Give love get love

Give love get love

The best way to understand anything is to love it and savor its beauty. Topic be
ing love I intend broaching it as a philophile [Lover of love]. Greek root phile
in means “loving”. When I did so, I found love to be,
1] Overwhelming wholesome flow of beauty
2] Divine
3] To understand it we have to be very religious.
1] True love is overwhelming wholesome flow of beauty
It is always the unstoppable and unstopped live wholesome flow of feeling of abu
ndance that happens and permeates everywhere in us and around us and into all re
alms of life. It is not any leveraged or labored emotion or activity going throu
gh a studied and planned process; it does not happen after analyzing the pros an
d cons and consequences; it does not happen in parts and transcends realm after
realm like physical, emotional, spiritual etc. Being always a live wholesome flo
w that happens we cannot dissect it into parts like any dead specimen and try to
understand it. When this flow happens we are just part of it and it is also par
t of us; it is not something that we create or produce to give happily; nor is i
t something that exists outside us for us to get it . So the very expression giv
e love get love can be included in the list of oxymorons.
Unfortunately the term Love has undergone enormous misunderstandings and mutilat
ions that its true meaning is hidden beneath a huge carapace of multiple connota
tions.
First the word Love is a universal live wire used for everything from the silly
to the sublime. Second, unfortunately, the verb love is used as a transitive ver
b. So when linguistically communicated love must have some external object or so
me external aspect of what we love. But every love and everyone’s love has uniqu
eness to it. That’s why the same thing or person is loved for different reasons,
at several levels and varying degrees of intensity. But real love with total in
tensity and intense totality goes beyond the external things and becomes one wit
h the spirit and soul of the beloved, that is, when the live wholesome flow happ
ens and two or more points in the flow get connected. As Song of Solomon puts it
, "I am my beloved, and my beloved is me." Reciprocity is embedded in Love. So w
hen we give love we get love. Tsekung asked, “Is there one word that can serve a
s a principle of conduct of life” and Confucius replied, “It is the word SHU mea
ning ‘reciprocity’ .So when you give love you can only get love. This is not a s
logan but a logical truth.
2] Love is divine.
We must have a communion with it [get connected]. When communicated our inadequa
te tools of communication dilute its true value and totality. Besides before com
municating we naturally tend to conceptualize by confining it to our own self im
posed limitations, whereas, in reality true love manifests in everything, it per
meates everywhere, it is a splendor to be savored and an indescribable wonder.
It is better to get absorbed in love than observing it or judging it. To observe
or to judge we need to perceive, and perception involves the processes of gradi
ng, categorizing, classifying etc and sieving them with our limited knowledge ba
se, experience and attitudinal reactions etc. so better love every moment of lov
e. Like divinity it is always pleasant and present, something live, there can ne
ver be a love was or love will be, love always is as the best definition of God
itself is “I am and not I will be”. As Germaine De Stael says "Love is the emble
m of eternity: it confounds all notion of time."
Therefore, in these aspects love is divine as it cannot be confined to concepts,
categories, classifications and chronology of past and future.
3] We must be religious know love.
The word religion means ‘linking of the part with the whole’ i.e. communion, fro
m the Latin roots re- again, ligare-to link. So the best way to understand love
is to be part of it, participate in it, get immersed into it with our heart and
savor its beauty. As Helen Keller remarks "The best and most beautiful things in
the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."
No writing on love can do justice without a reference to Plato who confirms my c
ontention that love is beauty, divine and it is best relished with participation
when he says that “Beauty [love] is eternal, unproduced, indestructible; neithe
r subject to increase or decay . . . All other things are beautiful through a pa
rticipation of it . . .
This is the divine and pure . . . the beautiful itself”.
Love is beauty as St. Augustine said "Love is the beauty of the soul."
this was written by my daughter B.Srividya studying in sixth standard for an ess
ay competition conducted by UN Information centre.