Is love worth it?

[Piscivore]

Ya know, that's hard to argue with, Marquis.

Fortunately, there is room for Kitty and Skep and you and me in the eternal present, if that's where you guys are right now.

Reading about eternity takes only a moment or two.

The miller's boy is making fun of our Mr. Iacchus, another notorious solipsist noted for the phrase used. He is a virtual twin to Mr. Lifegazer.

But that robs too much from my human experience. Life is enjoyed best with at least half the heart of a poet. The concepts of love and the eternal both have their origins in human feeling... But the concepts are mythic. They are in all of our stories. They are front and center in the story of man. They both have a a physical truth element that is undeniable. So I say embrace them. Walking chemical factories??? Walking meat bags??? C'mon. That's the banal identification with existence. We're conscious. We're deep. We are the only beings we know that have a concept of the eternal. If we can have the many words for love, surely we can have many poetic meanings for the eternal... especially when we know we have the experience of it. And I don't know if you've had it, but like love itself, it's something you're caught in.

I'd agree with what you said, Atlas, excepting I'd replace the word "eternal" with "transcendant" (meaning "beyond one's self); like Skep, the first word, to me, conveys a certain specific temporal meaning that is entirely inappropriate applied to "love".

And yes, I've caught a glimpse or two of the universe and my place in it. "Mythic" is a good way to describe the experience, especially in contrast to "mystic". Love is indeed like that, when it is good, but it's not something that just happens. As someone wiser than myself once put it: lust is the chemical reaction, love is the good thing we can make of it.

 

[Atlas]

The miller's boy is making fun of our Mr. Iacchus, another notorious solipsist noted for the phrase used. He is a virtual twin to Mr. Lifegazer.

Darn it! I hate to miss the joke. Thanks for the tip. I liked the story too. They do make quite a pair here. I've drifted away from their threads lately, this one seemed a little different.

I'd agree with what you said, Atlas, excepting I'd replace the word "eternal" with "transcendant" (meaning "beyond one's self); like Skep, the first word, to me, conveys a certain specific temporal meaning that is entirely inappropriate applied to "love".

And yes, I've caught a glimpse or two of the universe and my place in it. "Mythic" is a good way to describe the experience, especially in contrast to "mystic". Love is indeed like that, when it is good, but it's not something that just happens. As someone wiser than myself once put it: lust is the chemical reaction, love is the good thing we can make of it. .

I do like the word transcendent. When I started exploring my peculiar brand of atheism I found I had an affinity for the word soul that I didn't want to lose for a variety of reasons. But the main one was human appreciation of the arts; poetry, dance, architecture as well as sunsets and the night sky. Soul just seemed like a useful word to redefine. Anyway, I scrapped the eternal soul for a transcendent soul that still gets all the good feelings but doesn't survive the body. So I guess I did start with the same "forever" association with the word eternal and chose the term "transcendent" to escape that association.

Then recently I caught a rerun of Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. I see things more mythically after any reminder I get of Campbell. In the episode I watched he made the remark about the eternal being something to experience in the here and now. And suddenly I had a redefinition of eternal that had nothing to do with forever. It was kind of strange. I do believe that humans have feelings that they have not yet identified words for. I don't believe I ever had a feeling of eternal in the forever sense but I know I've had the feelings of the eternal in the here and now transcendent sense. And transcendent is for me a whole class of feelings. Love is one, Peace and Understanding is one that needs it's own single term, and the here and now Eternal is one. I don't think that I've ever tried to name them all. I just group them. It's apparent when one is having an experience that is transcendent but how would you know if you've had every one. It seems likely to me that everyday feelings like love for your kids is a gateway to the transcendent but some other event opens the gate, like hearing a car screech to a stop, turning and seeing you child in the street chasing a ball. Some chemical potion floods the body and you race to retrieve the child and bring him into the house then as you lean down to admonish the child, he touches your face and says "Don't be afraid". Now a different set of chemicals floods over you and you pick up your child and are lost in a teary timeless moment. I wonder now if it feels eternal because the brain has no articulation of thought. It's a pure "now" experience without any inner conversation to get in the way.

I'm just rambling, I guess... I'll have to think about that. It sounds a little crazy. "Describe the wordless, quiet experience." Hmmm. The universe is a zephyr in the garden that touches your face.

I'll work on it. Where did I put my Zen for Dummies manual?

 

[epepke]

Romeo and Juliet nonsense

Romeo and Juliet wasn't even about Romeo and Juliet nonsense. The play was about teenage sex and violence, peeps. Not to mention the other stuff that you couldn't have come across without having one family be white and the other black.

I saw something truly horrific the other day. It seems that you can get a copy of Romeo and Juliet with an additional scene that makes a happy ending. Also, your picture is on the cover, and all the instances of Romeo and Juliet are replaced with your names.

Which, in a grim way, quite elucidates your point.

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled flamefest.

 

[Suezoled]

Of course, the social/biological urge to maintain that love is also from a chemical reaction. We are walking chemical factories.

PS. If I may respond for Suez, lifegazer is another Mr E. He is a Solipsist and is maddening in his explanations and defense of his vision. He has plenty of threads and they all go long. Pick one at random and read one page.... You'll recognize the pattern.

What he said.

 

[Kitty Chan]

Reading about eternity takes only a moment or two.

Interesting site I had forgot about it, plus good description.

And since we are slaves to time it does only take a moment or two to read.



I have a question to stretch this thread further

So far everyone discussed Love and how it is between family but what about all the other humans we run into in our lives? (obvoiusly not the same kind of Love one has with family) Family love is work but loving others that are not family is even more work.

 

[Scot C. Trypal]

I’ve very much enjoyed these posts.

Kitty gave a great take on the different degrees of love and romance. I’ve been seeing a bunch of relationships dissolve over petty differences lately and it’s so nice to know others out there see love the same way.

The romantic love I feel now should not be the same as the love I felt 12 years ago, and it’s a shortcoming of our language that we often put dedicated love into the same category as love-at-first-sight. One only takes a young pretty face and the other takes years of attention and sacrifice. For the larger long-term picture, you’re not going to get everything you want, or “win” every disagreement, and you should stop wanting to. I actually think one of the best skills to gain, for a couple wanting to move from infatuation to love has got to be the ability to surrender .

Atlas, eloquent and accurate as always, pretty much summed up my view on the “meat bag” thing, and I very much like Piscivore’s use of transcendence here. It’s true, love literally make you feel beyond yourself (with varying degrees of accuracy ), like you’ve become a hemisphere of another larger mind.

I’d too like to prop up at least the feeling of “eternal”. These moments--the birth of your children, their first steps, the public recitation of vows with your partner, and so on—feel like stones tied into a flimsy string of memories. At the time, the feelings are so arresting they can’t be explained and I even feel like I’d do the moment an injustice to try. Maybe the experiences continue to feel eternal because their strength leaves them incomparably more vivid and accessible than other memories. There are memories and then there are Memories.

Let me take it further, I think the past could be seen as having permanence; it happened and can’t be undone. Even during the heat death of our universe, there’ll be a past in which I bought roses last week, and to me that’s important. True, in that sense every moment, pleasant and painful, is “eternal”, but I’m biased in my recollection . It’s the permanence and accessibility of those pleasant moments that make love worth the effort and possibility of loss for me.

So far everyone discussed Love and how it is between family but what about all the other humans we run into in our lives? (obvoiusly not the same kind of Love one has with family) Family love is work but loving others that are not family is even more work.

It is tough. I want to be kind, civil, and fair with strangers, but I’d feel like I was abusing the word love to say I love them. I don’t know them, or what they want out of life. I’m not going to sacrifice my day to, say, help a stranger move, just because he asks, but I’d do it for my family and friends no questions. I also get uncomfortable when strangers, or even distant family, tell me they love me. To say you love someone, I think you need to have the effort and intimate knowledge of the other person to back you up. It bugs me when people use the word too flippantly (Many religions do this--it feels good to claim benevolence--but without the effort it’s seems to me to be simple self-pleasuring).

 

[Azrienoch]

Call me a "plonker" (whatever that is) if you will, but there are many kinds of love. Some are good. Some are not. Some mean everything. Some mean nothing.

Ah, and this is why I believe love is "worth it"; While developing yourself as a skeptic, as topics become more black and white, things like love remind us that there is still grey...

 

[Piscivore]

Ah, and this is why I believe love is "worth it"; While developing yourself as a skeptic, as topics become more black and white, things like love remind us that there is still grey...

I prefer "technicolour", myself.

 

[Z]

Love a father, and you eventually must grieve his death. Love a son, and eventually you must grieve his leaving. Love the world, and eventually you must grieve its changing. Love fortune, and eventually you must grieve fortune lost. Love a woman, and eventually you must grieve her betrayal. Yet love change, and you will never be dissatisfied.

Actually, I'm paraphrasing a quote I heard once and cannot place... and don't personally believe in all of it.

I think part of the problem with love, is that we don't truly love as much as we obsess and get comfortable with. We possess, we integrate, but we confuse all this with 'love'. I think love, like any other term, is too broad a statement, and in need of further definition. But without straying into that territory...

I love my wife dearly, and I know that means that I would do any reasonable thing she asked of me. I also knows that means allowing her freedom of action, because true love doesn't constrict, confine, or control. I love her as her, so I don't seek to make changes in her; yet I understand that change is a part of reality, so I also love those things in her which do change. I separate sex from love, the two acts being somewhat related but not inseparable, so my love for my wife is not tied to sex. If we have sex, wonderful; but this doesn't mean more or less love is involved. If we don't have sex, it doesn't mean I don't love her. If one of us has sex outside the boundaries of 'marriage' this, too, has no bearing on love. Each of us is a separate person with his own rights, feelings, and desires; my love for my wife does not automatically turn off my base physical desire for sexual stimulation, nor does it demand possessive jealousy to prevent her from exploring sex beyond our bonding. The fact is, our love DOES tend to limit our desire for others, simply because we are satisfied each with the other, but it has not always been so, and may not be so in the future, and we're alright with that.

I love my children, but my love for them necessarily includes acceptance that they are their own people. Each child must grow, develop, and find their own life. My love for them doesn't include a need or want for them to stay little forever, or for them to stay at home or close to home. My love for them WANTS them to venture out on their own, to make the inevitable mistakes of life, to grow and learn. Marlin learned the hard way, that you can't protect your children from everything - he had to let Nemo experience life, not shield him from it. And when the day comes, be it at 18 or 16 or 24, when my children spread their wings and leave the nest, my love of them will be fulfilled and satisfied, whether I ever see them again or not.

I love the country I was born in, but this doesn't preclude me from being critical of its leadership, or indeed of the entire structure of its politics. Nor does love of my country mean I never want it to change. I would embrace a revolution in this country, if I thought it would do good for our nation. My national love is a dynamic thing, and stagnancy within a nation is counter to what I love about the U.S.

I love life, but the very thing I love most in life is change. Change and experience. Watching old things crumble and die, watching new things form and grow. I would be very self-limiting if I 'loved' life the way it was in the 1980's, and obsess over the things from my teen years. Granted, I still enjoy music from the 1980s, but there are some absolutely amazing musical journeys that have been accomplished since then, and I love music deeply, so I enjoy the amazing sounds emerging from modern artists. And although I love movies from years ago, I'm in love enough with movies in general to recognize the value of the changes that take place through the decades, to recognize how much improved the filmmaker's art is over what it was decades ago.

And, most of all, I love experience and knowledge. Good and ill, every experience, every knowledge, every fact, is vital and important. Some may be unpleasant, some may seem trivial; but the more you know, and the more you experience, the more you can understand and the better you can make your own life. One thing I've learned from not avoiding negative experiences: this, too, shall pass. Change is inevitable. No matter how bad the now gets, tomorrow is a new day. Sooner or later, down turns to up; sooner or later, something good can and will happen in your life. So even the deepest slump is not cause for despair. I've been completely down and out several times; and always, something happens to turn it around. I've also been on top several times, and always, something happens to turn it around. Now, at 32, I've stopped 'hoping for the best' and 'lamenting the worst' - I'm on the roller coaster, and I'm enjoying the ride of my life. One month ago, we were unemployed and barely managing rent and utilities, eating ramen and feeding my kids the cheapest food we could give them and still be health-conscious. Now, I've got my first civilian driver's license ever, I have a fairly good-paying job that I didn't even try to get (just sort of fell into my lap), and life is on the up-swing. We're even looking at a nice, healthy Christmas this year for the six kids!

This is the true nature of love - to love change, to love things for what they are, what they were, and what they will become. To love without possession, or greed, or control. To love without restriction. To love in spite of character flaws, or any other issue. When you can embrace this form of love - love that never knows jealousy, or spite, or disgust, or fear - you can know, truly, that love is eternal, that love never dies. Alas, rare is the person who can love in this manner - I am one, but I know no more than three out of the thousands of people I've known, and one of those was a pupil of mine, one a mentor of mine, and one is my wife.

Most people cannot embrace unconditional love. They feel like they HAVE to possess or control; they feel like love is a license to lord over their lover, or their child, or whatever. They feel like love should override all else, and of course, they are wrong. They think that love of a mother for a son should be stronger than any bond the son will make in his own life, or that the love of a man for a woman should somehow prevent the man's physical desires of other women or men, or that the woman should, because of her love of the man, desire to change about herself whatever necessary to please the man. So most people will never truly know love in their life.

But love is worth it all, if you can find it.

 

[epepke]

Philip K. Dick wrote a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I think it had an excellent or at least interesting answer to this question. I'm not going to cheapen the book by summarizing it here. It's a short book, easily read.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Or you could watch "Blade Runner."

 

[Skep]

Or you could watch "Blade Runner."

You could, but the movie Blade Runner is very different from the Phillip K. Dick story that inspired it.

 

[Kitty Chan]

It is tough. I want to be kind, civil, and fair with strangers, but I’d feel like I was abusing the word love to say I love them. I don’t know them, or what they want out of life. I’m not going to sacrifice my day to, say, help a stranger move, just because he asks, but I’d do it for my family and friends no questions. I also get uncomfortable when strangers, or even distant family, tell me they love me. To say you love someone, I think you need to have the effort and intimate knowledge of the other person to back you up. It bugs me when people use the word too flippantly (Many religions do this--it feels good to claim benevolence--but without the effort it’s seems to me to be simple self-pleasuring).

I too am enjoying these posts, and I see that zaayrdragon has touched on different "kinds" "types" whatever label one wants but there seems to be different sorts of Love.

And loving your fellow person is hard. I was reading CS Lewis this summer and he was speaking about loving your neighbour as yourself and what that meant.

The nut shell of it would be to look at how you think of yourself, what things do you allow yourself. Do you allow yourself off days, good days, are you unhappy with yourself sometimes, or proud at other times. That which you apply to yourself you should apply to others.

I agree when you say others who are distant say they love you but maybe we need to define love in terms that reflect the situation, like zaadragon touched on. I know what you mean by saying its flippant but maybe we need to get our minds away from the hollywood version and see that Love as a lot of us have pointed out here is perhaps more fareaching than maybe we realise.

And I gotta say in that context brings me back to say what I said in the start is that Love is eternal. Its that grey area someone said a bit back that cannot be labeled.

 

[Marquis de Carabas]

I love everybody, and I mean it. However, in the grand JREF Forum Tradition of Redefining the Sh&# Out of Words to Suit Your Position (and Capitalising Words Unnecessarily), I should probably state what I mean by love.

Love, to me, is quite simple. It means merely the honest desire for another person's happiness. My above statement translates to "I wish everyone was happy." Not really all that hard to do, really.

All the various "kinds" of love are just different levels of that desire.

At the lowest level, we find people I've never met (and a few who I have, who have fallen out of my good graces). I do want them to be happy, but am not willing to do much to bring it about, though I will try to avoid doing anything to thwart it.

A general love for humanity may cause me to extend more help to such an individual than normal, but I admit that this depends greatly on my mood.

Moving up, we find casual acquaintances. I'll do a bit more here, at least listen to them gripe if they need an ear, or buy them lunch if we meet at a deli. I like to see these people smile and laugh, but won't sacrifice too much for their behalf.

I don't generally tell people from these two groupings I love them, not because such would be dishonest, in my view, but that it would be useless.

Further on, we have the people I call friends. Honestly, this is a tiny bunch, because here we have people I'd really go out on a limb for. These are the people I would drive all night for to help with any little thing that needed fixing. These are the people I strive to make happy just randomly, not just to help in times of trouble, but to bring joy when times are good anyway.

Then, family. The amount of sacrifice is the same as for friends, really, but I count them separate because the chances of family getting demoted down the list are slim indeed. It's harder to fall out of my good graces if you're blood, mostly, I think, due to kin selection.

And romantic love. Ideally, this would be the person (or persons--hey, you do what you gotta do) whose welfare you cared about truly as much as your own. Practically, it never quite gets there, of course, but the striving seems to give us a purpose that sometimes else is lacking.

Obviously, this list isn't really as cut-and-dry as I've made it. Boundaries are fuzzy (except between family and romance; that one's pretty crisp ), and there's a more or less smooth continuum of levels, rather than such neat groupings. And I don't walk around with a love calculator in my head to figure out exactly how much sacrifice each person is due. Call this the distilled version.

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I didn't want to march off on a tangent above, but if anyone is in the dark about "kin selection," this should help.