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Hi Cuore,

Love is a deep feeling, difficult to be described by a ‘meaning’. I think True love is the name we attempt to give to that divine feeling when the lover and loved unite/become one by transcending the physical and mental boundaries to unite at the finest (spiritual) level. I mean to say that some thing is missing in case the love is at the physical and/or mental level only. The real test/yard stick of the true love, I believe, is the union at the deepest level of existence.

Hi Rkmittal,

difficulty is ok, still having possibilities to be described with mind and thoughts, I hope. I really think that our mind and thinking are a direct gift from the universal creator of all things, humans having today the possibility to feel closer and closer to invisible things mainly using the faculty of thinking and not only with feelings and love.

It is a nice possibility to search for the “unity” between the two (or more than two) persons that are feeling love for each other. It could be the ultimate goal to reach the one of being united in a omnicomprehensive spiritual living being including more than one individual soul. But what in the meantime of our daily life here on material planet Earth? Is it still possible to feel and to provide LOVE for each other right now, today, in this moment? I think yes. Without doubts.

Is it still possible to Love a person at the moment even if not reaching the heights of the spiritual love? I think yes. In which way? Hmmm maybe….

Suggestions are welcome, in the meantime and in the waiting for the solution.

Marco

I think that today the meaning of ‘love’ has become a disguise for things which aren’t actually love. Or perhaps, it has always been this way and it is only now that we are realizing it is increasingly and outright deceptive. Today, love has no longer become a solution to things, but rather the problem (in many cases I see, anyway).

I think love for human beings is the ability to put another welfare in front of your own, and not just temporally – an unconditional love. But what is spiritual love and how does one know they have reached it?

Cuore/Marco- thanks for joining and starting this discussion! I find find these views pretty interesting.

I think people confuse love with too many other concepts these days… comfort, attraction, etc. Don’t get me wrong, these are all great things, and sometimes they’re a reason to share a life together with someone.

But true love… I don’t know. I don’t really buy into the whole unity/emotion transcendance idea. I may be wrong… I’m not sure. I just don’t think that there really is a completely spiritual, unconditional love union, but I’m probably too young to judge.

The way I see, love is just a positive connection, the opposite of hate which is a negative connection. It can come with a variety of other feelings, thoughts, and whatnot. It doesn’t have to be perfectly deep and spiritual… it’s just something that’s there for one reason or another. And in life you should work on increasing that connection and complementing it with other positive experiences and emotions.

Anybody buy what I just said?

I think love is simply an emotional response to a top value, probably an irreplacable one. As human beings surviving and pursuing happiness, it is necessary that we evaluate the opportunities around us and pursue what we consider to be our values, and our emotions respond accordingly. It is natural that we would feel a very emotional, intense reaction to top values of ours, and when it’s embodied in an irreplacable sort of individual human being, that is particularly intense. I think trying to justifying it with anything mystical, convuluted, or self-sacrifical, waters it down.

And I think it’s as simple as that. Seeing as no non-concrete, mystical worlds exist, basing your love on that is turning your love into an illusion. Love is real when you base it on someone’s actual, concrete attributes and how much of an asset they are to you in this life. And it can become very intense and very real when you experience it that way. I believe in the intensity and euphoria we associate with unexplainable transcendental love, but I believe it can be logically explained based on our real values.

@Derick – doesn’t that sort of take away from the magic of love, if we only base our love for them on how useful they are for us? Are you saying it’s detrimental to believe in something non-concrete?

And what about when love is unreciprocated? Does that mean the love did not exist, and that it was just an illusion?

I believe love, the emotion, the evaluation, actually comes second. I think a rational evaluation of the person according to your values is the mechanism that can make love “true.” I think, if you love someone, and the feeling comes first, and there is no rational/conceptual evaluation of the person, you aren’t really loving that person so much as creating a psychological/emotional association and dependency that has nothing to do with them. That’s the old, deeper meaning of “platonic love.” I think it’s what we today erronerously associate with true love. “Love me not for my attributes, love me for me!”

Now, I mean, if one feigns loving another because of some insignificant temporary need like money or hedonistic sex that’s another story. But I think when you know someone and you have that kind of respect and appreciation for them apart from any particular thing they do for you directly, that’s objectively valid and still an evaluation, and that this is different from loving someone where the emotion comes before the evaluation. And I think for it to be love you can’t merely enjoy a specific thing someone does for you, it has to be such that their very being who they are is a value to you. But that’s still an objective use.

I think it’s the mystic, the arbitrary that waters love down, and think an expectation fo that is why people treat relationships so pragmatically today. Much in the way how altruism, which is impossible to practice, stops people from acting ethically, when rational-self interest could show us a practical ethics that is mutually beneficial.

“doesn’t that sort of take away from the magic of love, if we only base our love for them on how useful they are for us?” If we’re talking about a very specific use, no. Those relationships are practical, but they’re not love. This is where the elaborate nature of the concretes we’re dealing with make things appear mystical. But really “true” love is still ultimately based on their value to you, just in a very ubiqtuitous way that makes it appear supernatural, which is why we associate loving someone for their specific traits and the value those show to you with a sort of pragmatic “using” someone. I think loving someone on an emotional love you don’t understand and can’t reduce to their actual traits and why those traits are beneficial to you is the shallow love. You don’t love them, they just have superficial simliarities to things you’ve emotionally associated with love. I think that’s infatuation.

“Are you saying it’s detrimental to believe in something non-concrete?” This really shows the epistemological/metaphysical basis of this, like all, issues. I don’t believe concepts that can’t be given specific concrete representatives like “love” and “government” are invalid. I mean they must be ultimately rooted in cocretes. Abstractions are ways of dealing with concretes cognitively; they don’t exist in of themselves. Plato believed abstractions actually existed by themselves in another dimension, and that our concrete world was inferior to this dimension, and that’s why we have the term “platonic love.” It’s love that can’t be objectively, concretely justified. Now we use it to mean love without sex, but the idea was actually that it had nothing to do with anything perceivable about the person whatsoever, it was mystically endowed. It was “above” the physical world.

“And what about when love is unreciprocated? Does that mean the love did not exist, and that it was just an illusion?” Love being unreciprocted can mean different things depending on the context. I definitly don’t believe that you were unjustified in feeling it in the first place because it’s unreciprocated. You don’t love somone primarily because of their use to you in a romantic relationship. You love them because the fact that they are who they are independently of you is itself a value to you. A relationships is just sometimes the best way to celebrate and enjoy it.

Well said, Derrick – I particularly liked your explanation in the last paragraph. Thanks for answering my questions and shedding some new perspectives on the matter!