Love

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.

When I originally posted here, I wasn't sure how to talk about my experiences of love without first finding and sharing my own definition of love.

Now that I've done that, I'm not sure how to share my experiences.... heh...

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?

Streen wrote: Anne Hathaway countered that we love people who have died. In her character's particular point of view, she loved someone she hadn't seen in 10 years.

So what is Love? I know, that's an impossible question, and I think anyone who thinks they know the answer may be fooling themselves. I, for example, have been in love with a woman I haven't seen in 8 years.

I've been deeply 'in love' with someone for about 12 years. Over the last 10 or so of them we've only seen each other a small handful of times, and barely spoken. And yet, I ask myself every single day - can you actually know someone you haven't seen in a long time, or someone you see very rarely? Can you really be in love with someone you don't know? Or are you just in love with the idea of that person?

When we have that depth of feeling for someone we can fall into the trap of thinking that we are connected to them on some sort of spiritual soulmate level where we just magically 'know' them without perhaps much interaction needed. In the case of someone we haven't seen in a long time, this feeling is rooted in what we once felt that we knew about someone (which may not even have been accurate in the first place) and tricks us into forgetting that people change. Not just in terms of our haircut or our views on a particular subject - when I look at myself I see someone in many ways very different in essence to the person I was 10 years ago, as a result of the experiences I have undergone, so how on Earth would someone else who has racked up 10 years of unknown experiences in the interim not also have changed hugely?

Surely the only way we can truly know someone is through sustained open and honest dialogue, perhaps combined with lengthy observation of their behaviour and actions - strong familial/platonic ties notwithstanding, if we have not had access to those things, can we really be in love?

In my case, although I feel that I am in love and my theorising seems to make little difference to that feeling, I suspect that I'm in love with a fictional person and that if I was to have a chance to exchange some of that open and honest dialogue with her, I would find that the person I've been thinking about all these years is simply a bundle of redundant memories tangled up with 10 years of mental embellishments. Although the distance (of space, time or both) usually feels like a curse in these situations, perhaps it is the very thing that facilitates the 'love' - if we had remained close to them we would have been more exposed to their flaws, less able to cherry-pick the things that contribute to our fantasy image of their being on some pedestal of God-like perfection. Sometimes in order to get closure on something we need to feel that we have been hurt, we need to feel aggrieved - although the situation might hurt us, it's conveniently difficult for someone to hurt us (and thus for us to 'get over it' and move on) if we have no real interaction with them.

In the case of loving someone who has died - I guess that their character hasn't changed over time in that same way? But the longer that time goes on, the more unreliable our memories become - the more those mental embellishments creep in, a little like Chinese whispers - so although our loved one may not have changed, can we trust that it is still actually an entirely accurate version of that person that we are remembering? I've not yet lost anyone that I've been extremely close to, so I'm just hypothesising and certainly not asserting that anyone who does remember their lost loved ones with crystal clarity is mistaken. And similarly to vladucard, I wonder if there is a difference between loving someone who has died, and being in love with them? When you are in love with someone who then dies, does the love change into a different kind of 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.