Love Birds (.... and plants and animals)

Wikipedia defines love in two different contexts:

Love1 is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment.

Love2 is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection.

We all need love - humans, plants, and animals. Usually, when we talk of it, we talk about the love that is limited by a circle. That circle is often one's immediate family, friends, city, or country. The problem is that the limited form of love carries with itself a lot of attachment. The smaller the radius of the circle, the greater the attachment. For one's mother, father, spouse, child, brother, or sister, usually one has a lot of love along with a lot of attachment. And for the rest of the world, there is little love and almost no attachment.

Coming back to the first statement - we all need love. What kind of love do we all need? We all are happy to get parental affection, soul-mate's love, love of siblings, love of child, love of friends, love of relatives, compassion of other human beings with whom we interact, affection of animals which we play with, affection of plants which provide food for us, and affection of every other entity of nature which keeps us alive and contributes to our well-being. Imagine what would happen if all the animals around us become hostile, or the sun and the clouds get permanently angry. Somewhere, there is a feeling of compassion that guides the world and sustains it.

Now let's think about the human love that we practise. As parents, we have infinite care and warmth for our child but our attachment for her keeps us worrying and suffering. As lovers, we have immense care and attraction for our beloved but our attachment makes us possessive and jealous. As friends, usually, we have lesser attachment and an undefined bond of understanding and compassion. It seems, if the attachment part is removed from the equation, the world will suddenly become free of a lot of suffering. But the moment we are born, we start accumulating attachments till death do us and attachments apart.

The truth of life is death. If, by some chance, we come to know that death is not a full stop but a comma, which leads us to the next phrase in the sentence, and that the sentence is infinitely long, sans any full-stop, perhaps we will live in a different way. Is there anything we can hold on to forever? Our mother, father, lover, brother, sister, friend, pet, relative - everyone will be gone away and nothing can be done about it. But if we come to know, at least, that wherever they will go, they will be safe and comfortable and find new family and friends who will love them as immensely as we do, most of our worries will leave us.

Life is impermanent. But what if we are not and we can realize that before death? How would that change our way of living? If in the next birth, someone else would be our mother and we can even be born as a plant or an animal, how would that change us today? It seems that just knowing the absolute truth of the universe and us can change all our priorities and way of living. Wouldn't our circle of love expand infinitely if we realize that we may be born millions of times and every being around us has been or will be our mother, sister, friend or lover in some life? Wouldn't our circle of love expand if we realize that every living and non-living thing around us is necessary for the existence and survival of the universe which is highly interdependent? We have memory of only one lifetime and hence it is almost impossible to accept such a truth till we get the memory of all lives, if there have been more than one. What if there is a way to realize the absolute truth of life and the universe? What if there is immense peace and joy in that way? What if as we proceed along the way, every moment that we live becomes more joyous than the best moments of our life, sans any attachment? Sounds attractive.

Extraa Shots:

Hatred (or hate) is a deep and emotional extreme dislike, directed against a certain object or class of objects. It seems hatred and love1, both are tied with attachment. If you love1 or hate someone or something, you have developed attachment. Love1 and hate can be considered opposites just as like and dislike are opposites, since love1 and hate are extreme forms of like and dislike.

The opposite of love2 can be love2', i.e., absence of love2, i.e., apathy. It may be cruelty or mercilessness as well. Philosophically, the opposite of apathy is flow. Love2 and flow seem to be strikingly similar.

Some believe the opposite of love is fear, some believe it's jealousy. At this juncture, I don't know the true meaning of love. There seems to be far more meaning and potential in love than our perception and understanding of ourselves and the universe. Hence, I don't know the opposite as well.

Courtesy: Link

Disclaimer: This post is more about a few of the many questions that trouble me than anything else. You keep asking until you get the answers.