Daily Times

Kabir Das said, “I have learned a lot of knowledge but I could not become a scholar, on the contrary I have learned only two and a half words of the love, then I have become enlightened.”

Love is a mental or spiritual activity that produces a sentimental tendency toward others. Love is the most powerful emotion that a human being can ever experience. The strange thing is that almost nobody knows what love is. Why is it so difficult to define love? That is easy to understand if you know that the word “love” is not the same as one’s feeling of love.

The word love is used as an expression of affection towards someone else (I love you) but it also expresses pleasure (I love chocolate). To make it a little more complicated, the word “love” also expresses a human virtue that is based on compassion, affection and kindness. This is a state of being, that has nothing to do, with something or someone outside yourself. This is the purest form of Love. There is nothing more important than love in the life of human beings, after physical needs the most essential urge is love, love is like a spring breeze, it comes, and when it comes, it brings tremendous fragrance and beauty but it goes, when it comes it gives you the feeling as if it is going to remain forever and feeling is so strong, that you cannot doubt it. Love is only authentic when it gives freedom, without freedom the love is merely suppression and mental suffocation. The people often say that why love is not permanent and why love disappears after some time among two persons? but people do not think about the freshness and aliveness of love. The colours of the plastic flowers are always static, they do not discolour and welk, the real flowers always welk after some time and their freshness even decayed. Love is driving force of our life, it cannot deny you in every aspect of life, so if the mother does not have the love of her child, she will utterly not endure the severe labour pain. Any emotional scientist or psychologist cannot define properly the love, but they can only interpret their experiences regarding love. So at this moment, I cannot citate the love interpretation of father of psychology Sigmund Freud, because he interacted love directly to the sexual longings, I am leaving their thoughts to another article. The interpretation of love according to renowned German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is more important than the philosophy of love according to Sigmund Freud, Nietzsche said, “it is not the lack of love but the lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” Friendship is the fruit of love, you cannot separate love from friendhood and the essence of a friendhood is merely a realisation. Realization is an individual and free behavioural activity towards others, a realisation comes when you pledge one’s, so the real mystery of love is solely realization towards someone. You cannot lock love to one’s solely, it is a universal, collective, unbounded life-affirming phenomenon, you can live it, you can feel it, you can taste it, but you cannot define it, bound it and express it. The ancient Greek used seven words to define the different states of love:

To make it a little more complicated, the word “love” also expresses a human virtue that is based on compassion, affection and kindness

1: Storge: natural affection, the love you share with your family.

2: Philia: the love that you have for friends. These are seven different kinds of feelings. The love you feel for your partner is not the same as the love you feel for your mother. Even the love for your partner changes in time. You feel different emotions for different situations and people, but still, we use the same word. It is easy to understand that confusion is easy made while communicating. I can say “I love you” to two different people (and mean it), but I am feeling differently.

3: Eros: sexual and erotic desire kind of love (positive or negative)

4: Agape: this is unconditional love or divine love.

5: Ludus: this is playful love, like childish love or flirting.

6: Pragma: long-standing love, the love in a married couple.

7: Philautia: the love of the self (negative or positive).

The writer is a psychologist and a polymath