What is Love?

[Spiritual Warrior]

What a profound scene from an anime show that attempts to answer the question, what is Love?

Taken from Vinland Saga 

 

 

Edited January 7 by Spiritual Warrior

[tuku747]

Love is. 

[Yimpa]

That was the best homily I’ve ever witnessed, hands down.

[Schizophonia]

Symbolic form of self-destruction.

 

[Ishanga]

Love its quite simple, an Emotion, a strong sense of pleasure, you feel it because of the Oxtocycin in your Brain, mostly triggered by subject/object attraction then something clicks in your brain, the hormone is released and you feel a great connection with other. Being Loving is another thing all together, its you expressing what You are feeling within Yourself, which is where all experience and feeling comes from, Love is not about the other, its just stimulated by the other for most. You want Love to feel Bliss, if Love made You feel pain and suffering then you wouldn't want it...

[Schizophonia]

Being vulnerable. 

 

[Ishanga]

Just now, Schizophonia said:

Being vulnerable. 

 

Being vulnerable brings fear, this is the whole problem with this sort of thinking and belief, that You have to leave Yourself open and vulnerable to allow someone else to come into your life, and deal with it, vulnerability allowing it too happen will naturally bring fear, fear of loss, fear of being vulnerable itself, this is all mental games and intellectual level of living which is thinking about Life, not living Life.  One must be Loving, for that too happen one has to already be engaged on a level of Reality and Awareness where they control and determine how they will experience Life within themselves, then they can go out and share it with others, this appears to be Love in expressed form. Otherwise You are just making an arrangement of sorts, you do this for me, I do that for You, the hormones release and sort of feeling of connection is there (for procreation to happen) then one must be vulnerable, accepting and such intellectual games, which usually leads to separation unless one has a higher level of Awarenss in play...

[LfcCharlie4]

@Ishanga  Thank you for this answer ChatGPT 

[gettoefl]

love is what i did before bed to prove that everyone i meet is me, the only receiving is giving, mission is to find someone who feels excluded and bring them to my table, doing to the least is to do to me, come take eat this is my body

soup kitchen is top draw, i recommend it

[Breakingthewall]

What we call love is simply reality without barriers. It's life, simply. What happens is that there are countless barriers that make life, or existence, perceived in a veiled way.

For example, if you are chased by 4 mad dogs, your perception will be very blurred, and the experience will have a, let's say, acidic taste. What veils reality and makes it opaque is fear, and fear is necessary for you to escape from rabid dogs and not stop to hug them while they tear the flesh off your face.

This can be extrapolated to everything, a plant growing is love, or life, or existence. Reality is a living creative flow that flows given the absence of limits. If you temporarily eliminate your fear, you will be that flow, and this is what we call love, since it is the same vibration that occurs between two people who feel one, without barriers.

[vibv]

Baby don't hurt me... (sorry, it had to be done)

[Yimpa]

[Breakingthewall]

27 minutes ago, Squeekytoy said:

Does that mean it's only called love from the perspective of a fear-based human, and not in any absolute sense? 

As I see it, there is only one thing as absolute, which we can call existence, because absolute means without opposite, without differentiation. In the moment that there is any differentiation it's not absolute anymore. What we are supposed to try with spiritual work is to open ourselves as much as possible to it. This cannot be named but many call it love, since the word love, in our human life, designates the highest reality, the purest feeling. Human love is always veiled, but it is openness to the absolute, to pure existence. It is the feeling that occurs in the absence of fear, and only occurs when the person is capable of a certain degree of openness. I think that almost all of us here have gone through times of minimal openness, which have made our lives miserable and pushed us towards spirituality.

What we seek is to open ourselves to the absolute, to our true nature. This nature could be called love because it is the same substance as for example the love towards your mother when you are a child, purity, joy, connection, creation, but I would say that it is much more. Calling it love falls short, it is everything, total existence, unthinkable. I get brief openings and spaced out over time, it is not easy, there are many obstacles and you have to be quite perceptive to be able to open up, but that is our work, of the people who have fallen into misery and have rebelled against it. Then nothing is enough, except everything.  

I would say that the goal in this life is to replace the psyche with openness. This opening is a window through which the absolute appears and flows. giving up the psyche is difficult, but really, it's just a burden

Edited January 9 by Breakingthewall

[thierry]

Love is the realization that there is absolutely no difference between Love and total absence of Love 

[thierry]

You can Love from a place of not love. You can :not love: from a place of Love but you can’t escape it, in fact you have never escaped it. That’s what you always have been, and always will be. That’s what You ARE.

[Tanz]

Baby dont hurt me, dont hurt me, no more.  

[gettoefl]

14 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

As I see it, there is only one thing as absolute, which we can call existence, because absolute means without opposite, without differentiation. In the moment that there is any differentiation it's not absolute anymore. What we are supposed to try with spiritual work is to open ourselves as much as possible to it. This cannot be named but many call it love, since the word love, in our human life, designates the highest reality, the purest feeling. Human love is always veiled, but it is openness to the absolute, to pure existence. It is the feeling that occurs in the absence of fear, and only occurs when the person is capable of a certain degree of openness. I think that almost all of us here have gone through times of minimal openness, which have made our lives miserable and pushed us towards spirituality.

What we seek is to open ourselves to the absolute, to our true nature. This nature could be called love because it is the same substance as for example the love towards your mother when you are a child, purity, joy, connection, creation, but I would say that it is much more. Calling it love falls short, it is everything, total existence, unthinkable. I get brief openings and spaced out over time, it is not easy, there are many obstacles and you have to be quite perceptive to be able to open up, but that is our work, of the people who have fallen into misery and have rebelled against it. Then nothing is enough, except everything.  

I would say that the goal in this life is to replace the psyche with openness. This opening is a window through which the absolute appears and flows. giving up the psyche is difficult, but really, it's just a burden

agree with all this and thanks for articulating ... my meagre insight is that every moment ego mind veils reality with the nonsense that this is better than that and my whole work is undoing that ... we instilled the love of fear which is the fear of love ... i proclaim that all around threatens my existence and i am on high alert ever in attack mode ... yet everything out there isn't in fact a megaphone calling for war but the muffled calling of love ... all an ingenious device for awakening if simple alertness would be maintained

Quote

You complain about fear, but you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful. I have already indicated that you cannot ask me to release you from fear. I know it does not exist, but you do not. If I intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with a basic law of cause and effect; the most fundamental law there is. I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking. It is much more helpful to remind you that you do not guard your thoughts carefully enough. You may feel that at this point it would take a miracle to enable you to do this, which indeed is perfectly true. ~ACIM

 

Edited January 10 by gettoefl