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What is Love?

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indydude19

indydude19

Rising Star
Greetings all, this thread is for everyone to put what you think love is and how you think of it. Feel free to post anything related to this, a poem, specific song, story, definition or something else ;) The idea for this thread was spawned by discussion in the recent America thread, where i learned that i do not know what love is beyond the chemical sense. So i thought it would be enlightening and neat to see what everyone else has to say about it.

I will start by saying i see love as the release of oxytocin and dopamine in the brain. Many different things can create this reaction, but usually involves a mate or offspring. I think its something that adapted to allow us to be more sociable, tolerant and even caring of each other. I find it hard to distinguish between love and affection.

With enough input, i feel this will be a very nice thread, given the wide range of uses we have for love :love:
 
۩ said:
...baby don't hurt me...
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lol beat me to it! woaaah woaaah wooaah waaah waaah.. waaaaaa waaaaaaaa

.

Good question indydude, I will ponder the question before a kneejerk reply...but in the meantime maybe ask Haddaway or enigma...
 
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Dark, sad and beatiful at the same time:

embracingskeletons.jpg


I will start by saying i see love as the release of oxytocin and dopamine in the brain.
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For me this defines the feeling of beeing enamored. The "butterflies in my stomach" feeling. But not love.
 
steppa said:
I will start by saying i see love as the release of oxytocin and dopamine in the brain.
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For me this defines the feeling of beeing enamored. The "butterflies in my stomach" feeling. But not love.
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I agree.

I think that love has many transitional stages. One could be that all of the mistakes that you have made in life and regrets that you have become nullified, due to the fact that they have led you down a path to a particular person.
Another part of love is that if your partner accidentally leaves a log in the toilet without flushing it does not take away from the fact that they are physically and mentally stimulating for you.
 
Also love can be quite annoying. It can decay people. It can be cruel and beautiful at the same time. It can hinder you from acting like a sane person...but everyone is in search of it. To be loved is a gift, but it also can be a burden. Love is a strange thing. But I honestly wish for everybody to experience what true love means. Especially to those who see it as the release of oxytocin and dopamine in the brain.

:love:
 
Love is appreciation. Love is giving without expecting return. Love is a sensitivity to the infinite beauty of another. Therefore, everything deserves love.
 
Love is divine, but the term "love" is perverted and FUBAR.
 
I feel that a clear distinction needs to be made between "love" and "desire", as it is one source of confusion in matters of love.

Desire is a self-centered interest in others.

Love is interest in others without the self-centeredness.

Love is a state of being wherein one transcends the narrowed egoic state.
 
First, YES!! I am so happy that was the first response 😁 my first desire after making this thread was to see that as the first response lol really digging the input!

The Unknowing, by your definition i do know what love is then! On a daily basis i am actively behaving that way. If i give something, i expect no return. I am astounded by the complexity of everything and everyone and extremely fascinated by it all. I maybe lack some of the sensitivity you speak of though. I experience what i feel you are defining as love, but in a non-lovey way. Like i have deep and profound appreciation of and interest in so much, but do not necessarily feel affection towards it.

Is love something completely independent from affection or desire?

I think Pitubo brought a good point with his idea, but i find it difficult to understand interest without self-centeredness. I would think it is impossible to consider your interests without considering yourself first. While i have the egoic state of "I", i view the universe as a whole unit, separated into different things by only language. So by my view, any interest in others is also interest in yourself. To me this would mean that love and self-centeredness go hand in hand, when using my particular view.

LOL hug :lol:
 
Love guides but does not insist. I feel like it is utterly content staying in the background, unnoticed and unappreciated - although it perpetually exudes its own essence. And when that essence is picked up by our sensors I feel like it is utterly content being observed and obsessed over, being swam in, being engulfed and engulfing.

Love is. We may put up walls against it, we may attempt to constrict its flow, but I hope we can always remember there is no lack of love in this life. There are barriers put up for various reasons, there are distractions and there are corruptions. No search is required for love, only a lowering of the defenses, a breaching of the walls, so that it may pour in uninterrupted.

Love is just really, really cool. I can dig it... even though it frustrates me from time to time.

Still - every path I take away from it and every time I do my best to run from it - I always end up face to face with it as I break down and cry into the couch cushions.
 
Kind of a "The only thing keeping you from having it, is thinking you don't have it" type thing?
 
indydude19 said:
Kind of a "The only thing keeping you from having it, is thinking you don't have it" type thing?
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Right on!

That little mini-rant was inspired by Rumi: "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
 
Just got some quotes from M. Scott Pecks "the road less travelled" which to me is one of the greatest rational books on love... if such a thing could be comprehended.

"The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."

"The common tendency to confuse love with the feeling of love allows people all manner of self-deception. An alcoholic man, whose wife and children are desperately in need of his attention at that very moment, may be sitting in a bar with tears in his eyes, telling the bartender, "I really love my family." People who neglect their children in the grossest of ways more often than not will consider themselves the most loving of parents. It is clear that there may be a self-serving quality in this tendency to confuse love with the feeling of love; it is easy and not at all unpleasant to find evidence of love in one's feelings. It may be difficult and painful to search for evidence of love in one's actions. But because true love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love or cathexis, it is correct to say, "Love is as love does." Love and non-love, as good and evil, are objective and not purely subjective phenomena."

"Our use of the word 'love' is so generalized and unspecific as to severely interfere with our understanding of love. I have no great expectation that the language will change in this respect. Yet as long as we continue to use the word 'love' to describe our relationship with anything that is important to us, anything we cathect, without regard for the quality of that relationship, we will continue to have difficulty discerning the difference between the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad, the noble and ignoble."



"Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words."
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indydude19 said:
Is love something completely independent from affection or desire?
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I think love is full of affection, but mostly independent from desire. That doesn't make desire in itself a bad thing. Desires can point us the way to personal fulfillment. A starving man cannot do much good for others. While love transcends self-centeredness, it does not inherently exclude self. You need as much love yourself as others do, so it is perfectly allright to love yourself too.

indydude19 said:
I think Pitubo brought a good point with his idea, but i find it difficult to understand interest without self-centeredness. I would think it is impossible to consider your interests without considering yourself first.[
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Maybe seeing the needs of others triggers an overwhelming feeling of personal need in you, causing you to exclusively focus on your own needs, wherein the other is essentially a competitor for fulfillment?

Perhaps it takes a state of being emotionally at ease and a deep personal fulfillment to be able to freely love.

Hug you too!
 
ill offer some love from rodney collins book The Mirror of Light

Rodney Collins said:
"Where there is love, God is within us. Wherever we see
something beautiful. God is there. God made all that is
beautiful; it is man who makes ugliness. Real love does not
stop at a person or an object; if it is real it goes on to God.
Nothing real ever disappears. If it disappears it is not real.
What is not true always disappears for it has never been"


"Where there is pardon there is love. Forgiveness is humility.
Where there is humility there is love. Where there is love
there is no condemning, because we feel there is nothing to
forgive"

"Remorse and love are the same. Remorse is real love, or
rather love is the pleasure, remorse the pain. If we are really
awake we feel remorse in proportion to the injury we have
done others; it is payment. "

"We can collect material things, but we cannot collect
love. If we receive it we have to give it again"

"When we demand we do not love. "

". The
divine in us realizes itself in wanting to help others, and this
is love. "


"Love is everything; it is understanding. We do not love
other people for their virtues; how can we tell if a person
does something right for vanity? We cannot judge, so we
cannot know. We love people for their failings. We love one
person because he is vain and needs taking down, another
because he is weak and needs confidence. We love people
for their needs. We must find the qualities of others and
cover their defects with our sins. In this way we can learn
not to judge. "

"Love is not voluntary; it is a grace. He who has received
the grace to pray has received no small mercy from God."

"There is no love
that is not a grace - love of flowers, love of animals, love of
people - all love is a grace. The greater the soul the more
God's love can be transformed."

"A good thought sent direct to someone
helps him in proportion to the strength of the irradiations
of our love for him; the same thought sent to God is
intensified much as the rays of the sun are intensified by a
burning-glass. Prayers are our highest irradiations magnified
by God. That is why prayer is so powerful."
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Love is a successful evolutionary strategy to keep is from feeding our toddlers to the wolves.

Just kidding. Sort of.
 
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