This fire that we call loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls – Aberjhani.
Love. Unconditional love. Romantic love. Materialistic love. One can examine the nature of love but one cannot measure it. You cannot have a comprehensive examination of love. We have had philosophers, writers and poets attempting to describe their understanding of the emotion from the experiences they have had. Art, novels, music, movies and culture in different countries in different centuries have been enthused and enriched by love.
And they still continue to be. It will always be a guiding force for humanity. We have read sagas of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare and watched movies like Casablanca. In India we have had poets like Mirza Ghalib whose poetry on the emotion is as astounding as anything can ever be.
Rumi said love has no nature. You can feel love for the passenger sitting next to you in the bus, for your children, girlfriend, husband, parents, pet and all the gorgeous and heart-warming things under the sun. Love is the ultimate source of Joy.
If we flip the pages of history, we had Platonism theory of love that described love as a pure and non-sexual feeling for friends and family, also known as platonic love. It is the desire to love fellow human beings, understand them and help them nurture and grow.
Socrates, who believed himself to be the unsurpassed master of love, in Plato’s “Symposium”, divided love into two categories - Eros (earthly love) and Divine Eros (divine love). Eros is the material attraction towards a beautiful body for physical pleasure and reproduction. Divine Eros, on the contrary, is human soul gradually transcending to unconditional deific love. There is a difference between attraction of two human bodies and the affinity of two human souls.
Love is the hunger of the human soul for divine beauty. It has deeper emotional affiliations. One is enlightened to create and be in love. To grow and help others grow. And then of course, we had Aristotle inscribing, “Two bodies with one soul.” This was the idea of love by three great philosophers of the western world.
Coming to the 21st century, we all in some fathomable ways must be aware of the existing reality. I am not going to talk about the divorce rates and the confusion amongst people to reach to a conclusion about their emotions. I solely believe we are living in a time and age where people are not self-aware about their emotions and it is disheartening. A life is to be loved and lived, lived and loved.
It is a clear reflection of the fact that when one is not in love with oneself, it leads to a pool of doubts. To love someone else, one has to be in love with oneself first. One needs to unlock the channels of thoughts and constantly discover. Love helps you travel through the difficulties and find a new world. That’s the beauty of love.
And somehow, I don’t know how, seeking true love has become an old-school theory. I distinctly blame the pop culture for imposing such a negative mindset that leads to mental collapse, psychosomatic diseases, drug abuse and everything that destroys the soul.
The idea of polygamy and infidelity is on the rise turning love into a cheap commodity. Alain Badiou (21st century writer) in his book, In Praise of Love (2012) wrote that love needs constant reinventing. We need to maintain it in a state of tension, unpredictability, and risk. One cannot choose to be fragile. Strength and loyalty is the dignity of love, and one cannot separate love from overall human dignity and hope.
Love is life-changing and soul-warming. It is an event and celebration. It is the basic food for the human kind to evolve and grow. Learn and understand.
This particular Rumi quote concludes my stream of thoughts on love, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Unravel and introspect. And, most definitely, love whole-heartedly.
One of my favorite “The Beatles” song
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