What is Love ?

There are many different kinds of Love.. love for Jesus or God or a Deity or a Religious Guru, Love for Country, Love for a Team, and more... here we will discuss only Love in the context of our daily life....

But to understand Love or what it means let's first see the context in which we live right now and how we exist... it will be easier to understand if you have read my previous articles.


And the path which brought us here and locked in this cage is the path of wisdom, knowledge, and experience gained over a million years, maybe more...

We need to understand a few things to understand duality or conflict before we go in the actual question.

We speak of Non-Violence, Happiness etc...But how do we define the idea of Non-Violence, Happiness, Non-jealousy, Non-aggressiveness, Non-greediness, Pleasure, etc. ???

The thought of Non-Violence comes only from the thought of violence and similarly for others. Similarly the thought of Happiness and Pleasure comes from the thought of Sorrow, Pain, Loss and Greed. In more simple words..imagine if we had two or more suns ..then the thought of night or stars would have never surfaced... not impossible... so if there was never any violence..then the thought of non-violence would not have come...

If we can confront hate, anger, pain, aggression, violence directly to its very root cause then we might achieve something but if try to move from one state to the other say from pain to pleasure then we cannot achieve anything and we will continue to live in duality and conflict and the struggle with that...

Similarly if we approach the Question: What Love is - we need to approach it with a free mind - free from prejudice, romanticism, free of motive, free of sentiments, the million definition in books and elsewhere, and free of all our personal emotional equations with the word...

What is Love ?
The most common answer we receive...
Yes, I think I know what is Love ( with a smile)

And this is where we put a stop to ask ourselves what really love is...If we really want to know what is love we should ask it without prejudicing our mind with personal experiences, emotions and opinions as otherwise we will close the door of perception of knowing the real meaning

Though everyone has a different opinion we can do some generalization of majority opinion that Love is a feeling which provides pleasure to our senses ( at an adolescent level we can attach words like sharing, caring, and other feelings etc. again which results in pleasure)

To elaborate : Love is a combination of the thought of desire, the memory of some experiences which gave us pleasure and chasing that image of pleasure in our mind or trying to achieve that state.
If we do not equate Love with pleasure then we can get rid of Fear, Anxiety and all the other things with it. If we can get out of the conflict of ?I am Loved? and ?I am not Loved? and chasing the memories and those images of pleasure and desire. As they will only result in conflict, sorrow, fear and frustration. Love is something beyond passion, desire and pleasure as love cannot survive in conflict.

Finally.... Love is Compassion in all sense....and in all its manifestation...
We will not be able to appreciate the beauty of this word without freeing ourselves from attachment

The Mind

The Human mind has created many things... but the three things important to us today are science, commerce and religion... I designed the picture above to make a graphic depiction of the three components rather the three powerful destructive elements.

Please dont read this ...

I must also say that no body is forcing you to read this blog... but i would be happy if you go through the collected wisdom from many thinkers including me and ask some basic questions to yourself....

Maybe you will feel that the world is much nicer today than it was with so much advancement and convenience...why bother with the mind...

So please do not bother... let their be a killing of a girl child every five minutes in India , let the father sell his kids for his daily bread in africa... let the girl be sold to a brothel in bangladesh... let the powerful nations make missiles for the next 100 years... let bin laden kill innocent lives in the name of his religion... let commuters get bombed in local trains... let me loose a million soldiers across borders... let the famine flourish in africa for another 100 years... lets watch television and entertain ourselves with the dangling head hold by the hairs by some terrorist... lets watch the final swing of saddam from the gallows... lets not bother... with all the violence, pain, conflict, sorrow, war and be happy with our pizza and let go and do the same routine work at our office for the next 50 years...

We can be happy with the outer world with so much advancement etc.. but again the inner world will remain same.. the inner world is what which controls the outer world and science and technology and all its manifestations... a violent mind full of conflict and destruction and which is self-centered cannot bring in non-violence...

Mind and body

Some theories also suggest a relation between mind, body and breadth and mentions that if you control any of the two you the third will complement the others...

First let us keep one thing very clear..the body has nothing to do with mind... maybe a healthy diet and good way of living will give you a mind which is quite... but it is the other way always ... meaning the mind always influences the body and its habit and all... and also breath is just one one of the many bodily functions...

Our mind with the thought inside destroys all kinds of real feeling - even the feeling of love... thought can offer only material pleasure.. and keeps us away from the path of love... it gives pleasure like the pleasure of having a pizza ... a glass of good wine... all these are a product of thought and just to exercise a control on this pleasure - by suppressing them has no real sense - it will only create conflict inside (like my many friends who go on a diet....) and compulsion... body has no role with mind... whereas the mind with its judgments, prejudices, its own interest creates all problem... if you have a healthy mind which is aware - ( awareness without thought influencing it), full of vigor you will be sensitive. And then the physical part of yours will function at its best - the body or the physical being of any living organism has a natural intelligence - and can function on its own - its only our mind which spoiled it by habit, taste and external influences, strictures and so called advertisements... so we must begin only with mind and not with the body... here by mind ..our thought and various manifestations of thought...
Also, we should not try to tackle our mind... instead create a blank page free of any prejudice, past, belief, guidelines and knowledge... like when you walk on the green grass and enjoy the early morning sun glistening on a dew drop of a just born green leaf....when u observe something without knowledge influencing it and can appreciate it truly....

So What...

Some people might ask so what... life goes on on its own..why bother with all these stuff...

My answer is "Nothing " ... there are many more things.. but this philosophy...( i am not alone... I am just a participant thinker...) covers ALL aspect of human life and existence... we can of course ignore the questions raised.. and continue... with life...

You can forget all these and do what you have been doing for the past so many years - the coder can continue to code for the next fifty years... the peon can get tea for the nest 30 years... the driver can drive for the next 20 years.... people can switch on their TV sets and listen to news for the next 50 years... bin laden can go on abusing innocent lives for the next 509 years..science can throw out emissions for the next 100 years... the beggar can beg for the next 50 years... the director can aspire for the next 30 years... couples can fight for the next 20 years.... I can write poery for the next 10 years...nations will re-arrange our boundaries for the next 100 years... philosophers can invent new philosophies for the next 100 years and yet fail to make people secure... the church can spread their doctrines for the next 1000 years.... US can produce the latest missiles for the next 100 years... and so on and so forth live in a world with perpetual conflict.... nothing matters...

Of course it will give us an illusion that the world is much better and convenient and advanced ... but Sandy..that is the outer world.. the inner world with all its conflict, pain, sorrow and fear will remain still the same...and of course there will be unrest and revolution and destruction... but what they will cut is the tree and not the root... which feeds the conflict, the division, the fear... hope Lafa is listening too... you can rob a bank... or paint a whole country red... but unless you dig inside and destroy the roots ... many a reds will come and fade away into mediocrity...

The civilization will go in rotation.... destroy - build - destroy - build... and man will never have peace.. never be secure... and will always live with fear..ultimately destroying himself... in a cyclic pattern... but each circle a bit bigger than the last one... until we reach the biggest infinite one.... non-violence cannot come out of a mind with conflict or with violence....

Questioning can purify the mind

Only questioning can purify the mind... questioning which is not a product of our thought process...

Nearly all the religions are based on books some one and some several...but none of them allows you to question or doubt... if you question the entire religious world in the west, east and all paces crumbles down in one day... but questioning, doubting something purifies our mind and can only give us the most clear and bright picture of everything. But questioning something is a process with a flow... like if u believe something first and then question you may go from certainty to uncertainty..while the other way round if u start with a blank slate maybe you will reach a level of certainty and strength.... otherwise if we just go into questioning if there is something beyond this material world ... you will get caught in the net of many organized institutions spreading the illusion of security.

We are correct when we think that the mind has also achieved something in the field of science, technology, communication, art, literature, medicine, transport....but psychologically we are stiill the same with our animalistic mind...still with the same conflict with the same insecurity.Your body and mine is different, we exist in different places, maybe speak different languages, eat different foods and are different entities in all physical sense, but only our physical body is an individual - not our mind... the consciousness is not an individual entity.... from the very beginning it was only one... the individually or self centered nature is only an illusion contributed by thought.

We have always learn from questioning... we questioned if the world was really flat... we questioned if the sun was really moving around us... if there is anything on the other side of the ocean... similarly though it may sound preposterous or crazy maybe we need to question the basic structure of our society and nation which breeds materialism, sorrow, pain, greed, hatred. Maybe its too early maybe this civilization like many others will destroy and a new one will come which will grow a bit further... the physical evolution is not yet complete ... but maybe on the final phase....and maybe it will take a million years and many more civilizations before we see the mind evolve into being one.... and instead of thinking that i am an individual we start thinking that my problem is also others and we all share the same conscious mind and maybe from there thought will convert into complete actions - actions based on high moral standards and which generate love and compassion !

Religion is an institution build on the foundation of human insecurity...

Religion should have been the arm which dissipates scientific knowledge for the betterment of living but it never happened in that direction. From the day we started living in a clan, marked our territories, our flock of cattle our women ... the illusion of security was developed in our mind... human beings have a tendency of following.. follow the leader, the religious guru, the philosophies, the beliefs.... and this nature of following breeds from the sense of security. In the early days ... the two men who had the strongest power were the ones who had the muscle... and the other one was the aged ... with wisdom..who knew when the seasons will change, when to plant the seeds, which herbs comes to cure, which stones can be used for arms.... and he enjoyed some privileges... and the foundation of priesthood was formed... for quite some time they enjoyed almost equal and in some cases greater power than the ruler...( we even find coronations happening now with a religious leader...) ... Anyways..down the ages as we accumulated knowledge man has started inquiring.... if there is something beyond this daily life... the daily pain, the conflict , the sorrow, the daily routine ... if there is something meta physical beyond our known realm... and the entire domain of religion got institutionalized but like the earliest times even now they survive and flourish on the same basis of insecurity.... and fear.

And also the fear of death ...which has played an important role in strengthening the foundation of religion... let me explain.. the feeling of security is there when you live in constancy... the end of constancy is insecurity... and death means the end of attachment and the fear of leaving everything behind you....and so we went towards religion as it provided the assurance of heaven of resurrection and even of re-incarnation....

Our brain is conditioned over a million years by accumulation of knowledge, experience and our pain and sorrow and fear..and since the earliest time we are always seeking security - as security of mind and our physical existence as it will bring our mind to a totally different level - a different state.... but the sense of security still remains an illusion... in both the physical and mental world...and that's where the thought creates gods, saviors, new philosophies, and the priests, the psychoanalysts, the religious gurus who make merry of the situation to catch you in their net... the mind also plays it part in building an illusion of security in the form of many a things like vastu, numerology, crystals, ying & yang, zen, yoga.

There can be no good from religions which give strictures, which binds people, encages the mind from questioning, which makes one group of people hate the other, which divides people - the only religion can be living with a true sense of morality and integrity where the mind does not follow thoughts and actions flow out of only love and compassion.