Love

Imo love is a feeling, and feelings are called feelings because they aren't thoughts. Or at least, I've found it true in my experience that feelings just kind of *are.* They am that they am, so to speak. We can apply thought and say, "aha, that's why I love" but in the end maybe it's our higher self, total body brain, spirit, or whatever, that's in charge of the emotional side of things and operations on a set of laws that our consciousness as we know it just can't grasp.

Or maybe I spend too much time philosophizing

For me, love is a lasting life changing link across the wide web of the Force. Those come in various flavours... love is about caring for another more than caring for ourselves. Wanting their happiness more than we prioritise our own. And like any of those big life-changing links, it's fragile and can swiftly slip into anger, or greed, or envy. But at the core of it, even if that pure intention becomes alloyed to others, is a very real altruism directed at a single person, another node in the grand system.

For my part I don't see any reason to discriminate between living and dead people as objects of love. The second the person I love is out of sight, they may as well be dead in terms of my reliance on recollections of them. Whilst we ourselves may never hope to see dead loved ones again, many people do, in heaven, the next life or simply longing for them to return. I don't find these functionally different to, say, my loved one waking to the shop. Even if they're hit by a bus and killed, my desire for them to return and to be with them won't fundamentally change in that instant... nor, really, when I learn of their death. While the yearning may take on a more tragic character, I'll still be wishing they'd jangle their keys in the door lock.

ReallyRiver wrote:

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: Love is unconditional attachment, nothing else. And as James says, you can't love the dead, only the ideas and experiences that dead thing represents to you personally. So to take that further and to answer the OP question, I have loved a furry horse that I met on the internet. It was not the person I loved but the concept he represented.

I'm curious about what I'm seeing as a bit of duality here (though of course it's entirely possible I'm just not understanding properly). How is it that you believe it's possible to love a concept, but not someone who has passed on from their material form?

I suppose it's all relative according to how you define "someone" after the body dies. When a person dies we don't continue to love the dead body, only what that body represents in the person you loved. The question then becomes where is that "person" after death? I personally don't believe a conscious, in tack entity continues on after death. The energies that were that person go on but that combination that was that individual do not. So all that is left are the experiences and the concepts that person represented to you. And those only go on inside of us.

It's been a long time since I visited this thread

But I'd like to offer an answer to my own question. An answer provided by Matthew Stover in the book Star Wars: Traitor...

Love is nothing more than the realization that two are one; that all is one.

Streen wrote:

Love is nothing more than the realization that two are one; that all is one.

Agreed. We love nothing more than ourselves, and if we are all connected, to hate another is to hate self. Open hate, I find, is an reflection of self.

It's unfortunate that English lumps so many different concepts under the word "love" - it makes it difficult to be very precise in discussing the nature of it. Ancient Greek does better, with different terms for the different concepts. Within that approach, some forms of love are unconditional, some are highly conditional. Some are based in the perception of becoming "one" - others are built on the attraction or acceptance of difference. Even one relationship may transition through several different of these types of love, from the romantic impulse (which may be very illusionary or self-reflective) to the enduring kind that keeps a persistent bond even when the physical source is removed. Physical death will end the physical forms of love (at least, one would hope so), but for me, we are far more than just our physical bodies, and death is just another form of physical absence (which can be seen as temporary, depending on one's personal beliefs.) I personally place less emphasis on love as a feeling - actions to me are the test of whether the "love" is substantial or a projection.

As for experiences, I've run the gamut of types, I believe. Probably the most important lesson so far was found in loving another Initiate, and realizing that for both of us to continue our journeys at the differing levels we needed to, we'd have to end our marriage and move on, transitioning a romantic bond to another form. The process of discovery sometimes involves a lot of strain, and sometimes it really is the willed actions that get you through it.