The Content of Love

Well here is a quote from FROMM( ERIC)

“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly as love” - The Art of Loving.
It seems like a nice and intelligent statement when you take it at its face value. I agree Fromm has desisted from defining love. That of course is a major flaw. But all those who have loved and have seen their love turn sour would probably agree with the statement. I have already spoken too much about this sort of love in my blog and would not like to do that again. The subject bores me to death now. But love otherwise is a big subject for me.

My capacity for love was very limited from the very first. I have always wondered about ‘unconditional’ love. Is there such a thing in the world? There is the infatuation, a childish and adamant desire to own something, there is the masochistic yearning for the nearness of somebody, and there is the flaming desire for sex. These are the most common varieties of love that we find among humans. There are other forms too, like intimacy.

Yet…….. as Yagnavalkya says to Maitreyi ‘ We love others for the sake of our own selves” .

Come on, admit it, we do it for ourselves, no amount of romantic ‘bulshit’ ( The word is copyright, and I am using it with trepidation- its all in fun, don’t take it otherwise!) would convince me that we can love others without benefitting from it. Perhaps (it is very doubtful though) your intense awareness of some one else may give you an insight into the real. But I doubt it very much because becoming aware of someone, something or ‘anything’ other than yourself is just the path away from freedom; it is the opposite of being free. ( An old scholar on the net who saw some of my posts seemingly knows only of one special sort of ‘things’- nice to have some one like that around –anyway good luck to him with the ‘things’ he is after).

There is something dangerous in immersing yourself into some one else. “ Dhwithiyaat vai bhayam bhavathi” -duality brings in fear as an old Sanskrit text says. This is no mean statement and can not be dismissed as a sentence from an old and outdated text. The awareness of the ‘other’( not in the sense of a doppelganger but as other human entities existing independent of yourself) always creates anxiety, it disrupts peace , it destroys tranquility . In fact as they saw it, clearly this is the root cause of all our troubles.

Now don’t say that it is the most selfish of all practices to stick to oneself and seek ones own freedom. We produced society to help us achieve relative independence and security. It is not the other way round. It’s a contract between us and the society. Now why did we enter into this contract? There is a school which thinks society is more primary and man has to sub serve it. There is another branch which holds on to the view that the individual is of more importance. But it is better o stick to a middle path (like Buddha) and accept that the relationship is beneficial to all concerned (What the hell am I writing about!)

Anyway to me love (whatever is understood by the term) is always limiting. I have often found it debilitating too. It becomes the single choice at times. It has an element of stupidity in it. It has some animal connections. It is instinctive rather than intellectual. Intellectual love is just bull crap. It does not exist.

I don’t think that you can find release in love. The Bhakti Yoga of India is a method trying to reach God by universal love. It is not very practical, even if it is it is not very safe. Love means many things to many people. There are persons who love freedom than their own wives ( I am not joking, though I am not one of them). There are people who ‘love’ a drink a little more than everything else. Some love art, theater, music and the lot. We have a very limited vocabulary to express the different aspects of our intense likes. Love has to substitute everywhere.

We need to find better words to express our different loves or limit the content which we pump in to it.