What is real love
Love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him. All his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he trys most actively to develope his total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation; that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one's neighbour, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement. Or - anyone can ask himself how many TRULY loving persons he he known.The first thing we have to learn is that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art. Maybe here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power - almost all our energy is used for learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
Love is a power which produces love. You can exchange love only for love, confidence for confidence, etc. If you wish to enjoy an art, you must be an artistically trained person; if you wish to have an influence on other people you must be a person who has a really stimulating and furthering influence on other people.
The essence of love is to labour for something and to make something grow, that love and labour are inseparable. One loves that for which one labours, and one labours for that which one loves.
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Responsibility could easily deteriorate into domination and possessiveness, were it not for a third component of love, respect. Respect is not fear or awe; it denotes the ability to see a person as he/she is, to be aware of the unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as they are. Respect, thus, implies the absense of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for their own sake, and not for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with them as they are, not as I need them to be as an object for my use. It is clear that respect is only possible if I have achieved independence, without having to exploit anyone else. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom, for love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.
Which yet another reason why real Love is so rare—because it is so difficult for us to learn certain things, grow in a certain direction.
Real Love requires that we confront and deal with and overcome our own laziness, irrational fears, tendency to get bored easily, tendency to be impulsive and reactive, tendency to think in discursive ways, tendency to not to want to think–thinking criticially and deeply, after all, takes effort; and one of the biggest pains to deal with in life is the pain of a new idea. Thinking widely and honestly and deeply is not something that most of us want to do, let alone embrace and make a way of life. The examined life is not for us–at least not the vast majority of us.–
But the reality is that love is not just a feeling or an intention. Love is a behavior, something demonstrable; it is a way of life and of interacting with and engaging the world. And thus all we are is not simply love.
We may each have some original goodness to us, but we also each have a lot of original badness or selfishness and “the world revolves around me“-ness to us—some potentially pretty heinous nonsense going on in each of us. We all have to deal with fear and shame/pride and laziness.
And until we do, and until we become self-aware of these negatives within us, our ability to Love will be very limited and easily compromised.
We each have to battle these negatives within us—that’s the daily, moment to moment ongoing battle that each of us must fight—a war against our own laziness, pride, fear, inadequacy, closed-mindedness, naïveté, and avoidant/escapist tendencies and patterns.
That’s the “wooden beam” we each must wrestle with and wittle away at.And we cannot do this—separate wheat from chaff, crooked from straight—within ourselves unless we are self-aware and deeply committed to leading a very mindful and examined (including self-examined and self-confronting) life.
And to fail to commit to this—to fail to begin learning how to better confront ourselves and our own blindness, selfishness, ego, impulsiveness—is to lose the battle already and fail from the start at learning how to genuinely Love.
Many, many people are simply not up to or interested in confronting or facing themselves. They are not interested in real self-knowledge or real self-understanding—in facing themselves and what they’ve done and become and confronting themselves honestly about their patterns and denial and avoidance mechanisms. Most people are not interested in wrestling diligently with themselves about who they are becoming—who they are becoming by the choices they are making today, right now—the choices of how to act, what to eat, what to read, what to right about, what to think about, how to think, and whether to try and be deeply aware of their own thinking and the seeds they are sowing right now, now, now. . . .
The truth is that deep down we—some of us, perhaps many of us—may be fairly warm, affectionate, kind, caring, empathetic, compassionate. And these qualities may get covered over through the harshness of this world, through heartbreak, through bad parenting—other people’s lack of love can wound and mangle us.
And unless we go inward and really begin looking at ourselves and trying to discover for ourselves what the truth of all of this is in regards to ourselves and try to begin dealing with it (healing it, neutralizing it, correcting it, et cetera), then our “love” will be much less loving than it could be and will have a greater or lesser potentially mangling effect on those we try to “love.”
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One of my pregnant families once told me : "hey, being pregnant is not bad at all. Sure I do have morning sickness, but it's part of the arts of pregnancy!"
So I agree with you that living is an art.
I think it is not a good idea for women to be totally dependent on a man. (a wife on her husband) In the job that I do for a living, I have seen the results of total dependence. I have had to sit down with women that, after 40 or 50 years of marriage, they lose their spouse and have no idea how to take care of themselves. Never having paid a bill or taken care of investments or anything. They are at a total loss. I feel that it should be a wife and husbands' responsibility to look out for one another in life but that they should also make sure they can act independently if necessary.
I really don't know enough about the Illuminati to be able to speak on the topic. I know, in general, what it is said to be, however, I haven't done enough research of my own to speak intelligently about it. Maybe after I do, we can discuss again?
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
1 Corinthians 13:4–8a
(English Standard Version)
Good Night!
And added to that, what percentage of romantic relationships that start out full of promise and intense feeling falter and end? 90%? 95%?
How relationship-eligible are any of us in this society really?
How well do any of actually know how to love another, ourselves, people in general?