Love??

[Ritu]

My question is, what is love?? I mean is it what we see in movies and TV shows and is it something more and deep? And why people get addicted to their partners when they are in love?

I know it's a stupid question but I really wanna know ?

[Prabhaker]

8 minutes ago, Ritu said:

what is love?

It depends. There are as many loves as there are people. Love is a hierarchy, from the lowest rung to the highest, from sex to super-consciousness. There are many, many layers, many planes of love. It all depends on you. If you are existing on the lowest rung, you will have a totally different idea of love than the person who is existing on the highest rung. Adolf Hitler will have one idea of love, Gautam Buddha another; and they will be diametrically opposite, because they are at two extremes.

At the lowest, love is a kind of politics, power politics. Wherever love is contaminated by the idea of domination, it is politics. Whether you call it politics or not is not the question, it is political. And millions of people never know anything about love except this politics – the politics that exists between husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. It is politics, the whole thing is political: you want to dominate the other, you enjoy domination.

And love is nothing but politics sugar-coated, a bitter pill sugar-coated. You talk about love but the deep desire is to exploit the other. And I am not saying that you are doing it deliberately or consciously – you are not that conscious yet. You cannot do it deliberately; it is an unconscious mechanism.

Hence so much possessiveness and so much jealousy become a part, an intrinsic part, of your love. That’s why love creates more misery than joy. Ninety-nine percent of it is bitter; there is only that one percent of sugar that you have coated on top of it. And sooner or later that sugar disappears.

When you are in the beginning of a love affair, those honeymoon days, you taste something sweet. Soon that sugar wears off, and the realities start appearing in stark nakedness and the whole thing becomes ugly.

Millions of people have decided not to love human beings any more. It is better to love a dog, a cat, a parrot; it is better to love a car – because you can dominate them well, and the other never tires to dominate you. It is simple; it is not as complex as it is going to be with human beings.

People are falling in love with horses, dogs, animals, machines, things. Why? Because to be in love with human beings has become an utter hell, a continuous conflict – nagging, always at each other’s throats.

This is the lowest form of love. Nothing is wrong with it if you can use it as a stepping-stone, if you can use it as a meditation. If you can watch it, if you try to understand it, in that very understanding you will reach another rung, you will start moving upwards.

Only at the highest peak, when love is not a relationship any more, when love becomes a state of your being, the lotus opens totally and great perfume is released – but only at the highest peak. At the lowest, love is just a political relationship. At the highest, love is a religious state of consciousness.

I love you too. Buddha loves, Jesus loves, but their love demands nothing in return. Their love is given for the sheer joy of giving it; it is not a bargain. Hence the radiant beauty of it, hence the transcendental beauty of it. It surpasses all the joys that you have known.

When I talk about love, I am talking about love as a state. It is unaddressed: you don’t love this person or that person, you simply love. You are love. Rather than saying that you love somebody, it will be better to say you are love. So whosoever is capable of partaking, can partake. For whosoever is capable of drinking out of your infinite sources of being, you are available – you are available unconditionally.

That is possible only if love becomes more and more meditative.

Medicine and meditation come from the same root. Love as you know it is a kind of disease: it needs the medicine of meditation. If it passes through meditation, it is purified. And the more purified it is, the more ecstatic.

Osho, Unio Mystica, Vol. 2, Talk #4

[Ritu]

Thank you @Prabhaker !!

[sheenp24]

"The souls recognition of its counterpart in another". Love that movie.

[Michael569]

Love is not romantic

Scot Peck distinguishes between true love, as defined above, and "falling in love". Our tendency to confuse the two, says Peck, is one of the most powerful and pervasive misconceptions about love. Peck asserts that falling in love is specifically a "sex-linked erotic experience":

"We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated."

In contrast to real love, falling in love is not a conscious choice ("try as we might, we may not be able to fall in love with a person whom we deeply respect and with whom a deep relationship would be in all ways desirable"), does not require effort and is not about personal growth. It is simply the collapse of part of our personal boundaries and the temporary merging of our identity with that of another. In Peck's view, falling in love is nothing more than a biological mechanism to increase the probability of mating, or to put it another way, "falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage".

The "myth of romantic love" propagated by our culture, the idea that there is one true love out there for each of us, makes this misconception worse. The ecstatic feelings of falling in love always pass, says Peck, but the myth suggests that if we can only find the right person, "the one", they would last forever. This myth is a lie, and one with damaging consequences:

"Should it come to pass that we do not satisfy or meet all of each other's needs and friction arises and we fall out of love, then it is clear that a dreadful mistake was made, we misread the stars, we did not hook up with our one and only perfect match, what we thought was love was not real or "true" love, and nothing can be done about the situation except to live unhappily ever after or get divorced...

As a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth."

Source: Scott Peck - Road Less Travelled 

[Annie]

There are many different kinds of love. The kind of love you feel for a friend, for your parents, your children or your partner and of course self-love. But I simply assume you're referring to the romantic kind of love. I like this explanation:

"We're all a little weird, and life's a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love." — Dr. Seuss

[5driedgrams]

@Prabhaker Loved it! Needed it! Thank you!

[Greys0n]

if you mean love to your partner for me it's meansa lot. When I love I want to care about my beloved and see her/him every day, share interests, feelings etc

[pluto]

Love is Home

Love is Truth

Love is Light

Love is Freedom

Love is Peace

Love is Connection

Love is all that is and all that creates life, the most powerful force in the universe, its what keeps us growing and finding ourselves over and over again.

Love is non-judgemental, ever-present and pure, through love the spiral of life came to be!

One Love

Edited September 5, 2017 by pluto

[egoeimai]

@Michael569 wow this shit is amazing.. Copying that!  I'm gonna keep it!  Thank you so much I'm grateful 

[Michael569]

@egoeimai  I highly suggest you read The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck. He talks about the misconception of Love a lot. Among other things of course. 

[egoeimai]

2 hours ago, Michael569 said:

@egoeimai  I highly suggest you read The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck. He talks about the misconception of Love a lot. Among other things of course. 

I don't know if they sell it here but thanks anyway 

[phoenix666]

On 27. Juli 2017 at 0:48 PM, Michael569 said:

Love is not romantic

Scot Peck distinguishes between true love, as defined above, and "falling in love". Our tendency to confuse the two, says Peck, is one of the most powerful and pervasive misconceptions about love. Peck asserts that falling in love is specifically a "sex-linked erotic experience":

"We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated."

In contrast to real love, falling in love is not a conscious choice ("try as we might, we may not be able to fall in love with a person whom we deeply respect and with whom a deep relationship would be in all ways desirable"), does not require effort and is not about personal growth. It is simply the collapse of part of our personal boundaries and the temporary merging of our identity with that of another. In Peck's view, falling in love is nothing more than a biological mechanism to increase the probability of mating, or to put it another way, "falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage".

The "myth of romantic love" propagated by our culture, the idea that there is one true love out there for each of us, makes this misconception worse. The ecstatic feelings of falling in love always pass, says Peck, but the myth suggests that if we can only find the right person, "the one", they would last forever. This myth is a lie, and one with damaging consequences:

"Should it come to pass that we do not satisfy or meet all of each other's needs and friction arises and we fall out of love, then it is clear that a dreadful mistake was made, we misread the stars, we did not hook up with our one and only perfect match, what we thought was love was not real or "true" love, and nothing can be done about the situation except to live unhappily ever after or get divorced...

As a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth."

Source: Scott Peck - Road Less Travelled 

very interesting! I sometimes come to a similar conclusion (it differs from time to time I think about love) 

but am I the only one who feels kind of sad reading this? 

[Wind]

On 7/21/2017 at 4:32 PM, Prabhaker said:

It depends. There are as many loves as there are people. Love is a hierarchy, from the lowest rung to the highest, from sex to super-consciousness. There are many, many layers, many planes of love. It all depends on you. If you are existing on the lowest rung, you will have a totally different idea of love than the person who is existing on the highest rung. Adolf Hitler will have one idea of love, Gautam Buddha another; and they will be diametrically opposite, because they are at two extremes.

At the lowest, love is a kind of politics, power politics. Wherever love is contaminated by the idea of domination, it is politics. Whether you call it politics or not is not the question, it is political. And millions of people never know anything about love except this politics – the politics that exists between husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. It is politics, the whole thing is political: you want to dominate the other, you enjoy domination.

And love is nothing but politics sugar-coated, a bitter pill sugar-coated. You talk about love but the deep desire is to exploit the other. And I am not saying that you are doing it deliberately or consciously – you are not that conscious yet. You cannot do it deliberately; it is an unconscious mechanism.

Hence so much possessiveness and so much jealousy become a part, an intrinsic part, of your love. That’s why love creates more misery than joy. Ninety-nine percent of it is bitter; there is only that one percent of sugar that you have coated on top of it. And sooner or later that sugar disappears.

When you are in the beginning of a love affair, those honeymoon days, you taste something sweet. Soon that sugar wears off, and the realities start appearing in stark nakedness and the whole thing becomes ugly.

Millions of people have decided not to love human beings any more. It is better to love a dog, a cat, a parrot; it is better to love a car – because you can dominate them well, and the other never tires to dominate you. It is simple; it is not as complex as it is going to be with human beings.

People are falling in love with horses, dogs, animals, machines, things. Why? Because to be in love with human beings has become an utter hell, a continuous conflict – nagging, always at each other’s throats.

This is the lowest form of love. Nothing is wrong with it if you can use it as a stepping-stone, if you can use it as a meditation. If you can watch it, if you try to understand it, in that very understanding you will reach another rung, you will start moving upwards.

Only at the highest peak, when love is not a relationship any more, when love becomes a state of your being, the lotus opens totally and great perfume is released – but only at the highest peak. At the lowest, love is just a political relationship. At the highest, love is a religious state of consciousness.

I love you too. Buddha loves, Jesus loves, but their love demands nothing in return. Their love is given for the sheer joy of giving it; it is not a bargain. Hence the radiant beauty of it, hence the transcendental beauty of it. It surpasses all the joys that you have known.

When I talk about love, I am talking about love as a state. It is unaddressed: you don’t love this person or that person, you simply love. You are love. Rather than saying that you love somebody, it will be better to say you are love. So whosoever is capable of partaking, can partake. For whosoever is capable of drinking out of your infinite sources of being, you are available – you are available unconditionally.

That is possible only if love becomes more and more meditative.

Medicine and meditation come from the same root. Love as you know it is a kind of disease: it needs the medicine of meditation. If it passes through meditation, it is purified. And the more purified it is, the more ecstatic.

Osho, Unio Mystica, Vol. 2, Talk #4

This ^^ Last year I experienced both of these loves with two different partners. It was like two opposing extremes. Possessive vs non-possessive. Conditional vs unconditional. Way of feelings less alone vs way of expressing yourself without wanting anything in return.

Edited September 10, 2017 by Wind

[Truth Seekah]

On 7/21/2017 at 8:49 PM, Ritu said:

And why people get addicted to their partners when they are in love?

 

Edited September 13, 2017 by Truth Seekah

[Nahm]

Love is the reality. 

[phoenix666]

38 minutes ago, Nahm said:

Love is the reality. 

how do you become aware of that? how do you like really feel that?

[Nahm]

@phoenix666 That's a great question. Thee question, really. Love is reality. When you remove everything else, you see what is actually illusion and what you are. If you want to give me an idea of where you are now, with choices, I will offer you my best to fill in the path from my experience. By choices, I mean where you're at -  I'm talking about food, practices of meditation - self inquiry - contemplation, perceiving assertion or not, sleeping habits,  watching tv or not, spend time in nature or not, been on retreats, time spent alone, time spent not saying a word,etc. I could ramble about all is love forever, but I'm attempting to make it relative to where you're at. I do really feel it. Always. 

[phoenix666]

@Nahm I've spent a great deal of my life hating..people, life and myself. I really was a misanthrope. (only few knew that, I did quite a good job at hiding my true feelings) I lived in classic victim mentality, really.

two years ago I discovered Leo's videos and whenever I fell back into old habits, there was something inside of me, which pulled me back to his videos, again and again. suddenly everything changed very quickly. I started meditating, went vegan,  stopped watching TV and reading news. it never felt forced, it just happened, like a natural unfolding process. I felt my thought patterns change and when I now observe other people, I can clearly see the destructive cycle they're in. 

specially when I went vegan, I felt a strong aversion against 'unconscious' masses.. I really couldn't understand how people could be so selfish, exploiting the planet, hurting themselves and causing the suffering of millions of sentient beings.

over the past year I started working on my past. I stopped running away and numbing myself down. I started looking straight into my 'problems'. I am not quite at a point where I completely accept and love myself yet, I think. but I feel like I am getting there. the same for other people. especially after my silence retreat this summer, I started to be very sensitive for other people's suffering. It's like I can feel their pain and all hate vanished. I started seeing why they do what they do. I can see them stuck in patterns where I was for a long time. it's like I stopped hating them as soon as I stopped hating myself.

I hope that sums it up in an understandable way. 

thanks for your help <3

 

Edited September 21, 2017 by phoenix666

[Nahm]

@phoenix666 So you're question was how do you really feel like love (always). You already are it, and there's all this illusion - human - concepts - mental paradigms, that I was born, that I die, confusion that I am a person, etc, etc, etc ADDED to it.  So in one broad stroke, the way, or the path, simply leads back to what we already are, minus all that stuff, which admittedly, is very convincing.  It sure seems to me that you are well into the nuances of an outline I would have suggested. Your life is already a success story.  In the sense,  you've used practices to gain focus & clarity, and done the work of applying that clarity to your past to make more sense of where you are now. You're seeing the patterns we all go through for what they are. That's very significant imo, because it allows you to see a future that is wanted - that has nothing to do with the past. If you are not already, aim to be meticulous about only thinking about the future that is wanted and allow it to change ongoing, as you are changing ongoing. As in, the level of self honesty that you've already developed, that must be done with wanted thinking. (Some say positive thinking, but that's not specific enough imo) It needs to be and only ever be what you want. Positive thinking is far to general. 

How experienced are you with psychedelics? (I have only done shrooms, but it was enough for me) If you haven't tried them, contemplate how you feel about them. If you have, consider the effect is hyper awareness, so if you were at a bad place in terms of loving yourself, the experience may have been bad. If you've purified yourself of all that, the experience is likely to be loving & spiritual. I have practiced meditation, exercise, self inquiry, and studying the sciences, specifically quantum mechanics, biology & neurology, for around 20 years. Before that I studied religions and philosophies. The relevance is, IME, the shrooms, coinciding with amount taken, kick your brain into Limitless mode for a few hours, so you can realize (make real) all of what you've done and learned. I can't know if I would have seen what the illusion is, and therefore what I am, without all that learning, specifically QM. I think all of it culminates to make a foundation that freed me with about 8 shroom trips over 2 years, starting with 1g and ending with 8g's of shroom tea. (I have a trip report if you want to search it. It's a little sappy) 

It sounds like your're already well on your path, maybe just a few trips away from directly experiencing reality. Once you experience it for yourself (the Truth) you can't unsee it or unknow it. If you wake up the day after, and get right back to the practices, the physiological 'feeling' should stay. If it doesn't, imo, it's because you add unwanted thoughts & thought tree's-  which are remedied by choosing wanted thoughts. It takes time and it's hard to know if you're 'there' on the wanted thoughts / focus piece before or after the shroom revelations, but those are the 2 main components. When both are aligned or harmonized, it's love 24/7. It's worth everything. You'll gain everything. That will make more and more sense as you go. Hopefully all this typing is useful. Godspeed!