What Love is according to me

[JayG84]

2 hours ago, Nak Khid said:

If everything was love there would be no looking.

What I'm saying is that everyone is looking for something that doesn't exist externally. Everything is ONE. So you are looking for yourself. YOU ARE LOVE. YOU are EVERYTHING. 

But, if you aren't aware that you are ONE yet. Then there's not really much else to say. Your ego is going to defend your paradigm.

Edited June 5, 2020 by JayG84

[Forestluv]

5 hours ago, Nak Khid said:

If I imagined loving something, loving something is a feeling.  Therefore doing so would not lead to the idea that it is not a feeling. 

Also if  I loved something I would not always allow it to be exactly as it is.   If it was going to harm itself or others I might try to stop it .
Love is not accepting everything. That is apathy pretending to be love

Again you are talking about a behavior "accepting" and what you are saying here about accepting rape and murder is very wrong. 
Accepting raping and murder is not loving.   This is the danger I am talking about that occurs when nonduality is divorced from it's traditional and then when further confusion is added by attempting altering to change the meaning of the  word love.
Love is a simple thing available to us all in it's higher and lower forms.   
It is not an obscure intellectual concept only available to a few in some kind of rare solitary altered state that only certain people can understand

In a rational, relative context of love you are correct. In this context, no one here is advocating to accept or cause harm to oneself or others. 

You are perceiving what you consider to be “nonduality” through a relative, rational filter. This creates distortion. A dead-giveaway of the attempt to maintain a relative, rational filter is that you continuously default to rape and murder as not being love. Of course, rape and murder are not love in a relative, rational context. 

You write: ”This is the danger I am talking about that occurs when nonduality is divorced from it's traditional and then when further confusion is added by attempting altering to change the meaning of the word love”.

You are creating that divorce. No one here is advocating for the divorce of what you call “nonduality” and a relative form of love. A transcendent awakening reveals both and how they are connected as one. If you haven’t had a sufficient awakening, you will not be able to see this and absolute and relative will get conflated. The divorce, confusion and conflation is your creation by trying to figure this out through a limited rational, relative lens. As well, there is no objective, universal meaning of love in relative, rational constructs. You can easily explore this yourself by examining grey areas of what qualifies as “love” and how meaning is relative. For example, my parents don’t consider homosexual couples as being “love”. They see it as unnatural, deviant behavior. Yet to the homosexual couple the meaning is love. As well, you obviously don’t consider rape as love, yet I’ve known rapists that clearly considered it love. . . Yet again, these are relative explorations to breakdown the illusory construct of an objective, universal love within relative constructs. There are much much bigger fish to fry. 

What is being pointed to here cannot be figured out rationally, because the rational filter itself is causing distortion. You would need to awaken beyond this limitation. In doing so, you will not have to reject any of your relative constructs of love, yet you will become aware that they exist within a higher transcendent love. Some body-minds may realize this in a “Big Bang” type of awakening. Yet from what I’ve observed, most body-minds need to continually expand their capacity to love in a relative sense. The further out the boundaries are pushed, the higher likelihood of a big awakening. For you, rape and murder are too far outside your current edge. Focusing on rape and murder is just re-enforcing your relative, rational construct. I would consider working at your edge. For example, consider someone/something that is right on the edge of being worthy of your love. Who/what is in that grey area in which they sorta deserve your love, but don’t quite qualify for your love. Work in that range and expand your capacity for relative love. Ime, this will provide grounding for higher awakenings. You could also take a fast track through psychedelics, yet it would be much harder to integrate the higher awakenings on the small ground you currently stand. 

If and when you have a full awakening, you will realize “It’s Love”. There is no other word for it. It will be the word that appears. 

[Preety_India]

 

Your idea of love is very dysfunctional and simplistic in a very illogical way. You are thinking of love as liking ice cream in a very literal sense as in when a person says "I love ice cream" but they are trying to imply that they have a preference for ice cream. Love is not a preference or a taste or a passing feeling. We do not define our relationships as lightly as a passing feeling. 

Now love is a state and a quality. Some people are more loving than others. Because they have that quality. 

Also the cultivation or expression of this quality depends a lot on how conscious the person is. People with a natural instinctive bend for the spiritual are generally more loving unless they are fake or hypocrites. 

Love takes different forms, it's like water that fits and takes up the shape of the container. Similarly love can be a romantic love, a love for a purpose or a cause, a love for God and the universe, a love for a child, a love for the self. 

Infinite love is like infinite capacity or infinite space. 

Now imagine you have the spring water flowing from the mountains and let's say this flow is a never ending stream. This is how infinite love will look like. It's abundant, eternal and never ending. 

It has no start or stop. 

It is flowing eternally. 

When you experience this love, all judgement comes to an end 

 

Please try to be more spiritual or grow spiritually. With your thinking, you will get blinded by a false society. 

In simple words I'll say love is the experience and being of the Divine Eternal and note that this experience and incarnation is not subjective. Anyone who experiences it will look at it the way it is to be looked at or felt or become. 

There are no versions to this divine eternal love. It's one and only one but reflected in so many actions and sentiments. 

Yet it's fundamental nature remains unchanged. 

 

So water remains water, as pure as it can be, it doesn't change even if different people are drinking the same water 

 

Edited June 5, 2020 by Preety_India

[Nak Khid]

54 minutes ago, Serotoninluv said:

In a rational, relative context of love you are correct. In this context, no one here is advocating to accept or cause harm to oneself or others. 

You are perceiving what you consider to be “nonduality” through a relative, rational filter. This creates distortion. A dead-giveaway of the attempt to maintain a relative, rational filter is that you continuously default to rape and murder as not being love. Of course, rape and murder are not love in a relative, rational context. 

 

I don't normally talk about rape an murder but I hear these things frequently being brought up in addition to Hitler. 

These thing are brought up in the context of "infinite love"  "God"   "Police brutality is love" .
These types of things are frequently brought up to try to suggest this is some kind of "higher" beyond human love

Somebody might love to murder.  But murder is not love and love is not everything and it's not a substance. 
It's a feeling.    

 

[Forestluv]

@Nak Khid In a relative context, I don’t disagree with you and I know how it’s upsetting to see people claim higher ground and refer to police brutality, rape and murder as love. 

[Nak Khid]

1 hour ago, Preety_India said:

 

Your idea of love is very dysfunctional and simplistic in a very illogical way. You are thinking of love as liking ice cream in a very literal sense as in when a person says "I love ice cream" but they are trying to imply that they have a preference for ice cream. Love is not a preference or a taste or a passing feeling. We do not define our relationships as lightly as a passing feeling. 

 

From my opening post 

Quote

Nak Khid said:
Someone could love ice cream,  another person romantically, animals, their child, a god, an experience, people, themselves

You left these other things out form what I said in my opening post 

  Love like all feelings comes and goes like the tide.  People who are deeply in love and devoted adn commuted to each other but they are not feeling that love 24 hours a day and to attempt to do so, though impossible would be excessive and smothering.  They encounter other people and situations they are not feeling love constantly. There are other emotions in this world.  And let us not pretend that love is all there is to try to make it fit into this idea we may have of nonduality. 

Streams are not infinite. The have a time when they are formed and a time when they dry up.
Any feeling is part of duality, fear, anger, love, sadness, joy, tranquility, excitement   They don't have to be paired as duos of opposites. 
Every word and thought spoken here is separation.  That we need to survive and communicate with each other right here and now. 

Quote

Preety_India said:
Love takes different forms, it's like water that fits and takes up the shape of the container. Similarly love can be a romantic love, a love for a purpose or a cause, a love for God and the universe, a love for a child, a love for the self. 

yes,  it is an action, these variations yes, and one can even love ice cream. 

but is a hand grenade love?   Is an electron love,  is a shoe love? Is a cute puppy love? 
No, things aren't love. Love is a feeling and energy if you like from one being to another.
It rises and falls, like the ocean. Things die.
Others new born. 
 

 

Edited June 5, 2020 by Nak Khid

[Gili Trawangan]

29 minutes ago, Nak Khid said:

From my opening post 

You left these other things out form what I said in my opening post 

  Love like all feelings comes and goes like the tide.  People who are deeply in love and devoted to each other are not feeling that love 24 hours a day and to attempt to do so, though impossible would be excessive and smothering. 

Streams are not infinite. The have a time when they are formed and a time when they dry up.

yes,  it is an action, these variations yes, and one can even love ice cream. 

but is a hand grenade love?   Is an electron love,  is a shoe love? Is a cute puppy love? 
No, things aren't love. Love is a feeling 
 

 

You will never understand existential Love until you have a deep awakening.

It can't be explained to you, it's impossible to explain, it's impossibly miraculous, it's outside of everything you consider possible.

Deny it all you want, or be smart and try to find out what it is, not by arguing about it, but by going for awakening.

[Carl-Richard]

I'll try to bridge the conceptual gap between relative love and absolute love by sharing an insight I had some years ago:

When you do something you love very much (say your favorite hobby), your immersion and attention towards that thing increases, and it feels very good. That means your experience of that thing is bigger and more in tune with the reality of that thing. You can use neuroscience to back that up: dopamine increases attention, motivation and feelings of pleasure -> increased performance -> more in tune with reality. Then when you REALLY love something, your immersion and attention becomes so intense that the distinction between you and the thing vanishes, and you and the thing are ONE. If you concede that your access to reality is determined by your immersion and attention to that reality, then it logically follows that reality is dependent on LOVE. When you reach these higher states of love where you merge with the thing that you're in love with, then you realize that Love is Absolute. Love IS Reality. Everything is Love.

Edited June 5, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[Nak Khid]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

If you concede that your access to reality is determined by your immersion and attention to that reality, then it logically follows that reality is dependent on LOVE....

Love IS Reality. Everything is Love.

No, that is not logical.  A things's reality is not determined by whether or not somebody loves it intently
What you are right about is that love involves being attentive to something. 
One is not continually attentive to one thing.  And when that attention is drawn to another stimulus or interrupted by sleep
we realize that everything is not love, the intoxicant wears off. 
What if everything was love wouldn't that be wonderful?   It might be.
But it isn't.  There is also suffering in the world.   And that is why love is needed.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if when could just eat constantly but never get fat and never be limited by the capacity of our stomach?
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could take a drug that made us feel like we were in a state love and we could just take a pill, one after the other and exist in an unbroken state of love with no interruptions?  That might be wonderful.
Or horrifically monotonous.  
Fantasies and promises
 

Edited June 5, 2020 by Nak Khid

[Carl-Richard]

@Nak Khid When you immerse yourself in something and you feel good as a result, that IS what you define as love. I think your main problem isn't that you don't understand what love is: it's that you don't understand what nonduality is. When you follow relative love to its ultimate conclusion, to the point where you see through the distinction between self and other, you break through to Absolute Love. You realize that the love that you only extended to a limited amount of reality is actually an intrinsic part of all of reality, even the parts that you used to hate (death, suffering, injustice).

[Zigzag Idiot]

On 6/4/2020 at 5:16 AM, TheAlchemist said:

@Zigzag Idiot That's very interesting. It seems to be true that the sense of being a separate self only stays alive because we believe in the reality of the "negative" emotions. Fear tends to be retractive/restrictive and Love seems to be expansive. So the only way we hold "ourselves" together is by believing the fear which is necessary for the illusion to exist. By letting go of the insistence on fear being real we are released into the base state of infinite Love. 

Let me know if this sounds right from the course perspective, I'm a new student

I@TheAlchemist  I think you nailed it pretty good.

ACIM teaches that Love is so all encompassing that it has no opposite. 

I picked out a couple of Quotes from the Ridhwan Glossary on Love. There are about 20 more if anyone wants to follow the link. I also included one quote on evil. There's 3 or 4 more of those to be found by following the lower link.

 

To Really See that Love is Beingness is Not Easy 

What is the implication of this insight? If love is our beingness, our essence, and the very substance of our soul, then what is going on when we have love only in a relationship? It means you are yourself only in certain relationships. If you say that love can exist only with specific others, you’re saying, “I can be myself, my beingness only with specific others and only under certain conditions.” The conditions of the personality will restrict love, will restrict you, and you’re saying then that you can only be yourself under those conditions. If you say, “I only love this person,” what does it mean? What are you saying about yourself? To really see that love is beingness, is-ness, is not easy. You cannot understand it intellectually. The way to understand it is to experience it, to taste it, to be it. You will be able to understand its qualities only when you experience it. Love is not an idea or a concept. If you’ve never seen a coconut, never tasted a coconut, someone could explain to you the taste of a coconut forever, but you would never really know what coconut tastes like. If you taste essence, you know it. If you don’t taste it, you don’t know it. Everything is like that. When people say essence or Being or love is something mysterious, it means they have never tasted it. It isn’t any more mysterious than anything else.

Your Personality or Ego Does Not Know How to Love

The first thing you need to know is that your personality or ego does not know how to love. It cannot love. When you say, "I love you," it is always a lie, because the person who says, "I" cannot love, and doesn't know what love is. The personality does not know how to love. The personality is the product of the lack of love, so how can it know love? The personality is what you usually think is you, what you call "I," "myself." When you say "I," it is a lie. "I" doesn't love. "I" doesn't know how to love. "I" is there because you don't know how to love. "I" is there from the beginning because of the loss of love. The very existence of an "I" is the absence of love, the blockage and distortion of love. The "I" knows how to need; the "I" does not know how to love. It is not possible. What we call "I," our separate identity, is our self-image. Even if the self-image knows what love is, it does not have the love and cannot be a source of love. In fact, when there is love, love tends to melt away the "I." The "I" relaxes and gets out of the way.

From - https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/love

 

 

All Spiritual Work Would be Pointless if There Were Such a Thing as Ultimate Evil

As we have seen, each Holy Idea is a characteristic of reality at all locations, at all times, and at all levels. Holy Truth explicates this understanding. Here, we are saying that not only is reality just one presence that is boundless and real, but that it is also positive, blissful, and wonderful. So not only is God one, but God is also wonderful and made of love. The truth, then, is loving and lovable, which is why we say in the Diamond Approach that you must love truth for its own sake. If your orientation is that you love truth so that it will change you and make you a happier person, your orientation is out of sync with how things objectively are; if you see reality as it is, you can’t help but love it. It follows, then, that objectively there is no evil. We see evil only when we perceive reality through a filter. A person who behaves in what we consider evil ways is a person acting through a distortion. In spiritual work, concepts of a devil, of dark forces, of some evil that exists on its own outside of the goodness of reality are considered manifestations of ignorance, both in terms of believing in such concepts and in terms of the manifestations attributed to such forces. All spiritual work would be pointless if there were such a thing as ultimate evil.

From - https://www.diamondapproach.org/glossary/refinery_phrases/evil

[Consilience]

13 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

In a rational, relative context of love you are correct. In this context, no one here is advocating to accept or cause harm to oneself or others. 

You are perceiving what you consider to be “nonduality” through a relative, rational filter. This creates distortion. A dead-giveaway of the attempt to maintain a relative, rational filter is that you continuously default to rape and murder as not being love. Of course, rape and murder are not love in a relative, rational context. 

You write: ”This is the danger I am talking about that occurs when nonduality is divorced from it's traditional and then when further confusion is added by attempting altering to change the meaning of the word love”.

You are creating that divorce. No one here is advocating for the divorce of what you call “nonduality” and a relative form of love. A transcendent awakening reveals both and how they are connected as one. If you haven’t had a sufficient awakening, you will not be able to see this and absolute and relative will get conflated. The divorce, confusion and conflation is your creation by trying to figure this out through a limited rational, relative lens. As well, there is no objective, universal meaning of love in relative, rational constructs. You can easily explore this yourself by examining grey areas of what qualifies as “love” and how meaning is relative. For example, my parents don’t consider homosexual couples as being “love”. They see it as unnatural, deviant behavior. Yet to the homosexual couple the meaning is love. As well, you obviously don’t consider rape as love, yet I’ve known rapists that clearly considered it love. . . Yet again, these are relative explorations to breakdown the illusory construct of an objective, universal love within relative constructs. There are much much bigger fish to fry. 

What is being pointed to here cannot be figured out rationally, because the rational filter itself is causing distortion. You would need to awaken beyond this limitation. In doing so, you will not have to reject any of your relative constructs of love, yet you will become aware that they exist within a higher transcendent love. Some body-minds may realize this in a “Big Bang” type of awakening. Yet from what I’ve observed, most body-minds need to continually expand their capacity to love in a relative sense. The further out the boundaries are pushed, the higher likelihood of a big awakening. For you, rape and murder are too far outside your current edge. Focusing on rape and murder is just re-enforcing your relative, rational construct. I would consider working at your edge. For example, consider someone/something that is right on the edge of being worthy of your love. Who/what is in that grey area in which they sorta deserve your love, but don’t quite qualify for your love. Work in that range and expand your capacity for relative love. Ime, this will provide grounding for higher awakenings. You could also take a fast track through psychedelics, yet it would be much harder to integrate the higher awakenings on the small ground you currently stand. 

If and when you have a full awakening, you will realize “It’s Love”. There is no other word for it. It will be the word that appears. 

Wow what a fantastic explanation of the dynamic playing out followed with great practical advice. 

[Nak Khid]

18 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

@Nak Khid In a relative context, I don’t disagree with you and I know how it’s upsetting to see people claim higher ground and refer to police brutality, rape and murder as love. 

 

Ans here's yet another such comment made just yesterday 
 

Quote

The point is to spread Goodness and Love to as many living beings as possible. That's what God is doing. It's the only thing God desires to do. God shares its love by imagining an infinite number of living beings and then killing them so that they merge back into God. This cycle is Eternal. This cycle is what God is. This cycle is Love made manifest.

So God imagines an infinite number of living beings being killed
and that that is love made manifest.

I don't regard ideas like this as spiritual.   
They are in another category altogether 
using spiritual terminology is the only thing spiritual about it.

 

[Inliytened1]

11 minutes ago, Nak Khid said:

 

Ans here's yet another such comment made just yesterday 
 

So God imagines an infinite number of living beings being killed
and that that is love made manifest.

I don't regard ideas like this as spiritual.   
They are in another category altogether 
using spiritual terminology is the only thing spiritual about it.

 

But you still think death is real.  Therein lies the issue.

The ego is the thing that has a problem with death or impermanence, not God.

[Carl-Richard]

9 minutes ago, Nak Khid said:

 

Ans here's yet another such comment made just yesterday 
 

So God imagines an infinite number of living beings being killed
and that that is love made manifest.

I don't regard ideas like this as spiritual.   
They are in another category altogether 
using spiritual terminology is the only thing spiritual about it.

 

That is because you're subscribing to what is so accurately called "feel-good spirituality". It's a stage green fairy tale. True spirituality is not a joke: you accept death, you accept all fears, you accept all suffering, because it is You.

[Nak Khid]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

That is because you're subscribing to what is so accurately called "feel-good spirituality". It's a stage green fairy tale. True spirituality is not a joke: you accept death, you accept all fears, you accept all suffering, because it is You.

No, what you just said about true spirituality does not translate to 

"God imagines an infinite number of living beings being killed
and that that is love made manifest."

In fact the situation is the opposite of what you are saying.
 I have been been the one saying that suffering exists and everything is not "love" as is continually claimed.

The problem is exactly the opposite of what you suggest , feel-good spirituality is pretending that suffering does not exist and
everything is "love" . 
That is denial, in fact apathy in disguise, a corruption of language which I hope does not manifest in reality 

 

 

 

[Inliytened1]

8 minutes ago, Nak Khid said:

In fact the situation is the opposite of what you are saying.
 I have been been the one saying that suffering exists and everything is not "love" as is continually claimed.

 

God experiences suffering via the ego.  Via form or limitation.  Form or limitation is selfish.

[Carl-Richard]

33 minutes ago, Nak Khid said:

I have been been the one saying that suffering exists

 

 

Who said suffering doesn't exist?

[roopepa]

@Nak Khid Dude, look. Forget about understanding Love. You won't get it by debating at the forum. You are not yet at the level of consciousness that makes it possible to understand why reality is Love. 

You still think that this is some philosophical idea that you can disprove by logical thinking. It is not. When you become conscious of Love, it will be as obvious as Oneness. There is nothing to debate about. It's just how things are.

Go on with your life and keep doing the spiritual work. One day you will get it. I promise. ❤

Edited June 6, 2020 by roopepa

[SamueLSD]

8 minutes ago, roopepa said:

When you become conscious of Love, it will be as obvious as Oneness 

So much more obvious!