Love
and Relationships
How
do we bridge the gap between what we have been told and what we
really know within our hearts about love? And when we do achieve
a true understanding of love how do we communicate our understanding?
I will write and put before you some simple ideas which may, once
you have explored such ideas in your life realise the facts about
love.
IDEAS
Many people live in hope. The hope that one day true love will
discover them. Once they have been discovered such love will liberate
them from all their fears and this other person who loves them
be man, woman or child, son or daughter, will be their salvation.
(What's really happening is the lacking in their love focus to
journey and for some connect with their own self love)
Then there are some people who never discover love. This is because
either they never take a chance on someone to love. That they
create different forms of relationships which cannot contain anything
than some form of conditional love which is limited to the circumstances
or the rules on which they relationship is base and sustained.
The outcome of such relationships can either be long-term according
to the rules of the game being honoured or the person enters into
a long and torturous sequence of 'relationship' after relationship.
Often only certain types of people will qualify to be in such
a relationship with the person. Either this person is also driven
by the same needs of game play or they are themselves in some
way damaged sufficiently in their emotional world from the past
where their expectation of their significant other is limited
or non-existent.
Then there are what used to be termed many years ago as the spinster
or confirmed bactchelor.
For these people confirmed singleness may be driven by a variety
of factors.
They don't believe in relationships based upon their early experiences
often in childhood or what relationships mean - personal loss.
They have a powerful spiritual connection and so physical and
mental union with another is not necessary to fulfil the need
for love given it is already fully fulfilled in their lives.
They do not believe in love.
Either the love of themselves or, for that matter, the love of
another. Their views on love are strikingly childlike in the conditional
simplicity. Hard to challenge because the person in question simply
doesn't share the language to discuss beyond the statement they
have made.
WHERE DOES IT ALL LEAD?
For some, at varying times in their lives towards almost an explosion
in their mind. When they will reach such a point depends upon
a number of simple but powerful circumstances.
For those who reach a point where they find the strength to overcome
the emotional addiction placed upon them either by society, their
upbringing or other emotional strait jackets standing their way
of true love. A simple but powerful process gets underway.
WHAT IS THIS PROCESS?
Another common question which emerges in peoples mind is 'when
do I know it is underway?'
Oh you will you will.
BACK TO THE FACTS
People mirror a path which leads to exploring love of self. Finding
such love means we have to find what anchors such love - SELF.
Self, for many, exists outside of them appearing in work roles,
money, possessions, male, female, young, middle aged or old.
ME, SELF, LIFE, EXPRESSION, WISDOM, KNOWING and ultimately loving
the true person I am regardless of my sex, age, wealth and health
opens the door to the origin of true love.
I sat with those who had met a point in their lives where they
strongly felt the only action left open to them was to end their
life. I sat with those who had been told by the hospital there
was nothing more which could be offered as treatment and so now
they had to prepare to die. I sat with those who were bereaved
and could see no future life for themselves now that the one they
loved was dead and only memories replaced the fact that they would
never see or talk with them again.
I sat with people just as they had needed a relationship or were
preparing to leave that special person who they once thought they
loved sufficiently to given their life to (Insert quotes on marriage
from Kilbran)
We don't give our lives we share them for no save ourselves is
qualified to know who we are and what life we shall express. We
can only fully share when such sharing is truly in balance - for
this to happen we have to know and connect with true love of self.
The one and only relationship we shall have in this earthly life.
From
the main word doc as general ideas
Why
we need Love
Edited by Simon Van Booy
Notes Tue 6th Aug 13 - this is an exceptionally badly written
piece but the core ideas are good and relate to my work in the
power of caring. ACTION research others writing in this area and
compile notes which I can use to endorse the core elements of
my writing.
To focus on being real and connecting with true self we realise
how love is a journey with no destination . y writing is not meant
to convince you of anything, my purpose is to simply introduce
you to key elements or themes that quite possibly has already
taken a key role in your life. One interpretation may be that
book learning and actual life experience complement each other.
So by reading about other peoples experiences in this book, we
may begin to understand ourselves from fresh insight.
As you read this introduction, someone, somewhere, is falling
in love; a child is calling out to someone in the darkness as
he wakes form a bad dream; someone is sitting alone in a car missing
someone as rain pelts down on the windshield; someone is leaning
on a desk, anticipating happiness he hopes love will one day bring
him; and perhaps someone very old is looking out a window, wishing
he had said yes instead of walking away on that snowy afternoon
in forty years ago.
No matter what we do, love saturates our lives in every possible
way. Even when we try to escape, it finds us - if merely to tease
us with what we could have had, what could have been in our lives.
Put my own quote in and not other peoples - Ensa Weds 8th Augu
:LOVE IS NOT AN EMOTION
'Who, being loved, is poor? Oscar Wilde
That
love can beautify the world by helping us overcome the selfishness
that limits our experience of love.' Blake poem
'It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English
jury. Half of them don't believe that it can physically be done,
and the other half are doing it.' Winston Churchill.
'It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for
something you are not.' Andre Gide.
"Being rich is an obstacle to loving. When you are rich,
you want to continue to be rich, and so you end up devoting all
your time, all your energy in your daily life, to staying rich.
If this father were to understand what true love is, he would
do whatever necessary to find time for his son and wife.
The most precious gift that you can give to the one you love is
your true presence. What must we do to really be there?
'Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root
remains weak and is easy to pull out' Fredrich Nietzsche
'Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. 'Emily
Bronte from Wuthering Heights.
'True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few
have seen.' Francois de La Rochefoucauld.
Eric Fromm "Erotic Love2 from The Art of Loving TAKE ANOTHER
LOOK AT THE BOOK AND TAKE SOME MORE MATERIAL TO SHARE ON THE SITES
AND ELSEWHERE.
Brotherly love is love among equals; a motherly love is love for
the helpless. Different as they are from each other, they have
in common that they are by their very nature not restricted to
one person. If I love my brother, I love all my brothers; if I
love my child, I love all my children; no, beyond that, I love
all children, all that are in need of my help. In contrast to
both types of love is erotic love; it is the craving for complete
fusion, for union with one other person. It is by its very nature
exclusive and not universal; it is also perhaps the most deceptive
form of love there is.
First of all, it is often confused with the explosive experience
of "falling" in love, the sudden collapse of the barriers
which existed until that moment between two strangers. But, as
was pointed out before, this experience of sudden intimacy is
by its very nature short lived. After the stranger has become
an intimately known person there are no more barriers to be overcome,
there is no more sudden closeness to be achieved. The "loved"
person becomes as well known as oneself. Or, perhaps I should
better say as little known. If there were more depth in the experience
of the other person, if one could experience the infiniteness
of his personality, the other person would never be so familiar
- and the miracle of overcoming the barriers might occur every
day anew. But for most people their own person, as well as others,
is soon explored and soon exhausted. For them intimacy is established
primarily through sexual contact. Since they experience the separateness
of the other person primarily as physical separateness, physical
union means overcoming separateness.
Beyond that, there are other factors which too many people denote
the overcoming of separateness. To speak of one's own personal
life, one's hopes and anxieties, to show oneself with one's childlike
or childish aspects, to establish a common interest vis-a-vis
the world - all this is taken as overcoming separateness. Even
to show one's anger, one's hate, one's complete lack of inhibition
is taken for intimacy, and this may explain the perverted attraction
of married couples often have to each other, who seem intimate
only when they are in bed or when they give vent to their mutual
hate and rage. But all these types of closeness tend to become
reduced more and more as time goes on. The consequence is one
seeks love with a new person, with a new stranger. Again the stranger
is transformed into an "intimate" person, again the
experience of falling in love is exhilarating and intense, and
again it slowly becomes less and less intense, and ends in the
wish for a new conquest, a new love - always with the illusion
that the new love will be different from the earlier ones. These
illusions are greatly helped by the deceptive character of sexual
desire.
Sexual desire aims at fusion - and is by no means only a physical
appetite, the relief of a painful tension but sexual desire can
be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the wish to conquer
or be conquered, by vanity, by the wish to hurt and even destroy,
as much as it can be stimulated by love. It seems that sexual
desire can easily blend with and be stimulated by any strong emotion,
of which love is only one. Because sexual desire is in the minds
of most people coupled with the idea of life, they are easily
misled to conclude that they love each other when they want each
other physically. Love can inspire the wish for sexual union;
in this case the physical relationship is lacking in greediness,
in a wish to conquer or to be conquered, but it blended with tenderness.
If the desire for physical union is not stimulated by love, if
erotic love is not also brotherly love, it never leads to union
in more than an orgiastic, transitory sense. Sexual attraction
creates, for the moment, the illusion of union, yet without love
this "union" leaves strangers as far apart as they were
before - sometimes it makes them ashamed of each other, or even
makes them hate each other, because when the illusion has gone
they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before. Tenderness
is by no means, as Freud believed, a sublimation of the sexual
instinct; it is the direct outcome of brotherly love, and exists
in physical as well as in nonphysical forms of love.
In erotic love there is an exclusiveness which is lacking in brotherly
love and motherly love. This exclusive character of erotic love
warrants some further discussion. Frequently the exclusiveness
of erotic love is misinterpreted as meaning possessive attachment.
One can often find two people "in love" with each other
who feel no love for anybody else. Their love is, in fact, egotism
a deux; they are two people who identify themselves with each
other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging
the single individual into two. They have the experience of overcoming
aloneness, yet, since they are separated from the rest of mankind,
they remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves;
their experience of union is an illusion.
Erotic love is exclusive, but it loves in the other person all
of mankind, all that is alive. It is exclusive only in the sense
that I can fuse myself fully and intensely with one person only.
Erotic love excludes the love for others only in the sense of
erotic fusion, full commitment in all aspects of life-but not
in the sense of deep brotherly love.
Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That love from the
essence of my being-and experience the other person in the essence
of his or her being. In essence, all human being are identical.
We are all part of One, we are One. This being so, it should not
make any difference whom we love. Love should be essentially an
act of will, of decision to commit my life completely to that
of one other person. This is, indeed, the rationale behind the
idea of the insolubility of marriage, as it is behind the many
forms of traditional marriage in which the two partners never
choose each other, but are chosen for each other- and yet are
expected to love each other. In contemporary Western culture this
ideas appears altogether false. Love is supposed to be the outcome
of spontaneous, emotional reaction, of suddenly being gripped
by an irresistible feeling. In this view, one sees only the peculiarities
of the two individuals involved-and not the fact that all men
are a part of Adam, and all women a part of Eve. One neglects
to see an important factor in erotic love, that of will. To love
somebody is not just a strong feeling-it is a decision, it is
a judgement, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there
would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.
A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay
forever, when my act does not involve judgement and decision?
Taking these views into account one may arrive at the position
that love is exclusively an act of will and commitment, and that
therefore fundamentally it does not matter who the two persons
are. Whether the marriage was arranged by others, or the result
of individual choice, once the marriage is concluded, the act
of will should guarantee the continuation of love. This view seems
to neglect the paradoxical character of human nature and of erotic
love. We are all One-yet every one of us is unique, unduplicable
entity. In our relationships to others the same paradox is repeated.
Inasmuch as we are all one, we can love everybody in the same
way in the sense of brotherly love. But inasmuch as we are all
also different, erotic love requires certain specific, highly
individual elements which exist between some people but not between
all.
Both views then, that erotic love as completely individual attraction,
unique between two specific persons, as well as the other view
that erotic love is nothing but an act of will, are true-or, as
it may be put more aptly, the truth is neither this nor that.
Hence the idea of a relationship which can be easily dissolved
if one is not successful with it as erroneous as the idea that
under no circumstances must the relationship be dissolved.
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