Hence Love…

Hence Love…

For some

Love is a fire, burning, brightening and purifying. Sun is a pure fire.

And for some

Unrequited love is a wounded beast goes to the dark forest and looking to bite and hurt as much as it could.

But which one of them is love?

Maybe both!

Love is a journey, there are different shapes of love that different people experience differently based on their level of  personal development.
The vision about love has been significantly influenced by conventions, traditions, religions, education, media, advertisement etc. despite all, love is something to feel and experience with heart and within self.

Due to the subjectivity of love, perhaps mutual love doesn’t exist. Different people have different expectations and comprehension of this topic. Unless two grow together and become one! 

Philosophers write chapters, poets write poems to describe love and artists create arts about it, but at the end there is no universal description.

This reminds me of the story of ” elephant in the dark” by Mowlana Rumi, a Persian poet and a philosopher.

In this story,someone brought an elephant from India and left it in a dark stable at the guesthouse for the night. Once people at the guesthouse heard about the elephant, they became very enthusiastic and impatient to see this unusual creature. They couldn’t wait till the daytime to see the elephant clearly under the sunlight. Hence they decided to explore the elephant by touching the different parts of it in the dark.

Everyone thought they knew what an elephant looked like but their understanding of the elephant wasn’t even near accurate and no-one had the same description either.

We hear the word love everywhere, in the streets, through the lips of lovers, in the films, in the ads, in literature, at the art galleries but is the love the same for everyone?

I don’t think so. I classify the used and spoken love in the following five categories:

1- Primitive love, is  an extreme desire for someone else apart from self ( love for self would be called narcissism in the special cases) , and it consists of three subsets as below:

1-1- The instinctive primitive love based on sexuality is right at the bottom. Some may call it lust or infatuation. But for the person who experiences it and calls it love, it is love.

1-2- Possessive primitive love  where one sees love as an object and they don’t want to see others even lay an eye on their beloved one! This love may cause the recipient of love to suffer while the lover sees it as love.

1-3- Controlling primitive love is when one sees their love so powerful for the other that they need to tell their beloved one how to act or behave to make sure their action won’t affect their precious love. They can easily justify their controlling behaviour as a protection.

All the primitive loves can end up in obsession. We see wars, crimes, murders hatred, greed, ownership based on this sort of love but in the mind of those pursuing it, it is love and their action is the price they or the recipients of their love pay for love.

2- Natural love like the love of a mother to a child. A hierarchical love.

3- Equal love which is the beginning of a friendship. Here love is not extreme anymore, it is more settled and it’s not as eruptive or disturbing.

4- Transformative love which is an aid to help one to grow further.
Without understanding the other forms of love, I am not sure if one can experience this though.

5- Exquisite pure love, when one sees nothing but love, where one sacrifices self for the sin of others, where one  self doesn’t exist.
Where one passes self and reaches to the  true selflessness.

Pure love is not to serve a self or selves, it’s a BECOMING .

The vessel becomes the entity, the container becomes the contained.

Romeo and Juliet, Leyli and Majnun, Ying and Yang, are not separate beings, they are the unknown parts of the self. The parts which create resentfulness, jealousy, hatred, and anger. Once these parts collide, hatred, jealousy, resentfulness and anger depart.

The soulmate is within self. That’s where I call it TRANSCENDENCE.
UNITING.
The eternal drunkenness, which in Persian is described as a true selflessness ( “az khoud bikhoud”) . Where love ( Jaan) reaches its eternal root( Jaanaan).

In english, we have love and lover, in Persian also the words ( Eshgh for love Ashegh for a love giver  and Mashough for the recipient of love ) from arabic are abundantly used. But the Persian word for love is Jaan. In Persian there is no word for a lover. All existences are called Jaandaar, meaning: with Jaan, created with love. We are in the ocean of love and surrounded with love. What we need to do is to stop struggling and letting go.
Though most of the time we forget we are ( Jaandaar) alive and loved and we try to create one! What a dark slumber!

Here is a golden formula for seeing,hearing, smelling tasting and sensing love:

Zarathustra, a Persian philosopher, suggested “ The Good Deeds, Good Thoughts and Good Words” are the essence of the goodness and I see it as a golden formula for love. Doesn’t matter if we feel love or not, once we practice these three principles, Jaan will embrace us.

Love doesn’t need to be invented we are gifted by it. As we are all Jaandaar, alive. We only need to open our hearts to it.

Rymos
20/11/2023