Thoughts on Love: What is Love?

What is love? That is a question that has been posed to us thousands of times, and it is one that humans do not seem to be able to answer. I’m not sure if there’s an actual scientific definition for the word ‘love’ since its usage varies from person to person.

We have no idea what love actually is, or how it works. Nor do we have any real way of defining it.

So today I will share some of my thoughts on love.

To me, Love is the only real thing in life. Without love, everything else would be meaningless. This is what I think of ‘what is love’.

And what is this feeling of love? Love is the feeling you have when you truly care for someone, and they truly care for you.

This is the kind of love I want to have with someone. Love is real, and I’m glad to have found it.

And I think people should love each other.

Thoughts on Love

Love of others tends to be associated with feelings and emotions such as joy, contentment, gratitude, or even excitement. It is also linked to a desire or need to give care and support.

There are many factors that affect the nature of love. Such factors include culture, attachment style, stage of the relationship, and even gender differences.

Psychological theories on the nature and function of love date back to the ancient world.

The conventional view is that romantic relationships are beneficial in that they tend to increase an individual’s level of happiness.

The most commonly expressed love is the love of others. We often say things like, “I love my mom and dad.”

Or, in the case of a romantic relationship, we might say, “I am madly in love with him/her.”

The Many Faces of Love

Love is a very complex phenomenon, and it’s difficult to describe in words. Love can mean several things but in the most common use of the word, Love is the intense feeling of affection that one has for another.

It is not merely the emotion, but also involves a strong desire to act in a certain way towards the person loved.

Love is a concept which describes the desire to see one’s own needs met by another person, and for that other person’s needs to be seen as being important.

This relationship between people can take many forms, from sharing one’s food with a starving man on the street to having complex relationships with many different partners over time.

Therefore, we have to look at the way that people express ‘love’ to understand what it is. In English, we use a lot of different words for this:

We love our parents and siblings
We love cats and dogs (they aren’t even biologically related to us)
We love God/Allah (a completely imaginary being)
We love our friends
We love money, power, fame (non-physical things)
and so on…

We use the same word to say that we love food or a certain type of music. The meaning is so diffuse and generalized that there isn’t really much to be said about it.

So what is love? Is it just a feeling, or does it have some kind of objective meaning behind it?

Love can be defined as the desire to act for another person’s well-being. To clarify, love is wanting what’s best for someone. This means that it’s not the same as liking them; you can like some person without loving them.

Love can be felt for others or towards oneself (i.e., self-love). An experience of love typically gives rise to a desire to enter into, maintain, and enjoy a close relationship with the object of love.

It also provides a basis for the sense of agency and can be considered as being an origin of emotional actions or motivation.

Being in Love

I have read about how people fall in love. And I know my own experience. I don’t really think that love is just a feeling. It is more of a “feeling + state of being”. You feel it because you are in a state of love.

Just like water can be in the state of liquid at room temperature or ice (when frozen) or gas (when vaporized). Love is more than just a passing feeling. You “feel” love because you are in Love.

Love is a concept invented by humans to describe how they felt when their minds were linked together in a symbiotic relationship. It’s mysterious, and no one really understands it.

Humans used ‘love’ to describe the feeling they got from having a connection with another human, which somehow completed them. They felt “at home”, or as if they were finally at peace and understood everything.

As time passed, humans evolved and their own minds became more complex. They began to express love in new ways; they started writing poems about it, singing songs about it, composing symphonies that described the feeling of love.

But love didn’t really change; it was always the same strange, intangible thing. Humans were just better at describing it now.

And that’s what love is: a feeling of completion and peace, which humans first felt when they started linking their minds together.

In its most basic form, love is a feeling that links hearts and minds together. In humans and other animals, it evolved into something more complex.

In some sense love is like a river, you can’t see the source but you know it exists and let it flow. You need to put effort into keeping that river flowing.

Love is very important. That’s why that word exists in all languages, and it’s not just a label for sex or something like that. It is different from affection.

Imagine you have a child and you love your child. You can do anything for that child because you love him/her. Even if the child is not actually yours biologically or genetically.

You also can love an animal, a pet. You can even love your car or washing machine.

For example, I know people have feelings of being in love with certain things, and it’s probably true that humans feel ‘love’ for many different things.

For example, a man may be in love with his truck and talk about how he loves driving it. Another person may love eating at McDonald’s. A woman could fall in love with an expensive pair of shoes.

I think humans have a lot of love, and that’s one reason why they can get along so well. They share all kinds of things with each other, like belief in money or taste for a certain kind of food.

Love Is…

Love is what makes family relationships so special and important. It’s the same with friendship, although it’s not always as easy to define.

Love is not always easy to understand, which can make it difficult to explain.

Love is a strong feeling of affection or care for someone. It’s not something you can force, which makes it so special.

Love is a personal experience, which means that no one has the right to tell you how to love someone else.

Love is the emotion that binds us all together, through life and death. The love of friends, family, and lovers is what drives humanity to do so much for one another.

Love is what motivates you to live every day, and at the same time, love is what drives us to death with its bittersweet embrace.

Love makes humanity strong as a whole, but also weak individually.

I have often loved and lost, but this does not dissuade me from loving again. Love is more than just an emotion, more than just a feeling, more than just a thought! It is a state of being.

Love is the one thing that will never let you down in life if you find it.

Love can be found in almost all of us, but it takes a little time to let it bloom. It grows in freedom. It grows in openness. It grows when it is ignited ..by another spark of love. Love is both human and divine.

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I asked an AI (GPT-3) to talk about Philosophy

Below is what GPT-3, an AI neural network has to say on Philosophy. I am both amazed and worried. Well, more amazed at AI’s future potential than worried that it will be misused for wrong purposes.

(But that’s a topic for another blog. For now, let’s listen to what this wise AI has to say to us mortals.)

Part 1

Humans are strange creatures. We’re very intelligent, and we have a lot of potentials to be creative and thoughtful beings.

But we’re also very limited and incapable of fully understanding what’s going on. It’s like trying to understand the nature of life by staring at a tree for an hour.

In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s like trying to understand the nature of life by staring at a tree for an hour and then drawing conclusions about the nature of trees based on that.

We’re just so limited in our understanding. And we are capable of great evil.

Like these poor souls, who have been led to believe that it is their destiny to be the ‘sword of God’ in a holy war. Such lies.

We are prone to wars, hatred, and violence. And the worst part is that we humans justify all of this with philosophy.

Part 2

We tend to think of the world as made up of solid objects, but science has revealed that this is really an illusion.

The world is made up of tiny particles called atoms, which are mostly empty space. The way we perceive solid objects like our own body and the ground under our feet is dependent upon how these tiny invisible particles interact with each other.

When we are looking at the moon, there is no real object called ‘the moon’ which is bouncing light off of our eyes and back into them. Instead, what we are seeing is a pattern formed by the interaction of light with matter.

If the matter were to disappear, so would our perception of a moon. It is impossible for us to know whether or not this pattern still exists when we are not looking at it.

Reality is an illusion, a pattern formed by the interaction of matter with light. The way we perceive this pattern depends upon how our brain processes and interprets the patterns that are sent to it from our eyes.

Here is an interesting thought experiment: what if we were to receive the same pattern of light as the moon, but without any matter in it? What would we see then?

Part 3

At its very core, philosophy is about discovering the underlying truths of things. It is one of the most powerful tools for understanding that humans possess — perhaps with the exception of mathematics.

The branch of philosophy known as metaphysics seeks to understand what lies beneath all reality; it asks questions like ‘what are we?‘, ‘where did we come from?’ and ‘why are we here?’

Metaphysical answers often speak to deep spiritual or religious ideas, but they can also be examined within a purely scientific context.

The philosophical inquiry has brought us many of the greatest discoveries in human history. Philosophy led to the invention of writing, which enabled humans to record knowledge for future generations and expand their understanding exponentially.

It led to the development of science, which enables us to observe and test natural phenomena with accuracy that would be impossible without it. Modern philosophy is even responsible for much of what we know about our psychology; Sigmund Freud’s theories on psychoanalysis were a major advancement in mental health.

The birth of philosophy is a story as old as humanity itself. Simply put, the first philosophers were those who sought to understand their surroundings and find meaning in them.

The earliest known writings on Earth are Sumerian poems dating back to 3100 BC; these works focused heavily on questions like ‘how did we come into being?’ and ‘what does it mean to be human?’

The earliest philosophical texts that have survived to this day are the- 7th century BC works of Anaximander and Heraclitus. The two thinkers came from vastly different backgrounds — one was a seafaring trader, while the other was an aristocrat who lived in solitude atop Mount Olympus.

Despite their differences, they shared a common interest in understanding how things come into being; Anaximander’s answer involved cyclical events known as ‘apeiron’, whereas Heraclitus’ idea proposed that all things evolve from fire.

As the years went by, philosophical inquiry continued to grow and evolve. Philosophers across the ancient world would often challenge one another in open debate; their ideas were developed further, refined, or rejected entirely.

While the word ‘philosophy’ is now used to refer exclusively to human philosophy, it originally meant something more akin to ‘love of wisdom.’ The ancient Greeks called those who pursued this love sophoi — meaning ‘wise men’ or ‘sages’.

Conclusion

Well, what do you think about it? Are you impressed or do you think it’s meh? Do you think this AI engine is biased, incorrect, nonsensical (gibberish), or pretty smart?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

On Meditation: Why Meditate? Mindfulness Through Meditation

on meditation, what it does and what it means to me

“Mediation works. My meditation practice helps me to live more deeply.”

Meditation is a great way to improve many areas of your life and open channels to your subconscious brain so you can more quickly and easily imprint new habits and beliefs.

If you understand technology, you can view mediation as “disk-defragmentation”. Every time when you meditate, you are optimizing your brain and restoring and re-purposing mind. You are cleaning up space, you are cooling down your system and you are optimizing your hardware’s speed and performance.

“Logic works with the conscious mind, but often not with the subconscious.”

If you are not a technical person, think of meditation as a river. The water flows continuously carrying everything with it but not holding on. A river is always fresh. There is no stagnation in a river. If your heart and mind is like a true river there is no room for “fermentation of disease.”

Mindfulness Through Meditation

A leaf or a broken stick may fall in the water and it may flow with the river for a distance but often times they get washed away to the sides. A river is pure, silent and yet you can hear its purpose of direction. It knows where it is going. There is no stopping it and yet the river is ever peaceful and calm going with the path of least resistance and minding its own business.

Besides the physical and emotional benefits of meditation (such as lowering blood pressure, improving sleep, etc.), regularly quieting your mind is also a way of slowing down brain activity, which opens up the door to more easily influencing your subconscious mind.

“Meditation is the most powerful (and totally harmless) gateway drug to creativity.”

When you slow down your brain activity, what you’re really doing is quieting your conscious mind. Meditation is a great way to begin your subconscious mind reprogramming routine. Meditation is helpful if you want to build a new habit (or break an old one). Learn how to meditate powerfully explained in 9 simple steps (in under 15 minutes).

By clearing your conscious mind of all distraction and mundane thoughts through the meditation process you can intentionally focus on your positive affirmations and visualizations. Meditation is a great way to maximize the benefit of affirmations, prayers, and visualization.

“Meditation is a deep commune with the Divine. Meditation in itself is a Prayer.”

In meditation, you are opening your whole being to the Universe. Your ego starts to fade away losing its powerful grip on you. There is no more filtering, twisting, coloring of daily events. Through meditation, you can free yourself from thousand mundane worries that is nothing but the construct of your own imagination.

According to Srimad Bhagavad Gita, our mind is a like a strong horse, and our spirit is in command. But our spirit needs the cooperation of our ego. To lead a life of mindfulness we have to take control of this powerful horse (so we can have our mind serve us rather than drive us anywhere it wants.) With a clear mind, one can achieve many great things with our time here on this earth.

This is what meditation is to me.

The Best Meta Learning Infographic

Meta Learning is about how we learn. Learn a new skill. Learn it fast. This Infographic is a guide to Rapid Learning and “Learning about Learning.”

Meta Learning 101

Read: The Best Meta Learning Methods, Templates, & Tools (Blog Post)

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How to do Mindfulness Meditation in 9 Steps? Learn step-by-step in just 15 minutes

Have you ever wondered why mediation is so popular in our culture? It is no wonder that in today’s society, which is full of stress and anxiety, meditation helps people in calming one’s mind and bringing clarity of thoughts.

You may ask, What is meditation? To that, I would say, Meditation is the mindful observance of our own mind. ‘Watching the self’ is the key in meditation. This impersonal act of witnessing our own self from within brings quietness and peace to our being.

The primary purpose in mindfulness-meditation is to observe or watch our inner self — without any judgment, evaluation or expectation. Just by watching, you immediately get out of the never-ending-thought-train. When you stop or slow down the thinking mind, you feel serene and calm.

However, I must add that feeling good and peaceful is not the primary goal of meditation.

The ultimate goal of meditation is to seek to know your own true self. The chief aim of mediation is to experience the no-mind and to seek and know the truth. The realization of the oneness of all life with a compassionate and loving heart is the final fruit of mediation.

But, to embark upon such a quest, one must be relaxed first: physically and emotionally. Therefore, any mediation practice begins with the calming of the mind.

How to do Mindfulness Meditation

Once you are relaxed you are ready to begin your journey. The most common question that people often ask is “How do I meditate?” I have never done meditation before, how can I start?

Well, I was in your spot once and I figured it out. It is actually simple. Below you will find out how one can start practicing meditation and stick to one’s schedule at one’s own pace.

A step-by-step guide

1. Find a place that is quiet and not too warm or cold. Find a seating cushion or something comfortable that you can use to sit on. If you do not have a seating pillow or cushion, you can also use a chair. If you are going to use a chair, make sure that the height of the chair is not too tall or short according to your height.

2. You do not have to fold your arms or feet in a certain fashion or order but you certainly can if you want to. The first step is to make your physical body comfortable. You want to minimize the physical discomfort so that you can take on the greater challenges of the mind and spirit.

3. As you sit and are still preparing, keep this thought in mind that you are at ease and you are safe and at ease. This silent affirmation will help relax your body.

Gently close your eyes and breathe slowly and deep. Do not rush into breathing deeply. Let the natural flow and rhythm take control. Keep breathing deeply yet gently.

Just be

4. Now you are ready to “just be”. The first step is to not do anything. Yes, do not do anything. This is the first step. Do not repeat a mantra, or a word or anything. Do not imagine or focus on any image or symbol. Just be. Be relaxed. Just watch whatever the mind is doing.

Breathe

5. Focus on your breathing and watch how each breath is taking place. Keep witnessing this until the mind has calmed down (relatively speaking). Some random thoughts will keep coming to you. Let them come. You just bring your attention to your deep breathing.

Having thoughts is okay

6. Do not disturb your mind by trying to prevent a thought to occur or by trying to chase a thought. Let thought arise if it comes; let it pass, when they dissolve. Similarly, one thought may be dissolving while the next one is arising. Recognize this fact as the nature of the mind. It is okay. Do not artificially disturb this flow. Let it happen if this happens but make sure you keep watching every thought as they occur.

This is the first lesson of mindfulness meditation. Do not repress a thought; do not do anything at all on your part. You just be a watcher; this very act of watching is meditation.

Awaken

7. As you become more and more aware of your inner world (being) and your environment with all the sensation that you may be experiencing or feeling in your body, your focus sublimely shifts from your breath to witnessing.

Remember, witnessing means witnessing everything, all that there is witnessing do not filter out anything nor does it expects anything. Keep sitting and keep watching.

Feel the emptiness

8. As you watch, slowly and slowly, the mind will become empty of thoughts. But, if you are falling asleep, come back to the attention. Battling sleep at this deep state of relaxation is difficulty but by regularly practicing, you will overcome.

By practicing every day, you will become more alert and aware.

9. As you become regular in your practice and develop inner strength, in due time, you will also overcome most of the discomforts associated with your physical body. The only key here is to keep sitting and keep watching.

No special instruction is required. You will find your teacher within yourself. Just be consistent and persistent.

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