Yes, but Phyllo asked for a ‘word’. I was pinning it down. All of the words which you used go into describing what could be familial love…at least what would be ideal in a home.
But…pity?!
You cannot actually ‘love’ the separateness - you can only see its importance and meaning in a relationship and so accept it. But you can experience and be blissful in your solitary moments. Love needs space in which to grow and be free.
A discernment and balance ‘may’ be reached but may not be. But it is crucial for Love to thrive. Discernment and balance are reached movement by movement. If it appears that it’s happened all at once it’s only because we never noticed the movement.
What do you mean by "Which is loved more at that moment?
I don’t understand this statement.
We have both a devil (daemon) and an angel within us. I see both and would not part with either. But you will have to explain what you mean. Do you mean that we do not do what is best for us even though we know the consequences, the ramifications?
Well, although I do understand what you’re saying here about ALWAYS examining those perceived hopes, I don’t think we can do that at every waking minute. So always here for you may not mean ‘incessantly’. But I do think that there are particular moments which speak to us, or are unclear to us, wherein we have to examine our hopes - to see if they are possible or based on illusion/delusion. Hope can be a double-edge sword - it can kill us or it can save us. One of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books - The Count of Monte Cristo, is at the end where Edmund Dantes says that “The secret of life is to wait and hope”. I find this to be true. It can be one of the most difficult things when it comes to love, at least to me. And sometimes I find myself barely flying by the seat of my pants when it comes to waiting and hoping.
Could you explain this a bit more in-depth, please.
And I think that that goes back to the ‘perceived hopes’ which you spoke about above. I might attempt to be romantic about it and say that the WHY is pure and simple - we love or choose to love because we really have no choice in the matter. But who we love and how we love is based on our life experiences, the ways in which we have been loved and cared for/nurtured or as a result of the ways in which love has been lacking in our experiences growing up and further along even then that. Many of the WHYs are hidden in our subconscious and we dare not even begin to peel away that onion or pull away that heavy muddied veil that hides them. Perhaps if we peered into our perceptions and took an honest look, we would discover that much of what we love and why we love is based on simple need and lack; therefore, not love for the sake of love itself or Love as a response to Life, a Yes. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t whittle away the unwanted/unncessary and reach the core of what Love is…pure energy and spirit.
Hope may also be transformed. We might say that hope, like love, is an energy. It may be transformed into something more ‘real’ - re-directed as it were, towards something that is seen full of possibilites…where what lied before, may not have been. What is hope to you - an assembly-line product? 
I don’t think that what you say here is necessarily true, Mr. Saint. Human love, the process of it, is so messy and complicated. It is full of both intention and unconsciousness. Our unconscious may be speaking to us. Many of us are on a journey in this lifetime to learn how to love and perhaps our unconscious ‘knows’ what we do not self-consciously realize and so we may not feel/see/sense what we are being directed toward but never doubt that our spirit knows where ‘home’ may be - where love may grow.
I only meant that rhetorically. No, we aren’t insane, Mr. Saint. At least I hope that we are not since the insane are not capable of loving. We are just really hungry human beings. And we need to learn about ourselves and where to go to be fed and what it is that feeds us, and who we are that we may feed others. If we have no idea who we are, we cannot love. We authorize nothing - we allow - we flow between reason/awareness/heart/spirit/emotions/passion - all of it at the same time. It’s a swim upriver. And somtimes we find that the currents are about to take us over the edge so all we can do is to just go with the current - and fly - and trust that we will survive the fall…and continue the swim. Trust is tantamount.
Lol ok, I never know when people agree with me when they just fall silent. You do know familial love is two words? 
I object to the use of the word love at all, because love is something more than any of those words, any combination of them and to any extent. Those words are fine on their own - to lump them all into one word “love” is vulgar and does love no justice. Love ought to be reserved for the way in which I speak of it. My girlfriend and I have an agreement to only ever use it when we explicitly feel it, and never use it simply as an obligatory parroted response to the other saying it.
As for pity, it’s apt for Mother Theresa where love is not. The word meaning and derivation seems to narrow down to “appeasing”. She appeased people’s suffering. An actual mother appeases her child’s needs. Pity is apt for mothers in particular - the motherly instinct to care is akin to pity, to see others as suffering and in need of help - and to suffer with them but so that their suffering might be appeased. The German for “pity” is mitleid, meaning to suffer with. It is a word that applies to much of familial “love” very well.
But this thread is about love.
If “space” is what creates what you have hope in and you support having space, guess what - you “love” the space.
I mean which is more hopeful to you at that moment, the separateness or the thing that you are separated from?
You got it. As I explained before, your PHT guides you, “even if inaccurate”.
Self-Harmony is referring to the harmony within and surrounding you. It is actually the same as pure “Holy Harmony”, without the feared religious overtone.
There’s a shocker. 
Your “faith” constitutes a “feeling” unless you are a serious logician.
Emm… that is the first sure sign of it. 
??? Don’ tell them that.
Is there really significant difference between trust, faith, and hope?
I trust that we will make it.
I have faith that we will make it.
I have hope that we will make it.
Which ever, I’m going to try, because I Love.
And I love it because I hope in it.
And I love it because I have faith in it.
And I love it because I trust in it.
Silhouette,
I, for one, haven’t fallen silent. And I fully intend, as a matter of fact, I WILL IT, to respond to your post to me.
Fililial - that’s one word…the love part was understood.
Aside from that, Mother Theresa didn’t ‘pity’ - she had compassion for. She didn’t ‘look down on others’…which to me is what ‘pity’ is. Pity places us above the other - she had compassion for others which places one in a position of solidarity with the other…with passion. Pity separates - compassion brings together.
Fililial lol, I love it 
So for your definition of pity, I agree she didn’t pity those she cared for.
As for my definition of pity, based on derivation and the German word, she did appease and suffer with those she cared for. (Suffered with as in emotionally, not necessarily physically: she will no doubt have empathised).
Thanks in advance for your willed response - in light of everything else I wrote I hope.
=D>
Well, that statement of yours, alone, implies a lack of arrogance. Puzzle by puzzle.
That was funny.
No, I’m not suggesting anything of the sort - just questioning why it would be necessary to sublimate ‘real’ love in the name of sex.
Your loss…laughter is a great catharsis.
I’d like you to explain your meaning of a ‘fully sublimated love’ because what I glean from your words is that there is No love there. Love might include lust, hopefully, that’s normal…but lust may not necessary include Love.
Correct…not in love nor Love.
True - and Love may also require an incredible withdrawal of one’s feelings - that takes WILL but is nevertheless an act of Love too. I don’t get the ‘acquiring tokens to give as presents’ thought.
Well, that is your perception…but giving one’s body sexually isn’t necessarily being open and loving.
Someone else might say that giving one’s life to save another’s is the most open and giving…
Well, putting it THAT WAY, it does make sense. Sometimes our language and the way in which we express ourselves interfere with meaning. But it could just be me not understanding you. At the same time, it IS possible to love someone so dearly and passionately that one may feel a strong need/desire to have sex - we are, after all, human beings or human animals, but it is just that Love that overrules our passion…heart can trump sexual desire if directed toward love.
Gee, you know I am a strong proponent of Love not necessarily always being about feeling…but showing itself in WILL - WILL is not feeling. At the same time, emotion is important to human beings. It IS the driving force, the impetus, that can and does create the WILL necessary to truly love…the act of love. (not sex) But again, what you call ‘pity’ I call compassion. Pity just might be compulsive though. But perhaps it’s just a case of semantics…but i don’t like the term ‘pity’.
I would say that the act of loving must be discriminate but real Love does not discriminate…I mean agape love does not. It includes all people. It is not exclusive.
Perhaps what you’re REALLY trying to say here is that we cannot have enough energy to actively Love the way in which it would take to care for all of these people. We all have our own voice inside of us which speaks to us and which guides us to what it is we do have the energy for…how best to serve humanity, if we want to. Sometimes we have only enough energy to love our family and friends in the way that is good and that’s okay. So you’re correct - we have to discriminate in a sense…because our energy only goes so far. But by ‘discriminate’ I don’t mean seeing some people as ‘more deserving’ of our love than others. Mother Teresa was a really loving human being and one who did have a strong capacity, a lot of spiritual energy to love.
Insofar as Mother Teresa being a ‘frustrated childless mother’ - do you think at some point she may have left her vocation and become one if she had truly wanted to be a mother? Anyway, do you not realize that what acts upon us and directs our lives is our past experiences, the total context of our pasts and present moments, of course. So consciously perhaps or even subconsciously (which I somehow doubt) Mother Teresa knew exactly what she was about. It was not simply some kind of sentimental feeling but WILL and awareness that propelled her on. Can you imagine what she saw in her lifetime? Can you imagine that it must have taken a combination of emotion and will, inner strength, to continue what she saw as her vocation? Maybe you can’t. There is Real Love and then there is the sentimental garbage that can lead to more harm than good. You can see it in the way that some parents treat their adult ‘children’.
Well, we’re agreed on that then. As I said above, language sometimes gets in the way of real meaning and interpretation. So I apologize for misreading you.
But instinct and affection may be part of real love. We have to take the totality of the human being into focus. So we can’t discount those two things - but standing alone, they are not love.
Our emotions are a part of the love equation…and I liked your corollary. BUT AGAIN, the love act (non-sexually) may be acted out without emotion and only sheer willpower. Though of course, it has its origin in emotion. People tend to forget that and judge it as being unloving.
Platonic love is still love…a form of love - do you think that a really meaningful deep loving friendship sans the sex is not Love?
Again, you’ll have to explain ‘maximum sublimation’?
True for the first part - but as for the second, that’s not necessarily true, Silhouette, unless the receiver of those dependent feelings is capable of recognizing the difference between dependency and a wholesome, honest caring. Do you really believe that two dependent people who are ‘enablers’ will know the difference?
You’ll have to elaborate on this a bit. One may truly love another but not be loved in return. That doesn’t presuppose that there isn’t real love on the part of the one. Stop throwing away some of the pieces of the puzzle, Silhouette. They’re all needed to see a full picture.
I’ll have to wait until I get ‘YOUR’ meaning on sublimated.
No, love is not a checklist - just like trying to define the meaning of god cannot really be done with a check list. But in order to more fully understand an ideal or a concept, it needs to be brought into the open and discussed (defined) in a sense, though both love and god are a mystery. Just like as at one time, Black Holes were considered more a mystery than they are now. But at the same time, it’s wonderful to come closer to the truth about something. It defines us more as human beings and our place in the universe. Coming closer to the truth about love does this and I don’t think it destroys the beauty and meaning of the mystery of love.
Well, still - if love is a process and a journey which we are on, it IS possible that prior starvation (human imperfection) may in part be the catylyst that inspires the learning of love/what love is. Or is that too much of a stretch? We cannot discount anything from humanity. And I agree that full openness can be equated with a strong spiritual connection, but an interdependent one, not a dependent one.
Okay then…and I shall wave as I swim away from the Omega island which you have become. O/K.But sometimes it’s a good thing to go digging a bit deeper and deeper to get at the truth of things. We sometimes lie to ourselves - self-honesty is not so easy. Just in case…Anyway…
It is a good attitude to have knowing that we can provide those things for ourselves and that is important if we ARE to learn to love rightly. But though it is clicheish - people really do need other people in order to be fully human. And what enriches our spirits we can then give to others to enrich their spirits.
And we DO have the capacity to feel affection for someone when we are not with them. If we don’t, I don’t think that is someone we care about. So I disagree with you on THAT.
If you had to experience one - which would it be - to be possessive or be possessed by? If you had to? And why?
If love is NOT eternal - and I am NOT saying that it is -how can we possibly know this - how can it repeat eternally? And how would YOU define eternal/eternity.
One can also look at that first statement as being one from someone who is afraid of commitment. But if not, I do get your point here. Love can only really grow in freedom and surrender. The difficult part about that is in determining one’s actions; how to go about allowing another to be free and at the same time, maintaining one’s own sense of personal freedom and yet self-surrendering to love. There are really no easy answers. I’m not speaking here of irresponsible freedom.
I think you are a closet romantic. Do you also believe in the concept of a soulmate?
Incidentally, I mean familial love.
Mr. Saint,
There are times when that space leads to pain and grief. Do you love the space then even though it may lead to one’s own becoming? You may accept it, support it, but love it? One needs to make a distinction between self- chosen ‘space’ and space that has been inflicted by others. Do you ‘love’ the cure simply because it’s necessary, even though it may feel worse than the disease? You accept it.
Full of hope? I don’t think that’s so easy to pin down. The separateness at times may appear to be full of possibilities and at other times it is the Other that is more hopeful to one’s self. And then again, at other times, there doesn’t appear to be any hope. It isn’t a constant.
If someone gave you directions to drive to a city where that person had never driven to before, would you follow them? Your PHs may inadvertently ‘guide’ you, but that would only be after you have come to realize that they were inaccurate, in hindsight.
Perceived hopes may be inaccurate and the threats may not be real…so wouldn’t you say it is far better to let something more concrete guide us? At the same time, it isn’t an easy thing NOT to allow our perceived hopes to guide us - they help us to see possibilities. BUT those perceived hopes may be full of delusion. And I suppose it’s better to sometimes make mistakes (Your ‘even if inaccurate’) even if things don’t always turn out the way we would want. We learn that way and hopefully it is something learned without too much grief/loss.
Are you simply speaking of those moments when everything just seems to come together and it feels like ‘all is right with my world’ - sort of like a moment of grace (without the feared religious overtones). Sort of like in those not-so-rare moments when I truly feel that the universe IS a beautiful loving and intelligent place - and when i feel truly loved and for no other reason than that that moment has given me that gift. That’s holy harmony to me. Holy here to me meaning holistically, in its totality.
How does one achieve this holy harmony (without the feared religious overtone lol)? By simply allowing, by letting go, by surrendering? Is it the end of a journey we’ve been on and without realizing it, something has worked itself through and out, or can it happen in an instant? I mean, a real instant? But does anything actually happen that way?
This is true as faith IS based on belief and belief IS based on emotion. Which is NOT illogical unless that belief has not been examined and re-examined and unless that belief doesn’t change one’s life and others’ for the better in some way. Only then is it illogical, Mr. Logician.
What’s the first sure sign of it - not admitting to our insanity? But most of us are NOT insane. Wouldn’t that simply be an excuse, calling ourselves insane? Wouldn’t that let us off the hook for all of the totally unaware things which we sometimes do to escape our pain and the hard work and struggle we have to go through in order to grow? How often have we told ourselves “I must have been insane to do that”? But it wasn’t insanity, it was just simple unawareness and not allowing ourselves the courage to flow through the difficult moment. And sometimes our brain chemistry betrays us and our logic and reason go out the window and fly far, far away. Sometimes what we see as insanity is not having the power to remain grounded. Trust me, i know this.
Or do we hope, have faith and trust in it BECAUSE we Love it?
Why have these words if there isn’t a significant difference but then that would be according to one’s own perception, wouldn’t it? But I will have to think more on this.
I feel that it is trust that is the greatest of these somehow.
Faith can fail because it is based on ‘belief’ which may be based in delusions which haven’t been examined.
Hope may fail when we come to realize that it too was based in delusion/false belief.
Hope is like wings to me. It is what keeps us up so high that we may see possibilities.
Hope is desire always reaching and reaching for fulfillment - the fruition of those possibilities.
But it may fail when we come to realize that we have flown so high that we didn’t see what was right in front of us before the hope.
But trust, or Self-Trust, is the foundation of the other two. It is the cement which holds us together and puts us back together - trust at our very core, because self-trust is based on WILL and the inner knowledge that no matter what - we WILL BE, we WILL BE, and that is Love which may in turn lead to surrender. …and your holy-harmony.
Faulty thinking? I’m just trying to play devil’s advocate here.
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And trust, being so fundamental, when lost so easily to suspicion, dismisses all love. Thus trusting the love is trusting in trust which is trusting in the lack of suspicion, which only comes from those accepting love without worrying about trust.
Do you love your child only because you trust your child?
If you didn’t trust the child, would you refuse to love the child?
I can get a contract attorney and the police to establish trust, but I suspect the victim will have a hard time loving me for it.
What does what you say here have to do with what i said in the quote?
Anyway, I had to read that a few times [which I bolded] for it to make sense. And it does but at the same time, on the other side of that coin, you make it sound so absolute. What about special circumstances? Are we to have blind faith and simple trust even if our reason and logic tells us otherwise?
And also, so what you are saying here is that a lack of trust and/or suspicion dismisses love? Can love which is real be that easily dismissed? Of course, a relationship may suffer because of it…
One does not stop loving their child even if they cannot trust their child…but trust can be built. Trust between two people is not a magic potion.
About the contract attorney…that’s not based on ‘real’ trust but a legality that binds…perhaps because we’ve come to realize how necessary contracts are. You mean a criminal lawyer, don’t you?
Just like many people depend on the marriage and the marriage contract in order to stay together as if a marriage can be altogether THAT binding. As we’ve seen.
Just like the prenuptial agreement may be based on reason and [logic] but it’s not based on trust.
When it is founded on trust, it can and is everyday. 
“In their pain, finding none else to blame, they fall from above by accusing their love.”
But Love is. 
I was thinking a prenuptial/marriage/divorce attorney. 
When you really Love, trust isn’t the issue.
Think of all of the things that you see and love, yet trust has nothing to do with it. 
Sounds right, James. Bukowski put it like this, ‘as the spirit wanes, the form appears.’ So as love weakens, trust becomes an issue.
What do you think is the relation between will and love?
I think one will love.
I think one loves will.
You have conscious will power and unconscious will power. If they are not in alignment, they defeat each other (“Don’t eat the meat of a split hoofed animal”).
Love is an act of will, whether conscious, subconscious, or both. When one loses will power, one loses the power to love (or accomplish anything else for that matter).
Anxiety and stress divide the will, the “spirit” and thus weaken the soul, the “will”.
Hope gathers.
Fear scatters.
Hope strengthens will.
Fear destroys will.
In a world run by intimidation to destroy will, all people become desperate for love.
Interesting answers, but I also would suggest that Love is a free gift, and not something earned; that would be gratitude. Moreover, I propose that the very best kind of Love between two people would be Selfless. This Love does not originate in us anymore than life originates in us as individuals, but it does include us, if we choose to be included. But what is Selfless Love and what benefits does it impart? Selfless Love does not seek reciprocation, that is first and foremost, but if the one loving remains unloved, where does the Love he extends come from? As stated earlier, Selfless Love does not originate in us, but we can “plug” into it if we so choose. This of course presupposes that there exists an Ideal of Love, as Plato once posited, but it is easily determined if this is true by examining the living examples throughout history. For instance, Jesus exhibited Selfless Love, but claimed that it did not originate in him, but that he did the will of him who sent him. We have Ghandi, who demonstrated it when the muslim fanatic was strangling him, by looking at him with Love in his eyes though the man would take his Life. And the fanatic demonstrated it when he recognized the Love in Ghandi’s eyes and dropping his arms, fell at Ghandi’s feet weeping. The Selfless Love he recognized in Ghandi’s eyes having shined away the madness of hate. Do we really believe that such Love that can pierce through the madness of hate originated in the muslim fanatic? Nor was he left outside its realm but it included him. Is this the best kind of love as regards a marraige? If each one seeks the others interests, then they will never have any interests apart. If each participant cares more for their partner than for their own lives, then what is left to argue over? If the couple seeks to Give Love rather than to gain it, then they will learn of the Abundance of Love which is theirs to share, if they so choose.
Mr. Saint,
When love is founded on trust, it can be easily dismissed? I must be misunderstanding you here, Mr. Saint, as that doesn’t sound too logical to me. Human beings are pretty complex and we may love but at the same time we bring to our relationships, whether romantic or friendship ones, our own personal issues from childhood or from a more immediate past. For those who have grown up in a pretty functional family where trust wasn’t an issue - it flourished - it probably wouldn’t be such an issue in a relationship. It would have been learned and become engrained in the person. But not everyone is that lucky. But still, if the real love is there, the parties have a chance if there is understanding compassion towards the other.
…and perhaps this is why people feel that do not have to do the hard work to maintain a good and loving marriage/relationship/friendship.
Every fairy tale at the end of the story, when it says “And they lived happily ever after” - ought to be ended with ‘NOT SO TRUE’…
Is that based on empirical knowledge? 
Don’t answer that - nomb…
I wonder though - IS IT REALLY because of a lack of trust on the part of the man or woman to have a pre-nuptial agreement drawn up, or is it just sound business sense? If I were to marry a man who is filthy rich and had to sign a prenuptial, I wonder if I would feel he didn’t trust me? After all, it wouldn’t simply be about him but also about all of the other people who depended on him for their livelihoods. I don’t think a contract presupposes a lack of trust.
Well, I was wrong about what I wrote there. I hadn’t brought my thoughts further enough. Trust can be an issue, even when we love. Life isn’t that simple. The thing perhaps though is that in a relationship we can grow and learn to deal with our trust issues…learn to transcend them, by letting go and surrendering to the love we know that is there, knowing that it may be our issues we are dealing with and not reality. But still, we have to will ourselves to let go and let love. That might sound really romantic but it is not! Willing something like that takes our whole being…ah, but the love does help.
As for your last sentence, perhaps it does though…in an unconscious way. We tend to take things for granted, though we may stand in awe of them…feeling that they will be with us forever. I speak here now, for instance, about the beauty of the universe or let’s say an amazing tree. (my empircal knowledge) So perhaps trust has everything to do with it. But maybe that’s just taking things for granted, which is not trusting that everything will always be the same. Or Is it? There has to be some distinction there. These are just my musings here and may have no basis in reality or logic
So, on a subconscious or semi-conscious level, trust may be, in fact, I will say that it IS associated with those things we see and love. And so is gratitude for it all. I’m derailing this, I know.
Thanks for this thread is all I’m able to add.
Your welcome. Thank you, maryshelley. You really have no idea just what that means to me.
Turtle, the little reptile, began it.