Types of Love - ?
Love of nature. Love of God. Fraternal love, filial love, romantic love. Types of love or love typologies – this seems to be how love is often discussed.
What do you think of this approach?
What about love of dogs? Cats? Aunts? Second cousins…?
It seems to me that we can get a better idea of what love is by noticing what our different experiences of love have in common. Inventing another kind of love for each type of person or thing that we love may not really be so informative about what love is.
Reference – Original Faith: Chapter One, What Love Is
What do you think of this approach?
What about love of dogs? Cats? Aunts? Second cousins…?
It seems to me that we can get a better idea of what love is by noticing what our different experiences of love have in common. Inventing another kind of love for each type of person or thing that we love may not really be so informative about what love is.
Reference – Original Faith: Chapter One, What Love Is
Posted by Paul at 8:02 PM Permalink
40 Comments:
Blessings!
Bluebirdy
grieving dont help no one
u have to find laffs in life
we all going to die one day
not just the terminally ill
who knows, I might go before any of u guys
I live in terror land
we have had a series of serial blasts in Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmededabad and who knows about tommorow
tommorow it might be mumbai where I live
then again I cud get knocked down by a drunk Salman Khan
or malaria, or BIRD FLU, or ...
very few ppl in India die of old age
I’m left w/ no diagnosis. Hadn't realized there were cases like that until I became one, but long story short is when you don't get a diagnosis after 15 years and have doctors at places like NIH and Johns Hopkins wishing you good luck, you're unlikely to get one.
Severe osteo, peripheral neuropathy, skin lesions consistent w/ sarcoid though I don't have that, connective tissue degeneration and muscle spasm/taut bands throughout my musculature. But what's driving it all is unknown.
VISHESH, first comment: A force in the sense that other feelings and motives are also forces, prompting people to different sorts of actions?
JIM: So true. People often put the sick and the old in a category of pure “other” – like it has nothing to do with them…
VISHESH, second comment: Not sure I’m following...
there is another book that must be read in conjunction with yours
its for those who are going to die of old age
read excerpts
here
For comparisons of OF with a widely known book, The Power of Now comes as close as anything I can think of - not in terms of style, but there's a degree of overlap in the message.
VISHESH: I had to do some thread-rearrangement and activate comment moderator around an unhelpful comment. I sure wish you wouldn't do that.
Ha ha, kidding... It wasn't anybody who's a "regular" here.
The love of Ants is known as 'Hymenopteric' Love, which I find very misleading..OH Awhnts..sorry...
I was always a little nervous and confused about loving Aunts and kissing Cousins because I had heard that some of mine had already been 'once removed'..
some twice!
so they must crossed the line?
You must be very excited about the Book?
Do you feel Author-itarian?
you defined 'love' so well in 'original faith'.
i am reading excerpts here and there. i am not a disciplined reader. but like love, i flow with the wind.
And I agree about the message.
LIARA: Yes to all that except that for myself, I’d want to qualify your last four words with “in theory” and “I think…” That is, it enriches to the degree that a person is aware of it. And it’s conceivable to me that a small portion of humanity is truly lacking in this area – I’m thinking of sociopathic criminals. But I don’t know enough about the subject.
DONNNNN: (Note my strict adherence to the correct spelling) – I would add, in a similarly scholarly fashion, that Linnnnnda Rundstedt – Rundstedt? Anyway, that’s what spell check says…
I always thought it was Ronstadt.
Anyway, according to Linnnnnda Rundstedt, “Love is a Rose.”
But I only get to feel Author-itarian when people such as yourself read the book. Please… don’t make me send a healthy relative across the border and wrestle you to the ground, sit on you, and read to you aloud. Yes – it could happen. I have some overweight relatives, and they can read.
Spell check won’t let me say wrestle with an “a” for a humorous effect; that’s annoying… I guess it knows I’m serious. That spell check – knows everything that’s not in Wikipedia. So seriously, I really would like you to read it exactly because you’ve been my longest-running “resident skeptic” (turned humorist). Since OF is in the religion and spirituality subject area, it’s hard to get skeptics to pick it up because they assume it’s something that propounds doctrine.
The book is a-doctrinal – doesn’t speak for or against religious belief. I wanted to put the focus on something else for a change.
I know, I know, the postage from Canada... But I’ve got the ambulatory relatives, and some of them are really big…
MISTI, I’m glad… But as for Donnnnn, he could end up dead meat. We have to hope he sees my comment in time...
i made sure he would.
i'm twice the snitcher today.
"LOVE." i love it. :)
KATHY: People have been in love with love for a long time but the world's a mess.
What's the problem, do you think?
Btw, thanks for stopping by and sorry to be so absent from your blog but you've gone audio-video and I don't have the ability to function that way at this point. Probably won't get that back...
i have a copy of your book in my hand. i am reading it during my break time at work.
outstanding!
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
And I'm still reading your really
outstanding Original Faith.
you asked: "People have been in love with love for a long time but the world's a mess.
What's the problem, do you think?"
could it be that we humans have an unrealistic view of how the world should be like?
www.beliefnet.org is another place we can get a column writer to feature your book, Paul!
I'm celebrating inside, even if my body doesn't let me celebrate physically. As of July 31, I outlived the doctor's prediction for how long I would live! Only God can decide that!
Blessings all!
Blessings
Bluebirdy
I can’t handle hard copy so I’ve never had a regular reader’s experience of my book – only saw it on the computer screen. Hope it’s enjoyable to read; it was deeply enjoyable to write. Most of the creative work was done while I was still healthy. For fourteen wonderful years, working on the manuscript was a big part of my life.
KRYSTYNA: Same to you then! (See above.) It really does give me a good feeling to think of people being able to enjoy what I wrote.
In the early years of the disease I honestly felt some jealousy watching the lives of my peers go on as normal while overnight I found myself starting to lead the life of an old man at age 37.
A real turning point for me was 9-11. I was in earshot of the plane going into the Pentagon. A lot of things fell into place, and within about a year I’d returned to doing some work on the manuscript.
KATHY: I’ll be looking in on your blog then. Glad you still do quotes; you seem to have an endless source of good ones.
Could be - that we have an unrealistic view of what the world should be like. And at this point it seems to me that as a species, we’re the ones currently determining, to a large degree, what’s realistic or unrealistic. Our problems aren't the lions and tigers and bears anymore...
BLUEBIRDY: You’re on a wavelength here that could be very helpful. That would be great if anyone could direct something toward Beliefnet, and you’ve given me some further thoughts… I’ll post about them, probably next post or the one after that.
But wait till you’ve read the book! What if you think it’s terrible! If I have "fans" who haven’t read the book yet, then maybe I’m in danger of, I don’t know, starting a personality cult and becoming a fascist dictator.
People hate it when that happens.
Seriously, I admire you’re spirit. Unless something happens to our health or that of someone close to us, I think it’s often hard to imagine how tough a person has to be to exist in a physically fragile condition.
On your second comment see my reply to:
KAREN: Tricky to define for sure. In college I majored in psych and English and then got master’s degrees in religious studies and counseling, so I ended up reading quite a bit about love.
None of what I read informs my first chapter, which sees love as having both a feeling and a cognition-like aspect – with the two being powerfully related.
This idea of love came into focus over a period of about seven years. It’s honesty the best thing I’ve read on love, which sounds ridiculous for me to say, having written it. But the whole book was written more like a poem than prose – I mean, the process. It’s nothing I “figured out” – I’m just not that smart. It came on its own. I only made time and room for it - basically, got out of its way.
Blessings,
Lance
www.lancessoulsearching.com
I feel similarly on your "distribution" idea. We're each called to own up to a love that we don't own.
Love is a word, anyone can use it, and mean by it whatever they want. Only in language is there such democracy; not in the political world. Are we to have some kind of dictatorship of the holy? No. Love is open to all, sacred, profane. If you want to see only one kind, you can too.
It's only a word. Can you prove otherwise?
"What's love got to do with it?" asks Tina Turner in a song
I am doing my first giveaway and wanted to let you know since you have been a visitor for so long. All the best.
Erin
Here on the blog, where my assumption has to be that most people haven’t read it yet, I'll need to reply to you at a very general level or most people would “lose the thread,” so to speak…
I think that the subject matter of chapter one corresponds well with the meaning that people generally assign to the word love. I’d bet that if “love” were deleted from the chapter title and throughout the chapter, it would be easy for people to fill in the blank and know what the topic was.
This is to say that even if one were to disagree or not entirely agree with the chapter’s conceptualization, it’s far from arbitrary with respect to the generally understood meaning of the word.
Of course, definitions are certainly arbitrary regarding the particular sounds we make to refer to things. We could, for example, call love “splaw.” Well, OK, maybe not that…
PECOS BLUE/ERIN: Thank you for sharing the link –
how does that sound or feel? teehee.
It seems to me that people get too tangled up in "degrees of love" (I love my lover this much but my cousin only this much) and "types" of love.
I feel that love is always the same, but I am motivated it to express it differently in different cases.
HAYDEN: Now you seem to be getting at not only quite a bit of chapter one, but also my next post…
I don’t think I’ll have time to put it up tonight but honestly, the first draft was written BEFORE I read your comment, lol…
HAZZBUZZ: Do you mean that you can’t love someone until you understand them? How well or in what way?
Can you love a stranger?
I think this gets back to the metaphor in the Garden of Eden... we took a bite of the fruit that made us think we can make moral and logical determinations, and instantly we were separated from "God," and "God is love."
I'm not disputing that, Paul. But I strongly doubt that the attributes of love which you described in Chapter 1 are common.
What is extremely common is to agree with statements that sound good and holy. I suspect that people generally will agree with the statement "God is Love" without experience of God or love; or any basis to link the two abstract ideas together.
Except repetition, conditioning and sentiment. And some vague feelings.
It's perhaps that the understanding comes along with love and they grow together. As for loving strangers, I think maybe that is possible but you would have to leave yourself wide open, and then who knows what might happen!! scary thought! must make breakfast.
Paul your book just came in the mail today so I am excited to read it!
Blessings
Bluebirdy
VINCENT: Your response to the chapter is unique to date. That’s why some sort of forum for discussing the ideas in the book would be great. I have a couple thoughts but want to wait another week or so. I'd like the number of people who have read the book to go up enough to make it more practical to initiate something like that. Along the lines of my first comment, I think going into detail about the book’s contents on these threads would make them less interesting to nonreaders. So I have to respond to your comment here with brief generalities:
The Reader is the Expert: It would be surprising if every aspect of a book that covers so much of inner life resonated with everyone. So if chapter one doesn’t speak to your personal experience, it just doesn’t – it’s your inner life and you’re the expert.
Language and Logic: Not sure if this was your intention, but to compare the chapter’s use of language and its development and interrelation of ideas with vague/pious platitudes would be inaccurate, and very much so.
HAZZBUZZ: In addition to the topics of loving and being loved, there’s the subject of relationships in which one may give and receive love and the reciprocity involved in maintaining them. This gets complicated fast, especially since in any such relationship, things are going on in addition to love.
BLUEBIRDY: I think that’s right – that while love is a feeling, it’s more than that. I look forward to learning what you think of the book.
I should mention that although I don’t anticipate using these discussion threads for detailed discussion of the book’s contents because I don’t anticipate that the majority of commentators will have read Original Faith, I’m always happy for emailed reactions. And I'm giving thought, thanks to your previous comment, on what sort of forum might address the book’s ideas in more detail.
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