Thou Dost Love Me Cause I Love Thee . . .

 

Valentine Cup Cake

A sophisticate sees, comprehends, and realizes what is before her.  She has acquired a worldly wisdom through years of living and laboring.  If you have not labored, you do not have the know-how to love someone.  If you have not lived, you do not know how to love.  Love is work.  Work you do actively, consciously, unfailingly.  Love takes effort.  

Marilyn Monroe

Michael Douglas in Wall Street

An immature man or woman has a personal goal:  “I want to be loved.”  To be loved is immature; to be loved because you love another is mature.  So what do men and women do to acquire such love?  Men strive to be rich and powerful; women aspire to be attractive.  Both strive to be marketable packages in a world where material success serves as an outstanding value.  Of course, societal standards for marketable packages change with due course of time.

 

History of Love 

Eat, Pray, Love

Romance Novels

Movies

In Western culture, love is everywhere.  Romance heightens the market for girls and women.  People fall crazy in love in romance novels, literature, movies and life.  But in real life, “crazy-in-loves” fall out-of-love just as quickly as they had fallen with due time.  Love is not the idea of romance embedded in our culture that heavily washes out young, impressionable minds in a long drawn out repeat cycle.  Waa.  I know you feel let down.  It is not; the first step in loving is purging all of the silly, mindless static moving pictures and noises from the media which you have absorbed through your young years.  Your mother told you to get out and live instead of watching T.V. for a good reason.  Love is work which takes mastery.  Just as you master your work or areas of interest —mastery happens by learning the theory and practicing it.  Practice makes perfect, right?  As much as people hunger for love, few have actually mastered it.  In a society concerned with money, power, and success, who would be concerned with love?  Love is not profitable.  Love does not earn money.  Love comes without income.  You may think it is fruitless to learn to love someone.  Blah, money ill-spent!   

I.           Theory of Love

 

Separateness

Firstly, let’s take a look at the theory behind love.  Love is not many things.  People often feel separateness between oneself and others; they are detached from others.  So they want to overcome this separateness.  Join with another and blend harmoniously together.  But the first problem lies in blending well with another.  Are you oil and vinegar?  Or repel with one another?  Some will marry their spouses and still remain strangers in the same house perpetuating their separateness.  That is not love.  Love is not an orgiastic blend.  What is orgiastic blending? 

  

1.)     Intense and violent

2.)    Total personality in mind & body

3.)    Periodical/Transitory

Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke in 9 1/2 Weeks

50 Shades of Grey

Extreme and unrestrained, this blend turns out different outcome.  The hot love-making scene you watched on HBO/Cinemax/Netflix.  It is orgiastic blending.  Movies like 9 1/2 Weeks, 50 Shades of Grey are examples of orgiastic encounters.  Sex without love is orgiastic.  No bridge is formed which fills the gap between two human beings.  We live in an orgiastic culture.  

Alcohol and drugs are orgiastic allowing a person to temporarily escape separateness by covering up their guilt and remorse.   But after consuming drugs and alcohol, a man or a woman feels even more separateness.  So they revisit it again . . . and again . . . and again.  With each visit, it infests, haunts, and swarms inside of them.  Merely increasing the frequency and intensity of their intakes, drugs and alcohol lead them not to a turning point but to a pitch blackness. 

So what is not orgiastic?  Conforming.  We join in society by conforming.  As you conform to society, no intense or violent events occur.  But that is only partial answer to the problem.  Conformity is pseudo-unity.  Love is a desire for interpersonal fusion.  Often times, boys, girls, men, and women engage in immature love. 

Immature love is childish and infantile.  Most nice guys I have met fall into a category of . . . immature love.  Symbiotic love first occurs between mother-and-fetus.  Masochism is a passive form of symbiotic love.  A man or a woman may find themselves in a symbiotic relationship.  A girl or woman who submits is a parcel to another human being; she neither takes risks nor makes her own decisions.  Not yet independent, another person directs, guides and protects them.  She is an instrument of somebody/something.  No integrity lives in this blend.  None what so ever.  One person dominates; another simply submits.  Sadistic person commands, exploits, and humiliates; conversely the other person has been commanded, exploited, and humiliated.  Unfortunately, they cannot live without each other but have not yet gained the worldly wisdom to liberate from an unhealthy dynamic in a symbiotic relationship.  

Love preserves one’s integrity.  Love is active and giving; however, people have different means of giving to another. 

 

 

1.)  Only receptive, exploitative:  Giving is giving up something; sacrifice.

2.)  A marketing character:  gives to receive; otherwise he is cheated.

                     3.)    Non-productive:  “I refuse to give.”                   

 

 

Productive Person

3 Unproductive Light Bulbs; 1 Productive Light Bulb

 

Unproductive person refuses to give himself; he is poor and impoverished.  An impotent man is poor; he cannot give.  A frigid woman refuses to give.  On the other hand, a rich person gives to express his utmost potency.   Love is strength.  Love is powerful.  A productive person gives which fills him up inside with joy; furthermore, aliveness fills inside of him.  He or she gives because it enriches others which further enhance his aliveness.  To love is a power in an act of giving which takes character development.  Person may have to overcome certain boulders which lie before their destined exit:

1.)     Dependency

2.)    Narcissistic Omnipotence

3.)    Exploiting others

Spiritual Frequency

High Frequency in Spiritual Quest

You may remember the Biblical verse:  “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”  Person who gives has faith in his or her own powers; they rely on their own powers to attain their goals.  You may find spiritual individuals that give off heightened frequencies in the way they love others; they do not suffer from separateness.  Nevertheless, people are often afraid of giving. 

 

Learn to Rely on Your Own Powers

What is love?  Love is an “active concern for life and growth of that which we love.”  Erich Fromm defines love as an “active concern” for another human being. 

 

 

Watering Plants

1.)     Care:  Watering the plant shows that you care about it.  If you do not, you have no concern for it.  An example of a biblical character that had no concern for people was Jonah who was too afraid to warn the people of Nineveh.  Jonah runs away.

2.)    Responsibility/Duty:  Duty is imposed from the outside.  You respond to the needs of others:  expressed or unexpressed.  At Sunday school, you were taught to “Love Thy Neighbor.”  He is responsible for himself and for his fellow men.

3.)    Respect:  Sees a person as he is as a unique individual.  The keynote is “as he is,” absent from exploiting him.  Respect in love means to allow him to be himself.  He “grows and unfolds for his own sake and his own ways not for the purpose of serving me.” 

Shape him not what you need him to be but accept him as he is.  And you have to know him.  Shakespearean play has lines like, “Know Thyself,” “To Thy Own Self Be True.”  Know yourself; know your loved one also.           

Johnny Depp as Don Juan DeMarco

Then you may stumble upon few characters that simply lack masculinity.  Don Juans compensate for their lack of masculinity by playing up to his male role in sex.  Unsure of their masculinity, he is and remains a child emotionally.    

Immaturity

Emotional Maturity

An immature person says, “I love you because I need you.”  A mature person says, “I need you because I love you.”  An immature person says, "I want to be loved."  A mature person says, "I am loved because I love."    

Child's Drawing

How old were you the first time you gave something to your parents?  Most children around the age of 8 – 10 ¹/₂ are comfortable being loved; children have not yet learned to love.  (C.F. Sullivan)  Then the child learns to give by creating a drawing or doing some other activity for his mother.  In giving to others, you have to overcome your egocentric drive to fulfill your own needs.  At some point, giving becomes more gratifying, joyous than receiving.  Mature person is more loving than concerned with being loved.  Loving also abandons self-centered values.  Create the power of love by loving than receiving. 

 

 

Motherly Love

Fatherly Love

As a child, you experienced fatherly and motherly love which differs greatly from one another.  Fatherly love:  “I love you because you fulfill my expectations.”  Father expects certain things and sets principles upon the child.  Love is deserved.  Motherly love is unconditional and provides the security and cares physiologically for the child.  Motherly love is a hard task to take on in itself —loving the child unconditionally only to separate with him or her in the future.  Inevitably, she has to part with her child.  Mother who is happy and full of life is a blessing to the child.  When you grow up, you build up a motherly and fatherly conscience —if you do wrong, for example, your father disciplines you that helps you grow a healthy sense of reason and judgment.  Grow only a fatherly conscience and you grow to be harsh and inhuman; grow only a motherly conscience and you lack judgment and development.  Both are important for balanced growth.

 

 

A Domineering Mother

Neurosis can occur.  If a boy had a loving but overindulgent, domineering mother and a weak, uninterested father, for example, the boy seeks to receive love and be protected.  Fatherly love encourages the child to grow up with discipline, independence, and the ability to master oneself.  If a boy has a cold, unresponsive, and domineering mother, then the boy turns to the father for the missing link.  The boy becomes a father-oriented person.  He grows up completely about law, order, and authority.  So he lacks a balance of giving and receiving in a relationship.

 

 

Myth:  I love only one person.  Love is not restricted to only one individual.  If you love, you love not a specific individual but everyone else.  Your attitude changes to a loving one.  If I love one, I love everyone else.  Brotherly love excludes no one. 

 

  A.             Eros

 

Eros (making love)

Fact:  Eros is exclusive in a loving relationship.  A younger man has intense and exhilarating physical chemistry with multiple partners.  The physical intimacy is only an illusion of love; once it wears off, he feels more estranged from his partner.  The false sense of union diminishes and he feels  more separate from his partner afterwards; so he moves onto the next conquest, the next, and the next until he runs down to a diminishing ever-perpetuating cycle.  Some guy friends have shared this with me after they have a one night stand with a stranger:  “I got to get out of here.”  No union had been joined.  No intimacy had actually been shared.  Person lacks philia, brotherly love to others.  A guy who I once went on a date with was at high-risk of Eros and he practiced Eastern martial arts like Tai Chi to calm himself and discipline his daily routines.  He worked consciously to taper his physical desires by setting healthy habits and actively meditating.  He saw his Sensai regularly who coached him to retain his new lifestyle.  Discipline is one of the practices of loving; without discipline, you cannot love.  You may come across egotism a deux where two individuals are separate from the rest of the world while exclusively seeing each other.  That is not love.  If you get physically intimate with your partner in a healthy blend, you love the other from the essence of your being; you experience the essence of his or her being.  Erotic love exists only with some but not all.  With more fulfilling qualities, it is fit for an exclusive relationship.

  

Clark Gable & Joan Crawford:  Egotism a Deux

 B.              Self-Love

Love Yourself

Narcissus falls in love with his own image 

  Myth:  Self-love is a misdeed.  To love yourself is gold.  To love your own self is a virtue.  Love for oneself bridges the love for others.  At the other end of the spectrum, a narcissist is incapable of love.  William James explores inability to love a “stranger,” which is incapacity to love.  If you love yourself, you declare your life, happiness, growth, and freedom which are rooted in your capacity to love.  Your good fortune is rooted in your own capacity to love.  A selfish person only wants things for himself.  He is only interested in himself; he has no pleasure in giving; he lacks meeting others’ needs; he only judges everyone as usefulness to him.  He only sees himself.  You think he loves himself?  No, actually he lacks it.  He lacks care for himself which leaves him feeling empty and frustrated inside.  He only has a teeny love for himself.  A selfish person does not love another nor do they love themselves either.  Meister Eckhart shared his thoughts:  “If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself.  As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man.”  He who loves himself loves others equally. 

                                                 

Love Everyone Else Too

   C.        Love of God     

Michelangelo's Creation of Adam

Love of God is the highest value; God is a desirable good.  Monotheistic or polytheistic, religions fall behind the father-centered or mother-centered premise.  Monotheistic is widely practiced in the Western Hemisphere:  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Catholicism’s the Virgin Mary symbolizes mother-centered values.  When God banished everyone except Noah, it shows the laws of father-centered principles.  No man is God.  And if a man thinks so, he thinks himself as omnipotent which lacks the humility to love another human being.  Other religion delves into perceiving a man’s reality by transcending his own self.  “God and I are one.  By knowing God, I take him to myself.”    

Noah's Ark from the Book of Genesis:  Father-Centered law from God

                                          

Neurotic Love.  Love cannot be born out of a womb where streams of human flaws had not even been identified.  Neurotic love is an infantile attachment to his mother.  Mother-centered men feel like children; he wants his mother’s warmth, care, and protection.  Here is his personality:  charming and affectionate.  But his relationship to women is immature.  He wants to be loved.  If a woman does not live up to his phantastic expectation, he ends up having resentments towards her.  He resents her when she claims a life of her own.  He wants to be loved and protected.  He feels hurt when a woman does not condone his love for other women.  He rationalizes that his woman does not love him.  He confuses his affectionate behavior and desire to please with love concluding he has been treated unfairly.  They think they are great lovers.  His love life can be a big let-down.  When he is left alone, he clashes with his conflicts.    Clark Gable is an example of a mother-centered neurosis which ended his relationship with Carole Lombard's —her rushing to his side to hinder his cheating with another woman abruptly led to her plane crash and accidental death.  He could not be left alone without doing anything.  And in his later years, Marilyn Monroe's incessant tardiness ultimately led to his early death.  He could not be left alone without having prescribed an activity beforehand.  After two more marriages, he asked to be buried next to her grave after his death.  His love life was filled with five marriages and multiple affairs.  He symbolically returns to his mother’s wombs. 

 

 

Clark Gable & Carole Lombard

Father-centered finds a father figure who he attaches himself to —winning his father’s praise he has locked himself in a missing link from his childhood.  Here is his personality:  conscientious and reliable.  Unless his wife is father-centered also, he won’t be able to forge a marriage; his wife relates to his father-centered trait and accepts her role only as his capricious child. 

 

 

Late Selena and her idolizing manager Yolanda

Elvis Presley's grave and flowers from his idolizing fans at his home in Graceland

Love of idolatry encapsulates.  A weak identity leads one to idolize his or her object of love.  At the beginning, one person worships the other with fierce intensity.  Expecting unrealistic things from her idol, she projects onto her “loved one,” all things she could not realize onto her own life.  The worshiper has not yet found her own river of powers to which she can swim in and leave at her will.  Most college girls are discouraged from getting into a serious relationship to prevent the loss of her identity.  The relationship turns sour quickly and the idolized or the worshiped need to free herself from the one who idolizes her.  You cannot let an unhealthy worshiper too close into your personal circle. The late Selena is a victim of love of idolatry where her own manager Yolanda took a fatal shot at her because her life was over as she knew it by a single blow to her life:  the loss of her job.  Yolanda made Selena and her job as her manager her whole life than a part of her life.  Her life became too dependent under the umbrella of Selena's stardom.  Idolatry turns dangerous this way.  On a light note, fans that idolize a pop star or icon are harmless.  

II.  Practice of Love                                                       

 

  

Discipline

To practice love is to have discipline.  One must have discipline in his or her whole life.  Sure, you go to work for 8 hours and work for a scheduled time frame because it has been assigned to you.  But what do you do afterwards?  If you rebel, you have failed.  Some rebel outside of work and live their lives self-indulgently.  Those individuals do not have discipline.  Their lives are chaotic; their lifestyle is a riot; they transgress in the wilderness.  They disregard any norms of discipline outside of work.  Thus they have not practiced loving.

  

Concentrate

To concentrate in your art is to master it.  Any person can talk, read, and walk but who is actually centered during their practice?  The one who is centered have practiced loving.  Stay focused. 

 

Every art takes patience to practice

Nothing fruitful turns out from fast attempts.  It takes patience to practice your art; art is not created out of fast results.  It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something.  Leonardo DaVinci drew the Mona Lisa many times over before he was satisfied with the final painting of his subject.  A person must practice patience in every facet of their lives.  Scheduling activities to meditate, read, and walk is no longer a routine but a way of expression.  He will be able to be alone with himself.  Most people cannot be alone without doing some form of activity —fidgeting, moving about.  A patient person can be alone without doing anything.  Take 20 minutes to breathe in the morning or at night.  Fully give yourself to any activities —reading, talking, and observing a view.  What should you not do?  Stay away from the following which pulls you into an inactive state:

  

1.)   Trivial Talks

2.)   Dull, deadened company

 

Sloth

Live fully

To concentrate means living fully in the present.  Live fully in the here and now.  Be awake and alert in your activity.  Take a brisk, energetic walk.  Be prolific in your endeavors —work, hobbies/interests, and profession.  Think objectively.  Think based on the faculty of reason.  Some can only think from their subjective view but not an objective one.  You call to schedule a chiropractor's appointment, for example, but at the last minute saying you're only few minutes away from the clinic.  You think the chiropractor should just abide to your request.  On the other side, the few minutes of your locale mean nothing to the chiropractor who already has a full schedule ahead.  Think with an emotional attitude of humility.  This way of thinking frees you from narcissistic one and of omniscience or omnipotence.  Humility, objectivity, and reason make up the practice of loving.

  

Objectivity vs Subjectivity

Fairness to a person can mean, “I give you as much as you give me.”  This is a failed idea.  Every man has an interest in love.  A subject of concern to many and will be for years to come, you create the spectrum of colors that holds in your relationship by your loving words, gestures, actions.  Now you know how to practice it.  Call, write,  and wire to your loved ones.