you are a slave to it and thus it is not love is completely subjective. The subjectivity is, of course, a product of society and other opinions conditioned within you.
I’m not sure if your questions can be satisfactorily answered. The question is made irrelevant by the fact that “The way of exploring what love is, is first that you must recognize you are conditioned by society, and the things I have said.”
There is no way to give an unbiased definition of love.
Love exist, only when security is abandon, and when there is full of trust, worries does not exist. Like a wife and a husband both trust each other, without any worry and secuity of cheating each other. Love is there. But love cannot be form into a system, or a definition, as soon you put it into a definition or a system, there is no love but pleasure and desire.
Love exists when there is tension, or desire. Love is desire. As they say, “you don’t know what you have until it is gone.” This is true.
As Diotima and Socrates say in the Symposium,
D: Is love beautiful?
s: yes it is
d: and you agree that love is desire?
s: yes
d: but can love desire beauty if it’s beautiful?
That was a summary of their dialogue. I gotta go, I’m sorry I wasn’t clear, but I’ll try again later.
The machines of hell that I’ve gone through over the last few years (due to a schizophrenic illness) certainly are not love. To be someone who agrees with such demons is not to love.
I had a strange experience last night that I wanted to get off my chest, maybe it has something to do with love, I’m not sure.
I have been travelling to Bangkok on business; maybe once or twice a month since the New Year.
On my first trip there this year, I met a bar-girl, who we’ll call Tone. I found her down right comely and didn’t hesitate to get up and walk away from some other girl I was sitting with at the bar and had been with the evening before.
Slanty oriental eyes, angular face, little nose, freckles on nearly black Isaan skin, long black hair; 26, standing up to about my throat, little square white teeth, little hands and feet and no pock marks or stretch marks or tatoos or piercings or any of the other things that ruin a young woman’s beauty.
Tone’s a little older than the women I generally go for, (nineteen-year-olds), but something about her is very attractive despite her being 26.
I go with her a couple times a week when I was in Bangkok, giving her a thousand Baht more than she asked for. I never let her spend the night, never took her to dinner, never bought her anything; really never spoke to her: my Thai is not very good, and besides I don’t want to know her --how can you gag a girl you know, cum in her face, be sadistic?
A month ago I go to the bar I found her at, but she isn’t there. Her friend who I do talk to, as she can speak some Korean, tells me that Tone wants to have a baby with me and come to Manila. I figure she’s putting me on for a long con (Jesus, I live in Manila, so I’m pretty aware about this game). The next afternoon I call Tone and everything is the same as always: lay together, take a shower, fuck, take a shower, suck, take a shower, pay, she goes. She asks, “why you never take me long-time? Two-thousand Baht, I don’t eat too much.” “I like to sleep alone” I tell her. She gives me a picture of herself taken in the bar.
At Songkran I have the bad luck of being in Bangkok again, (bad luck because it isn’t fun to me to spend the whole God damn day with damp trousers and ruined papers). Anyway, Tone asks me to go to her hometown to see her home and parents. I pass as I have to go to Saigon straight away and then back to Manila, and I don’t want to go up to fucking Isaan anyway.
I come back to Bangkok last night and go to the bar to look for Tone. She’s not there, but her friend who can speak Korean tells me she was crying when I left last time. I don’t really understand her over the music and I can’t really believe this very professional woman has been crying over me. Tone gets to the bar, but she’s acting a little strange. I don’t know what, another customer she has to stand up to go with me? it’s her ‘magic-day’? she’s sick? I don’t know.
I take her back to the hotel --and she balls her eyes out!
She cries and cries and cries. “You go bar to get another girl!” “You forget me!” “You didn’t say good-bye!” This is totally unexpected. She calms down in forty minutes. We shower and fuck and shower and shower and suck and shower. We have a conversation. Her English actually isn’t that bad. In four months of seeing her on and off, this is the first time I’ve really ever spoken to her.
But this will be my last trip to Bangkok for at least six months; maybe more, maybe a lot longer. Tone has no passport, she sends all her money back to Isaan --and what the fuck is she gonna do in Manila? Or rather, what the fuck am I gonna do with her in Manila where I got three girls on the go there anyway?
I think this is interesting because you always hear people that claim to be in love say things like: “When you’re in love, you just know.”
I always that that was odd because I saw it much how it seems many of you do. Love is a set of feelings conditioned by what we are taught to relate with the word “love” and packaged and labeled under one convenient term. How do you “just know” if everyone’s definition is different? Especially if you begin to consider what shapes other people’s definition of “love” as compared to your own. I’ve been struggling with this thought for some time. How is it that we just know love? Or anything for that matter (I know, that’s a whole other topic of conversation). I think about my definition and wonder if there are things I should be feeling, that I am currently not, that would reassure me that what I am feeling is love. The funny part is how much we consider other people’s definitions of love when looking for love ourselves, when, in reality, that should not shape our opinion or definition of love at all. Love seems like it should be more personal, no?
Also, as I read this thread i began to think about how love and desire relate. Love in it’s purest generally = good, while desire in it’s purest generally = bad. Big conflict. But if you think about it, love is something that develops after the initial stages of desire that generally = bad. Love developes once youve developed a taste for what you once desired. So, is desiring what you’ve already obtained a sign of love? For example, how a man desires a woman. If that desire fades, the relationship will end or go sour in most cases. If the desire remains, even though the man already has what he wants, the relationship will flourish. In this case desire doesn’t necessarily seem to = bad. Would you say it is a sign of love if a man still desires his wife even after they’ve been married for 25 years? Of course the man could desire her for the “wrong” reasons, as staying married 25 years purely for sex doesn’t seem to constitute love, but what if he still desires her because he genuinely enjoys who she is, or desires her company because she makes him happy?
Sorry the post is so long, but i just found this forum and this topic really struck a chord with me…
I don’t believe love is a feeling at all. Love is an act and a conscious one. It is a choice. I believe love is the will to extend yourself in order to promote your own or someone else’s spiritual growth.
Love isn’t about eliminating desire or other feelings. Here is how desire needs to exist.
EG) You may desire to watch you favourite TV programme and you settle down to it. You have been looking forward to it all day. No sooner does it start and your child demands your attention. You now have a choice. You still desire to watch your programme but you may also desire to give your child attention as you are concerned with the wellbeing of your offspring. So you make a choice based on what you decide is the most loving thing to do. If you choose that interacting with your child if the better choice then you are being loving if you fully engage with your child and meet the demands being asked of you. If you half listen and still try to do both then your actions are falling short of love as you are neither helping yourself or your child. You haven’t set yourself aside fully and haven’t fully exercised the choice you made.
The acts of listening, giving your fullest attention, of challenging unhelpful behaviour, of deep examination and honesty are all acts of love, amongst many more. Love is effortful and is about promoting value in yourself and others. It can be a selfless act, though love is self-replenishing so it does have personal reward.
‘Falling in love’ is very much effortless. It feels extraordinary! It feels like the best thing in the world but this isn’t what I call love. It has been related to ‘ego boundaries’ collapsing, which is really a process of forgetting who you are and becoming one with your beloved. Before too long these boundaries snap back into place and the separateness that you were otherwise hidden to reveals things about your beloved that you start to find less acceptable. This is when the process of real love can find a much deeper understanding of each other, though often couples determine they have ‘fallen out of love’ because they don’t feel the same anymore (or at least one of you has). Lots of other things are confused with love to. Emotional attachment to another, for example, in the guise of dependancy. Feeling that you cannot live without another is the ultimate form of dependancy and very restrictive on the recipient.
That is my take on love. For me it is about having an awareness of the choices before you and choosing the one that promotes the greatest wellbeing. It promotes the ‘higher choice’ but is also compassionate and allows freedom of choice too.
By crude summary, love is an intense emotion elicited by an object (normally humans!). Why? Hate and jealousy can more easily be described, love escapes such easy definition, hence perhaps its mystery.