According to Hindu belief (or your belief) what is love for a woman/man? Is it a construction of the ego? Is it false? Or is it part of God?
It is love, but it is limited by the limits of our minds, as all emotion is mental. It is often driven by desire and lust, which is not a good thing. A relationship should be based on a matching of ideas and thoughts, not just on sexual desire. Love like that binds us to samsara and is a hindrance to our progress. On the other hand, relationship based on understanding and cooperation, with both partners growing spiritually together, hand in hand, walking towards higher living, is a great strength.
Love is not an emotion. Love is the realization of properly tuned consciousness. Love is the reality of the spirit. Love is the ego-less recognition of, appreciation of and response to the beloved's essence. Love is the realization of one's most primal identity. Love is most certainly an expression of God.
Perhaps there are two kinds of love (or more than two even) - un-conditional and conditional love. Where sexual relationships are concerned, it's usually conditional - if the person who is the object of affection does something we don't like, then our love may cease. Divine love on the other hand is said to be un-conditional - it loves us no matter what we do. As well as love is desire. This is clearly needed to ensure the continuation of the race. So what we think of as love can be simply a chemical thing. It is an inate instinct. I have a problem here - if one is in an ego-less state, would one really see the beloved as seperate ? And surely 'one's most primal identity' would be free from all qualities whatsoever.
According to Hindu Beliefs I know, love is surrender to your beloved and finally with such surrender you will see the supreme in your beloved. This surrender however is mutual. Your beloved surrenders unto you as you surrender unto him and finally you both see the supreme in each other. Actually, true love only exists between the soul and the supreme lord, all else is just illusion. There are many examples of this but one of those examples is Radha and krishna (Narayan)... another is Prahlad and Narasimha (Narayan). BG: 9.29: "I envy no one, nor am I partial to anyone. I am equal to all. But whoever renders service unto Me in devotion is a friend, is in Me, and I am also a friend to him." So basically if you think of God, God will think of you, if you want to love some one really faithfully , then you should love God.
Varuna, what you describe is more like devotion than love. I think the love that the original post referred to is more of the chemical thing Bill spoke of.
Yes, I was reffering to "chemical love" but thanks to all who posted. I greatly appreciate your comments.
Bhaskar, I know what you mean. Love is certainly (and necessarily) expressed differently according to the nature of the relationship in which it exists: erotic, familial, fraternal, agape, etc. I would argue, however, that in every form of love there is at least a trace (if not an abundance) of the divine, that essential element of devotion, that realization of the beloved. It is this devotion which transforms what is argued to be a mere biological imperative into true erotic love, it transforms mere biological obligation into true familial love, it transforms mere social proximity into true friendship, it has the power to transform any relationship into an expression of love. "Chemical Love" sounds like it should be a Marilyn Manson song. "We're all stars now . . . chemical love . . . "
I would expand your statement a little... In every form of everything, everywhere and at all times, there is nothing but the divine alone.
we live in ignorance-everyone of us, we don't see the truth. Any atrocity that happened in the past is due to ignorance of the general public about the supreme. Everyone is the same.. there is a famous song that annamaya wrote in telugu : Brahmam okate parabrahmam okate, its a very famous song actually the meaning is that everyone is the same, everything is one, everyone belongs to the supreme. We are the ones who make distinctions and we are the ones who create biases and destroy our neighbor's lives. If Germany knew this : "love thy neighbor thy yourself" during the early 20th century, both wars would have been prevented.
Then biases are not Divine? And the attitudes that create these things are not Divine. Hence, it makes no sense to say
As difficult as it can be to believe, the divine IS ever-present, and certainly was available, even at Auschwitz. The problem, then and now, is too many people were not conscious of, or acting according to, the reality of the divine. Hitler's model of reality was horribly, fatally wrong. His ego (the story one mistakenly believes represents both who one is and one's relationship to reality), was plagued with the horrors of his youth - fear, anger, hatred and violence. Like anyone, he could have overcome the limitations of his fictional identity. But because he identified so strongly with his ego, he never seriously considered an egoless relationship with reality. His ego dominated his attention and prevented him from becoming fully conscious of reality. What is worse, Hitler's fictional identity, tainted with unexamined fear, anger, hatred and violence, required that he get others to believe that his "vision" of reality was complete, true and urgently in need of corrective action. His erroneous "vision" became the collective ego of Nazi Germany. The Nazis' faith in their grotesquely distorted "vision," their collective ego, made it virtually impossible for them to be aware of the actual reality in which they lived. As a result, they were guided by a falsehood that had very little resemblence with the divine reality. I can certainly be said that the Nazis did not love the Jews or Judaism. They never had, and never even sought, an ego-less recognition of, appreciation of and response to the divine essence, the real humanity, of their victims. They sought not to recognize and improve their relationship with one of the greatest traditions of humanity. And, by most accounts, they never even realized that they should have. The Nazis were horribly, fatally ignorant of the divine reality of love, truth, peace, wisdom, mercy, creativity, consciousness, compassion, unity, etc. But this divine reality most certainly is, and always was, available to all people. You just have to "see" it, right there in front of you, right here, right now. Peace and Love
Thanks for your comments about the NAZI's, but I was only using the halocaust as an example, I could have used many others. I wasn't saying in my posts that the Divine was not available to the inmates of the camps. What I was trying to do was argue against Bhaskar's assertion that I quoted above, that only the Divine and nothing else exists. What I am trying to say is that there exist non-divine forces and elements, forces which are even anti-divine. In hindu mythologhy there are both the gods and the demons. We can say that all existences have their ultimate cause in God, but that doesn't necessarily mean that God is fully present in every action. It is hard to see how the SS guards at Austwich were acting in anything but a way totally contrary to any kind of divine will. They were fallible, and in some cases thoughrouly cruel and sadistic people, serving a monstrous cause. There action, however determined seems to me un-divine, not a manifestation of god in anything but the most remote or roundabout of ways. So - my point is that given all this, the statement Bhaskar posted is mis-leading to say the least.
Bill, what Hinduism have you studied? When the vedas say sarvam khalvidam brahma (everything is verily brahman) what could be more direct? Yes there are devas and there are asuras. Both devas and asuras are powered by the divine, which is the driving force behind all actions., If that life force, conciousness, were not present, there would be no action, indeed, no world at all.
Actually I've studied quite a range of Hindu philosophy over a period of many years. Some things I agree with, others I do not. My own view is that mankind needs to move on beyond the traditional religions to embrace a true universal spirituality. I also believe, as I have said before, that a marriage of religion and science is possible - something like the slightly old-fashioned phrase 'scientific illuminism'. However, it does seem to me that there is much of immense value in hinduism. I find it absurd in the extreme if people will argue that the SS in the concentration camps represent any kind of divine action or manifestation. In the Gita, Krishna speaks of this world as like vast machine. All the actions of those in it are wholly conditioned. They have no knowledge or realization etc, so to speak of such persons doing the divine will can't be right. If every action of mine were a direct manifestation of the will of God, it seems that no process of realization, no yoga or spiritual practice would be necessary. We know that everything is really only energy, but we humans are not set up to percieve this without much practice of meditation or some other process leading to an expanded awareness. Much of what we see doesn't look very divine at all, and I maintain that non-divine and anti-divine forces exist in this cosmic manifestation. If the whole universe were to evolve further, perhaps these forces will be reintegrated back to the divine source from which they emmanated. If one can rise up into the spirit, into a higher consciousness, one may indeed get a glimpse of perfection, but that is not to say at all that the perfection is established here on this level of being.
True. Love shares a primal simplicity with existence and consciousness. Words do no harm to love or existence or consciousness and these "things" are well expressed when they are the essense, the vitality of one's thoughts.
