What is Love?

[Siemens]

Hi,

I’m thinking about spiritual themes since decades. One of the questions I’ve been thinking about is: What is love?

I come to the following conclusions:
(1) Love is smaller than Happiness. Because the purpose of all life is the pursuit of happiness and love is just one type of happiness beside many other forms. So Love is a subset of happiness.
(2) How should we then define love? Apparently, love is just a state of consciousness. A state defined by two features: First it feels good. Love is primarily a feeling that is pleasurable. Although it would seem that the other person we love generates this feeling in us, the “love-feeling” is created to 99% within the individual itself. The second constituting element of love is that the individual who is experiencing love has the wish to care about the loved individual or entity.

Love = a good feeling + the wish to care about someone or something else.

In the case of personal love “someone” could be our husband, wife, kid, parent, sibling, friend, neighbour ....
In the case of universal love the “something” could be the planet, humankind, or universe.

[Heatherkey]

Surely the purpose of all life is procreation and preservation of the species. Reading your definition of love, the care that you mention would serve that purpose better than a pursuit of happiness could.
I am interested in how you would define happiness.

[Siemens]

Originally Posted by Heatherkey

I am interested in how you would define happiness.

Happiness is the condition a conscious being would chose self-motivated.

Originally Posted by Heatherkey

Surely the purpose of all life is procreation and preservation of the species. Reading your definition of love, the care that you mention would serve that purpose better than a pursuit of happiness could.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. Procreation can’t be a purpose if the ultimate purpose weren’t happiness. Without happiness what should procreation be good for?

[Siemens]

Originally Posted by inavalan

Neither love, nor happiness are the purposes of life (procreation either). Both of them are emotions, and they exist only accompanied by their dual negative emotions, including the worst (counterproductive) one: fear.

I didn’t say that happiness is the purpose but “pursuit of happiness” is the purpose of all material life.

Originally Posted by inavalan

The widely recommended "unconditional love" is, supposedly, a non-dual state of awareness, that should preclude the genesis of dual emotions, and ultimately the fear.

If you claim that the pursuit of unconditional love is the purpose of material life, I would say: unconditional love is a form of happiness. I define happiness as the condition a conscious being wants to experience most or that feels best.

[Jyotir]

Hi Siemens,

Love is the dynamic physical plane interplay of an essential and inalienable existential consciousness of Delight of One Being, experienced in many forms and levels as it descends, by the multiplicity of interdependent beings evolving in the physical.

The reason it takes on so many forms and definitions is because it is received and utilized according to the receptivity and instrumental consciousness of the individual being which is quite variable.

Even one animal devouring another is an expression of it, but of course there are higher, deeper, and wider manifestations available to human beings.

Yet even as a microcosm, an amalgam of various consciousness - there is ever shifting and variable expression of love within the experience of one human life because of the variability and focus of our consciousness; it's not static or monolithic.

~ J

[Heatherkey]

Originally Posted by Siemens

Happiness is the condition a conscious being would chose self-motivated.



Sorry, but this is nonsense. Procreation can’t be a purpose if the ultimate purpose weren’t happiness. Without happiness what should procreation be good for?

I dont understand what you are trying to say in your first sentence.

The way others view the world can often seem to be nonsense until you have viewed it that way yourself. I hold a different view to you, procreation is good for continuing the ever changing experience of life.

[Siemens]

Originally Posted by Heatherkey

The way others view the world can often seem to be nonsense until you have viewed it that way yourself.

But sometimes the views of others can by refuted by logic and therefore are nonsense from an objective perspective.
The logic is: Purpose can only exist if it refers to happiness. Everything that has purpose has to do with a direct or indirect increase of happiness/wellbeing/quality of life of conscious creatures.

Originally Posted by Heatherkey

I dont understand what you are trying to say in your first sentence.

What I wanted to say was:
Procreation can’t be the purpose of life, if the purpose of life were not happiness or the aspiration for happiness.

Originally Posted by Heatherkey

I hold a different view to you, procreation is good for continuing the ever changing experience of life.

What sense should it make to continue “the ever changing experience of life? What's the good of that?

[Heatherkey]

Originally Posted by Siemens

But sometimes the views of others can by refuted by logic and therefore are nonsense from an objective perspective.
The logic is: Purpose can only exist if it refers to happiness. Everything that has purpose has to do with a direct or indirect increase of happiness/wellbeing/quality of life of conscious creatures.




What I wanted to say was:
Procreation can’t be the purpose of life, if the purpose of life were not happiness or the aspiration for happiness.



What sense should it make to continue “the ever changing experience of life? What's the good of that?

The additions youve needed to make to the word happiness here are necessary because happiness has no definitive or logical meaning that can be relied upon because its a concept created by perception.

In answer to both of the other parts of your post, I hope you dont mind if I offer a rhetorical question.... how would you know what experiences lead to happiness if you hadnt experienced every angle of every experience?

[Unseeking Seeker]

***

If love be momentarily dormant
Because ferality has overtaken it
For the moment, we may yet pause
And choose that which expands
Our consciousness
Little things, starting with self gratification
Why not? Then we observe their transience
Their impermanence
Reversing polarity, let us now give instead of taking
An agendaless smile, a helping hand
A small service without need of recognition
The happiness that manifests lasts longer
Makes the heart warmer
Build on this
Then when we self realise that we must go within
We do, wholeheartedly
But if if now is not the time
If we would still indulge awhile
Let us do so
In mindful movements slow

***

[inavalan]

Neither love, nor happiness are the purposes of life (procreation either). Both of them are emotions, and they exist only accompanied by their dual negative emotions, including the worst (counterproductive) one: fear.

The widely recommended "unconditional love" is, supposedly, a non-dual state of awareness, that should preclude the genesis of dual emotions, and ultimately the fear.

In the universal evolvement there is a progression: instinct, emotion, intellect, intuition. Each form of physical materialization is centered somewhere on that scale.