Universal love
I am wondering if we have justification to conclude that love is real in any universal sense, other than as we find it, as a bonding emotion in mammals, or more generally in organisms.
For example, is the complex and subtle love experienced by intelligent humans, in some way a real expression of something universal in nature, or of divinity? Or on the contrary is it an intellectual, romanticised, expression of our animal emotions. Emotions evolved simply to reinforce the processes of sexual reproduction and the survival of the species.
Any thoughts?
For example, is the complex and subtle love experienced by intelligent humans, in some way a real expression of something universal in nature, or of divinity? Or on the contrary is it an intellectual, romanticised, expression of our animal emotions. Emotions evolved simply to reinforce the processes of sexual reproduction and the survival of the species.
Any thoughts?
Comments (53)
I can't think of any good reason to suppose that love belongs to the world in any way at all, apart from its appearance in creatures like us, as part of our animal nature.
Of course there are experiences -- for instance experiences associated with meditation or the practice of compassion, or associated with the endorphins that flow after a good workout -- that one might be tempted to describe as experiences in which sentience and loving compassion seem to belong to the whole world. But I see no good reason to treat those experiences as evidence that the claims in such descriptions are true; no more than I see a reason to imagine that the sky is angry when it thunders, or that the earth is angry when it quakes.
Quoting Punshhh
I see no reason to speak as though we can reduce an account of love, or of affect and emotion in general, to the mechanisms of mutation and natural selection. It's one thing to say that arms and legs like ours have been produced by and are the outcome of a process of evolution, and another to say what it's like to have arms and legs like these, and another to say what arms and legs like these can be used for -- and another for each of us to put his arms and legs to use in the way he sees fit on each occasion.
Of course mating, pair-bonding, child-rearing, and kinship bonds should be part of our story of love among animals like us. To do that story justice, I suppose we'd have to account for other emotional tendencies associated with love, such as joy and bliss, peace and contentment, reciprocal belonging and intimacy, mutual care, jealousy and possessiveness, envy and coveting, grief and loss, pride and rage.... We'd have to consider this complex of psychosocial forces at play not only among sexual partners and life partners, not only in families and kinship groups, not only among friends, but also as extending in us somehow to subcultures and cultures and nations, and to similarly generic social groupings, or even more generically, to humanity as a whole, or to all sentient beings, or to the whole of existence.
Thus we'd come full circle, back to the one who meditates or has a good run, and looks around, and feels the whole world full of love.
That is what a lot of people will say. This is why I have come to realise the negative consequences of evolutionism on public discourse, even though it is a factual account of the matter. Unless [some trait] can be rationalised in line with the 'tangled bank' metaphor from the Origin of Species, then it probably isn't real. That's Daniel Dennett's 'universal acid' of Darwin's dangerous idea.
Quoting Punshhh
Love comes in many flavours and varieties. There is connubial love, erotic love, Platonic love, love of country, love of duty, and so on. As regards encounters with divine love, something that has to be considered is the role played by ecstasy and rapture. Those states connote literally going out of, or beyond, oneself. I think they are foundational in all the mystical traditions. An account of such a rapture by one of the correspondents of R M Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness:
Many comparable accounts are found in the literature of comparative religion. They are generally forgotten or left behind when their accounts are congealed into dogmas.
Qualities are universal, including qualities we may love. But love is an experience, not a quality, an experience doesn't express anything, rather it makes us express it.
Some of our expressions of love might have universal qualities, as described in love songs, poems, plays and so on. But divine? Why would you muddle the philosophical question with religion?
Have I heard you cite Bucke before? What a reference! I've just ordered a copy.
We are real, and we experience love, and we are part of nature and some think part of divinity too. So, sure. Love is real in a universal sense. We didn't invent love, it was given to us through evolution's good offices. It was likely given to other species as well, in a form appropriate to each.
It certainly won't hurt anybody to suppose that the love we experience and express is an expression of both the earthly and the divine. What might hurt some, maybe many, is to suppose that love is nothing but chemicals sloshing around in a system concocted over the eons to assure reproduction--period.
"Love, love, love, love.
The Gospel in one word is love."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epynV_tray0
Gee I bet you're a thrill to be around ;-)
But what about a universal love, is this similarly a projection?
I wish to identify something in the experience of love which indicates the later(transcendent), rather than the former(evolutionism).
Regarding spiritual experience, I have experienced something akin to what Bucke testifies to and have contemplated the role of love in spirituality. I am beginning to realise the the presence of wisdom in "love wisdom"(Alice Bailey), which I failed to grasp initially. I perceive this in the inevitable wisdom of the benevolence to be found in love. An expression of the gift of creativity and fundamental in the phenomena of extended existence.
So are you suggesting that all the romanticism about love in the minds of humanity, is a happy accident of physical evolution?
:D
I think if you ask around, this transcendental love you seek is to be found in true or selfless love. I'm quite sure that many people have found it - love of a person, an idea, a god, etc. - and defined their very lives with it.
However, true/selfless love is a paradox because we can never extract the self i.e. there's always something to gain through such acts of goodness. The most we can say about all forms of love, including the true/selfless variety, is that there's a fair exchange of benefits between the lover and the object of love. I don't know how such an exchange can make sense if one loves an idea, inanimate objects, etc. but this doesn't vitiate the import of my view that there can be no true/selfless love.
From this angle it seems like a hopeless case - there can be no true/selfless love. Everything, from inanimate rocks to humans, is about give-take economics.
However, if I were asked for some form of solution to the love paradox I would say that self-benefit is unavoidable. The catch is in selfless/true love one sees self-benefit in the benefit of others. There is a paradoxical balance between egoism and altruism. This is unique and significant enough to give comprehensible meaning to true/selfless love.
Reductionism has become, for better or worse, a human habit and going by how science seems to be tyrannizing all spheres of human activity, we seem to be on the right track.
However, reducing everything to the physical is to overlook the limitations of science. Science can only answer what and how questions and usually can't handle why questions.
I don't have any information about love and evolution but if I were to offer a guess I think love does make sense vis-a-vis evolution because it results in preservation and perpetuation of life.
Why does it necessarily need to be about erotic love? And, as for the survival of the species, why just humans? What about animals? The environment? Earth itself? If we assume by universal we are speaking about all things or Leibniz's teleological dimension of the interconnectedness of all things, what if universal love is a capacity to give love, of caring for all?
Yes universal love might be in some way "Leibniz's teleological dimension of the interconnectedness of all things", etc, or transcendent.
Yes capacity for love, of caring for all, is interesting. I still don't see how this might necessarily be transcendent.
What about ones love for existence, the world, is this perhaps misplaced emotion(beyond where it is of benefit in survival of the self, or social group)?
This is a withered and partial account of 'emotions' in general. Who are we at this juncture in time to judge so definitively? How is any feature of our lives reasonably describable as 'simply' some speculative product of evolution? Emotions make us who we are. Grief, for instance, although generally and understandably characterised as negative, celebrates the lost, brings the dead back to life even as it faces the fact that they are dead, drives us to honour our fellows yet to know that it's too late, too late.
Philosophers get in a mess when they write about love, in my opinion. Best left to lyricists, poets and those who believe in the spiritual or divine.
Read the full Song of Solomon here ! (I know, King James' version, I'm a sucker for its rhythm)
You are right -- "self-less love" doesn't make sense. It's a hopeless case. Let's bury the idea of "self-less love" once and for all.
Where did this idea of "true love or the highest love means selfless love, self-denying love" come from? The lover and the object of love, be that a dog, a man, or a god has nothing to do with the subject of love denying himself, or being 'self-less'. The subject-self can not be subject-less or self-less.
Selflessness does not seem to be a feature of the kinds of love which are often cited as 'canonical' -- agape, eros, philia, and storge. Does the idea of self-negation come from "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."John, 15:13? As you noted, there is a give-take exchange in love. Christ's sacrifice, or anyone's sacrifice, is on behalf of, and intended as a enhancement of, or salvation of the object of love.
Christ's sacrifice was transfiguring, not self-denying or self-erasing. When someone has the opportunity to lay down his life for his friends (fortunately for us, the opportunities don't come along too often) the sacrificer is transfigured. Saints aren't fading, shrinking self-erasing personalities. The reason they are remembered is that they were such very, very strong, rich selves / personalities.
Did this idea of self-less, self-denying love arise from reading Christian (or other religions') literature which presented monastic self-suppression as the ideal? I don't know.
In love, the subject is self-affirming, self-exchanging, self-sharing, and self-giving, always with the object. (Nothing is perfect in human affairs, so our transactions are often pretty flawed.)
Don't we experience love?
To say that we do, is not to "reduce" love to something like a "mere appearance" with no other place in the world apart from the "experience" of love. To all appearances, all the experience, all the thought, perception, emotion, action of a human person is intimately correlated with physiological processes in the animal organism with which that person is naturally disposed to identify itself.
Accordingly, it seems to me that ordinarily when I say, truly and correctly, "I love" or "I am loved", "She loves" or "She is loved", I am reporting facts that I observe. Just as when I say truly and correctly, "I'm hungry" and "I'm tired", "She's hungry" and "She's tired", I am reporting facts that I observe, facts about these animals. One way to noninferentially acquire knowledge of such facts is by way of third-person observational judgments based on ordinary sense-perception, as when I can tell, by watching her, that she's hungry. Another way to noninferentially acquire knowledge of such facts is by way of first-person observational judgments based on ordinary introspection, as when I can tell, by my introspective awareness of my own feeling of hunger, that I am hungry.
Such observational judgments, whether made on the basis of perception or on the basis of introspection, are fallible; and the relevant conceptualizations, for instance of hunger, fatigue, or love, may be more or less refined, and more or less confused.
Quoting Punshhh
Along lines I've just suggested, I'm inclined to think of any experience of love as involving facts "external to experience" that also happen to appear "within experience".
Sometimes, infatuated with another, one may fall into confusion and mistakenly judge that his beloved loves him too, in the same way he loves her, with the same intensity, and with the same implications for action. There are many variations on this sort of error, many ways to go wrong; I suppose we could say some of them involve a sort of unwarranted "projection" of the love one feels himself into a misconception of reciprocal love in his beloved, perhaps construable as a sort of delusional misfiring of empathy.
It seems reasonable to expect that a similar illusion obtains, when the meditator or runner experiences a powerful, blissful feeling he associates with a conception of reciprocal love, of loving and being loved, of a world radiant with love, in association with his whole present consciousness, with everything in his current field of perceptual and introspective awareness, and with his intellectual conception of Totality.
Of course there's something external to the experience in such cases of confusion, namely, the physiology of love in the one who is thus blissfully confused.
We can have the same experience, without consenting to the judgment here supposed to be confused. If the experience can be the same, with or without the accompanying judgment, then on what grounds would we affirm or deny the judgment?
Quoting Punshhh
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "universal love" in this conversation.
I have a conception of myself and of others like me, as loving all human beings, as loving all sentient beings, as loving the whole of existence. I'd say this is a sort of "universal love" that really does exist in creatures like us, in hearts and minds like ours, in animal bodies like ours. I might say this is one sort of conception of universal love, the love of one for all.
It may be tempting to try, but I'm not sure how I might reasonably support an assertion like "Each human being in fact loves all humans, all sentients, all existence, no matter how confused he happens to be about this fact", or "Each sentient animal in fact loves all sentients and all existence, no matter how confused it happens to be about this fact", or "Each molecule or superstring loves every other molecule or superstring", or…. It seems to me that once we begin to speak this way, we lose touch with the objective basis against which we may test and define our conceptions and judgments about love; we lose touch with the objective basis according to which we may coordinate our discourse and adjudicate disagreements on the subject; we pass over into poetic sentiment, wishful thinking, and arbitrary fantasy.
Like they say, anything's possible. I can imagine that each quark loves every quark, and that each quark loves every animal; and I can imagine that no quark loves at all. On what grounds shall I take any such judgement or conception seriously, and integrate it into what I count as my own reasonable expectations about the world according to the balance of appearances?
Two examples come to mind.
In the Christian tradition, the term is 'agap?'. Agap? embraces a universal, unconditional love that transcends, that serves regardless of circumstances. It is considered to be the love originating from God or Christ for humankind. Cf. Matt 3:17, Mark 10:21; the covenant love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God; the term necessarily extends to the love of one's fellow man.
Compare with the Buddhist bodhicitta - (Sanskrit: ?????????), "enlightenment-mind", is the mind that strives toward awakening, empathy, and compassion for the benefit of all sentient beings. The mind of great compassion and bodhicitta motivates one to attain enlightenment (bodhi) for the benefit of all beings. A person who has a spontaneous realization or motivation of bodhicitta is called a bodhisattva.
Buddhism also has terms for other kinds of compassion, namely, mudita - the joy that comes from others' success (kind of the opposite of schadenfreude); karu??; and maitr? which means 'benevolence, loving-kindness, friendliness, amity, good will, and active interest in others'.
(adapted from Wikipedia).
My belief is that such states have a real source, although they're obviously depicted in very different ways in the two traditions mentioned. But they denote a transpersonal type of empathy and the awareness of the suffering of others culminating in a sense of kinship or solicitousness towards 'all mankind' (//edit// in Buddhism, 'all sentient beings').
Do you mean things like love of animals, trees, music, writing, etc.? If yes, then it would seem that human love is in excess of that required for mere survival. However, I think this is untrue because one essential feature of love is, well, expansion of the ego - the object of love is absorbed by the subject's i. Thus united, the subject and object of love, become one and what follows is obvious - the object's loss/gain is equivalent to the subject's loss/gain.
The excess of love you see is actually not excess. What you see as excess is nothing more than an swelling of the selfish ego born from the realization that the self stands to benefit from this expansion - transiting from the ''i'' to the ''we''.
Yes I agree with your observation of a "withered and partial account" and the extent to which who we are is shaped by our experience and the presence of love in our lives. What I am trying to identify is a distinct universal, or transcendent, love in all of this. As opposed to evolved feelings and behaviour.
I bring this up because about 2 weeks ago, while travelling in New Zealand, I had an experience of something which I interpreted as a realisation of universal love and I seek to account for it philosophically.
Regarding universal love, the way I am treating it in this conversation is in the sense of the principle, the reality and the experience of love and realities of which love might be a derivative, having some real and fundamental presence in the processes of existence itself, or the existence we find ourselves in. For example our existence might be hosted by a demiurge through a process of creative love and life for that demiurge might be all within the realm of mind where intellectual compassion and love is as concrete as physical matter is for us.
By analogy a person in the world is like a plant developing to the point where it develops a bud. When the bud flowers, the flower, awakens, into a rarefied transcendent realm(also inhabited by butterflies, who have undergone metamorphosis).This is perhaps alluded to in the symbolism of the thousand petalled lotus of the crown chakra in Hinduism and Bhuddism.
This is all very well, but can we identify something obviously transcendent, universal in any of this? Something which isn't accounted for in the materialist evolutionary account.
For me this is evident in a sentiment, or experience of, a universal love which transcends the planet. Specifically the planet, because in evolutionary terms the processes are blind to any reality beyond this planet. I describe this as the fixed cross of the heavens(Alice Bailey), which I have been contemplating for some time.
I do know the answer to this question, but I am suggesting it is not required, perhaps it is a byproduct.
The problem is, that is just what the materialist account obscures. It is found in traditional wisdom schools and other sources such as those you mention. It is real, but a 'first-person science' - the sacred science, it has been called - is required to realise it. The point is, there are ways to tap into that resource, like digging for gold, or diving for pearls. That's what spiritual paths are about.
A fair consideration. Religious love and spiritual love seem not to fit into the all-is-for-survival bag. However, these so-called sublime loves are born of fear - fear of injury and fear of death. There is also the hope of an afterlife. We're back to square one - all is about survival.
This is such a big problem, though. You mention 'love' and suddenly he is screaming and running away naked into the wilderness while you just stand there scratching your head thinking, wha? There is so much that can be discussed on the subject and I often have to consistently reiterate that I view love to be moral consciousness to avoid the continuous penetration of historical and emotional influences that challenge any rational discussion on the subject.
Quoting mcdoodle
Song of Solomon is not about divine love, not how it is often interpreted. It is highly erotic but nevertheless shows how her sexual attraction toward him did not defeat her into succumbing to his sexual advances and his games where he hid 'behind the trellis' from her; though she loved him, she wanted more. She is a virgin or 'a garden enclosed' who went through hardships by her siblings or 'mothers children' having had to work in the fields and unaware of her beauty, the intense sexuality between them made her realise that she was a 'wall and her breasts like towers' that is, self-love. She found peace in the end by saying that she hopes he is happy with his other women. It is hard to tell if his love is 'awakened' when he is ready coming out to her and where she crowns him king on his espousal that gladdens his heart (as in, they get married).
It is a story between two lovers with the same affection, desire, passion who fail to tell each other how they really feel. In the end, he still wants her but never says anything and she is still waiting for him to say something.
KJV is the best.
Perhaps the very existence of such beings, realising this capacity and questioning is evidence of something other than the gross physical reality we find around us.
The bonding between two people that transcends to something like 'true love' rather than just mating or what is social or customary, is the mutual connection between two people who have both reached that same state of transcendence or consciousness. This is because of the authenticity of their perceptions. Being genuinely self-aware, they admire their partner who shares the same awareness and for the way that they are as a person, virtuous and principled.
So by erotic, I meant the sexual pairing (Fromm, The Art of Loving) but the authenticity of this bonding process requires much more, as said by him: "If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism." He shows perfectly well here that when someone doesn't care about all things save for specific objects that he needs, his love is false. That is why we as individuals need to first dissect and understand the intricacy of our own mind in order to reach a frame of mind capable (since it is our mind that is the apparatus of reason) of thinking correctly.
My opinion of transcendence is a type of Kantian consciousness, that whilst we are formed in a deterministic environment, we transcend through free will to become self-aware and a rational, autonomous agent. Moral consciousness - love - becoming aware of our moral obligations and our rational and decisive realisation that a life of virtue aimed at identifying the Platonic form of Good [universal love] as the best way to live is a natural a priori extension of this.
Hence the reference to be 'born again' through love, that is, to transcend what we think we understand of love and apply ourselves consciously and authentically by using the mind as an apparatus to draw rational inferences vis-a-vis the awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.
Quoting Punshhh
Weird shit happened to me in New Zealand too :D
Also I do think that there are many people who are philosophically minded, but who are not academically trained who do look into such ideas, or don't rule them out. In fact they probably outnumber academic philosophers. Perhaps an underswell of innate spirituality within humanity, including an innate wisdom and knowing, a knowing which may be more of a knowing than those academics appear to have.
Yes, indeed. The materialistic view could be at best, incomplete and at worst, utterly false. However, the same may be said of non-materialistic philosophy.
That doesn't matter because current trends in almost everything under the sun seem to express a materialistic philosophy - a dangerous?? situation. Religion, the quintessential non-materialstic philosophy is diluted to such an extent that it would be unrecognizable to its very first followers.
I think it becomes imperative at this point - a time dominated by science (uber materialism) - to remind ourselves that even though the doors of the spiritual are closing fast and irreversibly, we should take note of the window of possibility which admits of an unexplored spiritual world.
Agreed? Yes? No?
I suppose what I am alluding to is a realisation of a Platonic form of good, as you put it. Although in a more physical way (actually on the plane of the soul*) than simply the mental, or intellectual realisation.
The form that my weird shit took was a crisis of the heart brought about by a brief and fleeting recollection of a brief meeting with someone in India 23 years ago and the crushing realisation that this person was a soul mate, a candidate for true love, as you describe. And the pain of the acceptance that I failed to go with this person, but rather turn away for petty egotistical reasons and subsequently regret it ever since.
*i will reference the egoic plane(Alice Bailey) to be more precise.
Quoting Punshhh
With:
Quoting Punshhh
Alice Bailey? Madame Blavatsky? Egoic plane?
Theosophy - which endorses evil - is not only a New Age fashionable tool used by the ignorant to justify irrational behaviour, but I would hardly consider it anywhere near philosophical.
Ever wondered why Hitler used the swastika?
Quoting Punshhh
It took you 23 years to realise you were in love with someone?
That is just horrifying. I am sorry and not for you, probably the feelings that I have toward you at this moment are somewhat resentful. Clearly you were a fool and missed out on an experience that could have filled your life - and possibly hers - with something unique, even if it may or may not have worked out, only honesty to yourself would have allowed you to ever know.
That is the only problem here, authenticity. Your dishonesty to yourself. No new age planes that are used to divert your attention away from the truth by the management and even the desensitization of your inner feelings are ever going to change what you did. The problem is, you probably maintained this dishonesty because of the deep guilt you felt, almost repressing it that it may have even hurt you in different ways, until that brief moment in New Zealand where you faced it.
What a shame. It always catches up on you, though, one way or another.
Regarding my "weird shit", you seem to have gone off on some tangent and projected lots of your own ideas onto it. There doesn't seem to be much point in trying to explain it further, other than to point out that your interpretation of the situation is wildly off the mark. That I am not in love with the person mentioned, and there isn't anything tragic going on. Have you not in your youth been a "fool", or regretted the one that got away? Come on be honest now?
Do you agree, in particular, with the distinction I made between one respect in which love is "in experience", and another respect in which love is "outside experience" in the bodies of the animals who love?
Quoting Punshhh
My view is that it has a "real existence", in the bodies of those sentient animals and in the experience of those sentient animals.
Quoting Punshhh
I suppose on my view, love is as concrete as physical matter. Or, a particular instance of love is as concrete as a particular instance of physical matter. But I see no reason to suppose that love is "fundamental", in the sense that it is a basic feature of anything said to exist. Tables and chairs, sunbeams and raindrops.
A story like the one you've told about a demiurge: We can imagine it so, and we can imagine it not so. We can imagine countless alternatives like this one, each as consistent with the balance of appearances as any of the others; each as unsupported by the balance of appearances as any of the others. On what grounds would we choose among all those possibilities?
This particular story emphasizes a connection between love and sentience. That's an interesting dimension of our discussion: Can we conceive of love without sentience?
Are the love and sentience of the demiurge, or of the demiurge's "realm of mind", similar to the love and sentience of our animal experience, or how are they different? How do we know the answer to such questions? On what grounds would we support an answer?
We call this attachment ‘Love’ in usual language. This is based on expectation of future gratification. When the expected gratifications do not come forth we feel betrayed, disappointed. This leads to hate.
On the other side, when we help a stranger, an animal, or give to a homeless on the street, we know that no gain will ever come from this action of ours. This is mercy, compassion. This is universal love. We all have to define the value of selflessness for us, by trying it a few times, and make a judgment, as to what adds to happiness, selfishness or selflessness. World cannot teach this to us, we all have to learn this ourselves.
Alice Bailey is a terrible reference. There are a plethora of philosophical arguments on the subject of soul, perhaps give McTaggart a shot or maybe even Schopenhauer if the subject of transcendence is appealing (though I disagree with both). The former is perhaps more in line with what you seek vis-a-vis 'universality of souls' and if this bond is genuine, perhaps love is an experience where time does not exist and that she too is waiting for you.
Why do you somehow assume that the intellect has no relation to this ambiguous and intuitive domain within - what is termed as 'soul'? Intellectual invalidity exemplifies why 23 years later you realised that you were in love. They are not mutually exclusive.
As for 'levels of being' - again, gobbledegook if you are looking at it from a New Age perspective. There are no spiritual beings floating about the place on higher planes, no amount of listening to waves and whale sounds while humming and meditating is going to make you a better person. You can become a better person by reading the right books, having the right friends and people in your life, loving and caring for others in need, fighting injustice, having fun and giving love.
Quoting Punshhh
The only projection is my dedication to authenticity and there are multiple ways people destroy love due to their inauthenticity - either for their ego or because they are cowards, or for social standards and the image they create, both completely narcissistic. I am not sure if you have ever felt the joy of having a genuine, close friend who cares about you and vice versa, but friendship is the beginning of learning how to give love and to be friends with a woman who you also share intimacy with, who you admire, and all the benefits of sharing a life with someone who actually understands and can see deep within you or your 'soul' and vice versa, what does that make you to turn away from that?
I don't know about tangent; calling you a fool and feeling disappointed that it took you 23 years to realise you were in love is not projection; it is logic.
But I can see why it took you so long. Your excuses are really good. It seems you are more in love with yourself.
As for me, no, I regret nothing because I seek genuine friendship. I never give up on the prospect of love but I do demand authenticity and being mistreated with impropriety by being seen as a mere sexual object is a dishonour I have never allowed any man to make of me. Flattery, conceit, poetry, superficial sagacity and appearances do not work with me, I will and do everything in my power to rid such people from my life and I regret none of the actions that I have done to ensure my virtue remains in tact. But even so, my love for them (care) never ceases.
“Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.”
What is there to regret if it was not love? The foolishness of youth is loss younger self couldn't anticipate, a path someone turns away from because it's too hard, too much work, interfered with their other desires it much or wasn't popular at the time, even though there was something more worthwhile their in the long run.
In these 23 years, how can you say you have lost anything if you did not love her? Are you one to have relationships and a soul mate without love?
Perhaps you are being honest about not loving her (whether then or now), but it would make you profoundly dishonest value. I would mean your regret was a status play, one where you are in love with the idea a relationship with this person or having a soul mate, so you are regretting you didn't take your chance to meet this abstracted standard of perfection.
"Universal love" often works like this. In most instances, it a play for status-- if only I find universal love, then I will be perfect, will be the best, will break out of the ignominy of my worldly existence.
In this sense, universal love is a lie. Love is given by people to other people. It's defined by it is anything but universal, as it is care and respect for a specific person. Those who love everyone do not love universally, and it's what makes them wonderful-- no matter who you are, they specifically have your back, help when you are in trouble, etc. To be loved universally is an oxymoron.
We've been tricked by our own abstraction. Universal love, in sense, takes the significance of being loved by someone and pretends it can be given by no-one, as if love was an infinite with didn't requires anyone else or anything of the world. It's myth which destroys our ability to describe those we love and those who love us.
Our understanding of love becomes a solipsistic pretence, where we think love is only about our own beliefs and feelings, about finding the universal, accessing the transcendent, attaining Nirv??a, getting the hottest wife, possessing the perfection of having a soul mate, etc., rather than any person we care about. The selfish desire to have a perfect idea or belief overpowers concern for the people and world around us.
Really well said, however I think incorrectly interpreted, though an easy oversight. Humanity stands above nature as we are capable of manipulating it and communication between people in a social atmosphere is a necessary requisite for our learning and development. The transcendence from this determinist environ is consciousness - by free-will - and upon doing so we become aware that our individuality is established by the determined components or properties that make our lives; our mind is merely an object that becomes the tool to enable consciousness in order to become aware of our own personhood. In doing so, we become aware of the greater ‘whole’ - that 'I' is no longer since we are finite but that 'we' are eternal as we continue to exist. This transcendence or consciousness of both the 'I' and 'we' encourages the desire to protect the determined plurality or 'nature' by seeking to prevent or stop evil - injustice, environmental depletion etc - anything that may jeapordize this initial state and thus moral consciousness becomes this very transcendence. Moral consciousness is love. Moral consciousness itself contains no contingent parts [the categorical imperative] and our death becomes meaningless or we - in the Heideggerean sense - overcome the fear of death. This is authenticity, our authentic state of mind and awareness.
When you love someone who is also aware or morally conscious, who works hard for good things, for justice, for the environment to ensure humanity - as it stands above nature - does not mindlessly destroy itself, you admire them for their principles, the fruits of their achievements, who they are as a person. It is no longer about what they look like, how old they are, how much money they have, how sexually appealing they are, what other people would think or anything 'worldly' since you have transcended society and all its teachings. It would be as I say: “I love through you the world and back into myself” rather than only loving an object because it has some sort of benefit to you alone. It is where two people share a bond that is both friendship, sexual, filial, affectionate all the types of love that rolls into something enduring where together they make one other better as you make the community or the environment better.
Just as much as being with 'any person we care about' - a person possessing the hottest wife would care about a hot woman because he cares about the image he would represent and that others would pat him on the back for, which is what he really cares about and not actually the hot woman that he painfully and deceitfully tolerates because he cares about possessing the hottest wife - clearly shows it is not full-proof of the danger of solipsistic pretence; what makes the clear difference is authenticity. If you have transcended society and no longer require institutions or religions or societal norms and expectations because you have become self-aware and thus transcended all that, the clarity of your motivations [applying love through moral consciousness] enables you to genuinely perceive and feel without the rubbish of all that.
Only through this universal love - that is to love all things - are we able to access the capacity to love what is authentically true in someone else.
I don't see how the western philosophical tradition is addressing universal love other than in arriving at some logical positions from the starting point of an emergent(by evolution) intellect blind to the reality it finds itself in. As such western philosophy can't address any reality there may be in existence, because it is a-priori in ignorance.
It is blind to any spiritual reality other than what it has inherited (primarily) from Christianity. You can't address spirituality and therefore any kind of universal love that there might be without deriving from a spiritual, or religious source. So what is your source?
You are talking as though you have some insight on love, what is your source material?
Again your comments regarding my experience are a monologue exposing aspects of your own personality. I am not surprised to read that your are in fact perfect and I am a fool. Feel free to monologue some more.
Occultism has plagiarized from Hinduism to try and legitimize its position, so it is grossly incorrect to assume it derives from the eastern philosophical tradition. Esoteric interpretations of satan by Blavatsky in the Secret Doctrine ameliorates your limited awareness of the subject.
Quoting Punshhh
You dont understand because you are not willing to research and read on the subject. You have made your choice and this - in line with your willfully stubborn and immoveable ego - would make it impossible to discuss the subject with you. As I said, you love yourself too much. I gave you philosophers to read. So, go read and stop presenting rubbish.
Also what does western philosophy say about love again ( Remember you spoke with authority to begin with)?
Apart from a handful of logical extrapolations from a place of ignorance, western philosophy can only comment on observations about human or worldly love. Areas well covered already by biology and anthropology.
What about universal love, the subject of the Op?
I agree that all animals love and that it is known and felt in experience, perhaps in humans, the kind of love is more self aware than in animals. Also that love can be in respect of external facts, things.
I understand what you are saying about instances of love as facts, but this is not something which I view as important. For me love is a personal experience of sentiment, something which through repetition becomes an established predisposition, or bond within the person.
Yes, but I am asking if there is a greater love of which we and our experiences of love are pale reflections? This was spurred by a personal experience I had in which I sensed/intuited such a thing.
But I do have reason to suppose this, however my reasons fall within the realms of theology.
Namely that our existence is hosted by beings for whom love is the meat and potatoes of life and creation.
Yes, I agree we have no grounds from which to establish such knowledge of reality. (Well there is revelation etc, but putting that to one side for now). For me establishing the facts of such knowledge is not important, or relevant to me. However I do contemplate intuited forms of which such knowledge may take as an intellectual exercise.
Let me illustrate by analogy, many people say why do depictions of aliens resemble so closely the anatomy of humans. I don't because I see how this might be the case through the processes of evolution and that any alien which travels here from elsewhere in the universe would likely exhibit certain anatomical forms, forms mirroring the forms in human anatomy which enables them to develop the technologies which might one day enable them to travel to other planets. Namely, they would most likely have limbs, so as to be able to move in their environment, hands, or means of grasping and manipulating material. Good eyes, most likely bi-focal, for seeing and intricately manipulating the materials. Mouths for accessing sufficient energy and minerals to sustain a large body. An intelligent brain etc, etc. Ther are many examples of animals on our planet who are highly developed, but who will not develop such technologies because their anatomy is inadequate, dolphins for example.
Well by analogy divine beings hosting us, or of which we are a part are likely to have certain forms of anatomy.
I agree, I consider that there are other forms of love without sentience, but the kind of love we can conceive of is through experience reliant on sentience. This is in line with an idea I have about divinity being universally sentient.
I would intuit it by analogy, I observe that the love in an animal is similar to that I experience personally, but less selfaware, integrated, sentient. So presume that the love in a demiurge is more selfaware, integrated and sentient than my own.
For me there is a reality by which I intuit knowledge in, from and through interaction with my environment. This knowledge is refined and sculpted through a creative process guided by intuition, rather like an artist. Whilst on the spiritual path this is my daily bread and along with some other practices enables me to walk forward.
Anyway, I mentioned this example of an experience to illustrate an experience of an emotional breaking or opening of the heart. Which seemed to me to be deeper than what I would expect in the life of a being in my position. Or in my humility I would never have expected, or imagined that such a thing would happen to to me, a person who lives a peaceful emotionally stable and humble life. The recollection of events 23 years ago was I presume the event in my past which my consciousness found appropriate for the experience to become anchored in my lived experience and was not important in the experience, but rather a way my mind found to understood what was happening.
It is this which started me thinking about a universal, or deeper love than what we normally experience in the world.