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Sunday, April 11, 2010

Give love get love

Give love get love

The best way to understand anything is to love it and savor its beauty. Topic being love I intend broaching it as a philophile [Lover of love]. Greek root philein means “loving”. When I did so, I found love to be,

1] Overwhelming wholesome flow of beauty
2] Divine
3] To understand it we have to be very religious.

1] True love is overwhelming wholesome flow of beauty

It is always the unstoppable and unstopped live wholesome flow of feeling of abundance that happens and permeates everywhere in us and around us and into all realms of life. It is not any leveraged or labored emotion or activity going through a studied and planned process; it does not happen after analyzing the pros and cons and consequences; it does not happen in parts and transcends realm after realm like physical, emotional, spiritual etc. Being always a live wholesome flow that happens we cannot dissect it into parts like any dead specimen and try to understand it. When this flow happens we are just part of it and it is also part of us; it is not something that we create or produce to give happily; nor is it something that exists outside us for us to get it . So the very expression give love get love can be included in the list of oxymorons.

Unfortunately the term Love has undergone enormous misunderstandings and mutilations that its true meaning is hidden beneath a huge carapace of multiple connotations.

First the word Love is a universal live wire used for everything from the silly to the sublime. Second, unfortunately, the verb love is used as a transitive verb. So when linguistically communicated love must have some external object or some external aspect of what we love. But every love and everyone’s love has uniqueness to it. That’s why the same thing or person is loved for different reasons, at several levels and varying degrees of intensity. But real love with total intensity and intense totality goes beyond the external things and becomes one with the spirit and soul of the beloved, that is, when the live wholesome flow happens and two or more points in the flow get connected. As Song of Solomon puts it, "I am my beloved, and my beloved is me." Reciprocity is embedded in Love. So when we give love we get love. Tsekung asked, “Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct of life” and Confucius replied, “It is the word SHU meaning ‘reciprocity’ .So when you give love you can only get love. This is not a slogan but a logical truth.

2] Love is divine.

We must have a communion with it [get connected]. When communicated our inadequate tools of communication dilute its true value and totality. Besides before communicating we naturally tend to conceptualize by confining it to our own self imposed limitations, whereas, in reality true love manifests in everything, it permeates everywhere, it is a splendor to be savored and an indescribable wonder.

It is better to get absorbed in love than observing it or judging it. To observe or to judge we need to perceive, and perception involves the processes of grading, categorizing, classifying etc and sieving them with our limited knowledge base, experience and attitudinal reactions etc. so better love every moment of love. Like divinity it is always pleasant and present, something live, there can never be a love was or love will be, love always is as the best definition of God itself is “I am and not I will be”. As Germaine De Stael says "Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time."

Therefore, in these aspects love is divine as it cannot be confined to concepts, categories, classifications and chronology of past and future.

3] We must be religious to know love.

The word religion means ‘linking of the part with the whole’ i.e. communion, from the Latin roots re- again, ligare-to link. So the best way to understand love is to be part of it, participate in it, get immersed into it with our heart and savor its beauty. As Helen Keller remarks "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."

No writing on love can do justice without a reference to Plato who confirms my contention that love is beauty, divine and it is best relished with participation when he says that “Beauty [love] is eternal, unproduced, indestructible; neither subject to increase or decay . . . All other things are beautiful through a participation of it . . .
This is the divine and pure . . . the beautiful itself”.
Love is beauty as St. Augustine said "Love is the beauty of the soul."

this was written by my daughter B.Srividya studying in sixth standard for an essay competition conducted by UN Information centre.