What is Love?

Love and biology
Is this love?
Love is an evolved state of the survival instinct, primarily used to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species through reproduction.

I love my iphone!
Is this love?
Can this really be love? It may be argued that we all understand that the word love in this context is being misused. We all know somehow that we cannot actually ‘love,’ an object such as a mobile phone or a film. Or can we? By attaching this word love to cars, houses, and other material objects commerce and the media are hoping to invoke or are invoking the emotions that are actually implicit in the word ‘love,’ when used in its true sense. Which is?

I love her/him.
Is this love?
Is love desire? Most of us humans seem to be caught inextricably into this fusion of desire/pleasure and love. What sex seems to give us is a way of totally losing ourselves in the other. But this of course is only a temporary state. So we need constant repetition of that state in which all our problems and our very selves just disappear. What else makes our hearts beat so fast? What else makes us swoon with feeling? What else renders us so intensely alive? Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the emotional exchange, the companionship - is this what we mean by love? Our culture appears to accept that romantic love is the pinnacle of life. Popular literature, movies, TV, art, and music celebrate this western view of love that grew out of medieval chivalry and the adoration of the Virgin Mary. These feelings obliterate reason as poets have long reminded us. This, is it would, seem is part of its charm and power. We want to be swept up and spirited out of our usual lives. "Want" here is important for it is this ‘wanting’ of love that leads us to become desperate. But this want or demand to be ‘safe’ in relationship can often provoke sorrow and insecurity. Can we find security in relationship in this way? Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but can this exist if we are each selfishly seeking personal security?

I love my wife/partner.
Is this love?
Involved in this love of our wives/partners is sexual pleasure, of having someone to help look after our children.We depend on him/ her. He/she has given us his/her body, his/her emotions, his/her encouragement along with a certain feeling of security and well-being. But sometimes this goes wrong. He/she gets bored with us, or falls in love with someone else and our whole emotional balance is destroyed and this disturbance, which is disagreeable is called jealousy. There is pain in it, often anxiety, hate and violence. So perhaps the real situation here is a ‘deal,’ that can be stated, as long as you belong to me, are useful to me I love you. The moment you don't I might begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don't like you. Is this love?

I love my son/daughter.
Is this love?
Most parents think they are responsible for their children and this sense of responsibility takes the form of control, of telling their offspring what they should do and what they should not do, what they should become and what they should not become. Most parents want their children to have a happy life within society. But often it is respectability parents worship and they are really concerned only with becoming perfect bourgeoisie and ensuring their children fit this mould also. When preparing their children to merge into society in this unthinking way parents are unknowingly (because they also have been brought up in that manner) perpetuating the short sightedness, materialism and delusion within that society. Is this love and tender care? It could be viewed as the parent’s pride and their living vicariously through their offspring.

I love my country.
Is this love?
In time of war we are often given permission by governments to go off and murder and inflict misery and worse on our ‘enemies’. Enormous sums of money in the world’s economies are devoted to supplying soldier/citizens with the armaments to do this. Can patriotism ever be love?

The ultimate sacrifice
Is this love?
‘Greater love hath no man/woman than this that he/she lay down his/her life for his/her friends.’
Is this love?

Karuna is compassion and mercy, which reduces the suffering of others. It is complementary to wisdom and is necessary for enlightenment.
Is this love?

Metta is a benevolent love.This love is ‘unconditional,’ and requires self-acceptance and self knowledge. So this is quite different from ordinary useage of the word ‘love,’ which is as we have seen often about attachment and rarely therefore occurs without self-interest. Metta conveys the sense of a certain detachment an an unselfish interest in others' welfare.
Is this love?

The Bodhisattva is an ideal in Mahayana Buddhism. To take the path of the Bodhisattva is to hold the idea of enlightenment within an unselfish, altruistic love for all sentient beings
Is this love?

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"So can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader - come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive - passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can come into being only when there is total self-abandonment. A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it - to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and therefore it is sharing with everybody."

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 –1986)

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