On Love (rephrased for easier comprehension)

Note: there was considerable feedback that the last patch was very difficult to comprehend, even for those whom had read on 'the living best'. For easier comprehension for ALL readers, the excerpt has been rephrased to simpler English, much effort has been been exerted to ensure that the information within is preserved as far as possible.


“Man’s two greatest purpose of living is of work and love” – Some cheem guy.

What is love again?

From the previous topic of Identity we get to see what love is. Love is an experience that brings together two or more individuals (or things); when we define love personally, love becomes an emotion that brings about some sort of affection, and attachment. Love unites relationships, and indirectly affects one’s sense of self and social identity. To ‘like to do something’ comes from loving yourself, and you need to learn how to love your neighbor before you know how to love yourself.

Summarizing, love makes you know who you are, and brings things together. It is from the idea of love that humans can socialize, and from socializing we get our Ethics and Morality. Ethics and Morality are stuff that we ourselves and society takes to be important and valuable. From ethics and morality we ask why we exist and what are we doing on this earth, to finally ‘does God exist?’ We wouldn’t be bothered with such cheem stuff for the time being- for now; let us look deeper at Love and its related ideas.

Love itself is just an experience, and no amount of theory can make us understand this as a few seconds of ‘being in love’ can. We cannot learn love from books, and neither can we describe love into words, pictures, film etc. Even television and books, the love that the author (or director) tries to show (by the novel, picture or film) has to be inferred. We must have experienced love before we can understand what it means for people to be kissing, hugging or saying ‘I love you’.

But even if it’s just an experience, love is still real and ideal. An example would be when we are talking of ‘true love’ or the love that comes with a kiss (we call this passionate love): True love is ideal, and passionate love is real. We need both loves to come together if we truly want to experience love. Now we know what a passionate kiss or a hug is, so we know what real love is. Ideal love is slightly difficult to understand, this is because like ideal gases, it cannot be sensed immediately

Now, what is idealistic love? Do allow me to quote a phrase as analogy:

...There are easy farewells like 'see you tomorrow'. And there are sad farewells when we know we will never see each other again. But no matter what kind of farewell it is, I want to believe that even if we can't see each other, even if death parts us, our feelings will never change...

-Mai, from a film

I am sure we all have seen such lovey-dovey phrases before, and okay, this phrase is called idealistic love. We know that love unites, and farewells splits people up physically; but we know that ideal stuff can exist forever and everywhere. In this case Mai believes that her feelings will not be affected by ‘not seeing’ and ‘death’. Therefore we can say that whatever she says is about idealistic love

Now, many people say that ideal love is ‘True Love’ or ‘unconditional love’. We know that a simple ‘I love you’ might not be true love, because the boyfriend might ditch the girl when time passes or when things happen and another girl comes into the picture. Idealistic love goes beyond that kind of ‘I love you’, because since we cannot create love by words for fun, it can only happen when we are already in love. We all already know that when Mai says those words, she had already actually fallen in love in him by the time.

Henceforth, since ideal love has to be based on real love for it to exist (we cannot anyhow create it), we commonly heck care real love and jump straight to ideal ‘true love’. Strictly speaking, true love can only exist when love is real and ideal at the same time. Most people think ideal love is nonsense, or thinks that ideal love can be created as and when we like (since it’s just ideas), and that’s why we all say that the world lacks ‘true love’.

As for which kind of love came first, we all have different views. Christians say that comes from the soul, and shown by our body actions. The soul is eternal and dimensional-less, therefore the love that comes from it is ideal too. The body, makes this ideal love real like itself. Others may say that it’s because the human mind that wants the feeling of love to last forever, therefore making the real love ideal. Either way, we don’t really care what comes first, but we care that both need to come together.

We all know that this world don’t know what true love is. This is because we’re materialistic and selfish. Now, we have to ask why- As stated by a priest, it is because of the idea of ‘the survival of the fittest’. Therefore we all want to show our stronger side, and that we have power and are in control. Rephrasing, it is because we all want to survive, thus we stop being considerate to others and become materialistic with things (instead of idealistic), we say that idealistic things are just empty castles in the air. So we all become selfish, and become superficial and greedy.

While being selfish and materialistic lets us be powerful and successful in life, we all misunderstand love to be a form of ‘dependence’, no more than a passion and a ‘weakness’. Love is only said by priests. Love is an excuse humans give to run away from the fact of ‘survival of the fittest’, or to some teenage girl with her childish romance drama serials. As observed by some scientists: this world has no time for such childish ‘lets-pretend’ games such as true love, equality, morality and God. We all struggle to survive or die, let alone all the bullshit of meaning and equality…

It is because of these kinds of views that had led us to abandon love, to another weakness of human nature today. Selfish materialism lets us find a good way of living, but it results in loneliness and a meaningless life. We all want to earn money initially because we want to live a successful life. But when we become rich, are we already successful? We don’t know, and so we start earning money for the sake of earning more money. When we become old and think of our past actions, we find out that we have been selfish and unproductive; and we would just die a disappointed person.

While love, and the experience of love is seen as a stumbling block on our quest for knowledge, achievement, power and success- actually, we need such experiences, on top of the logic of wanting to be successful, if we really want to be successful. From the discussion from the previous project, we know that truth is theory and experience, and should we want to live our true ‘best’ we need to put feelings and beliefs and logic and theory together. Also, we have to love our friends just like how we love ourselves. Naturally love, which allows us to feel and be close to our friends, must come in to our selfish world of materialism if we want to be the best.

There are two reasons.

The first reason holds that while materialism gives us a method to earn more money and be successful, feelings from experiences makes us more committed to follow the method. It is only when feelings and logic come together can we know ‘what’ something is about and ‘why did it come about. Know what and why lets us know something fully. This point is well re-quoted as follows:

“One who does not know what love can do, can never be powerful. Love itself is something we cannot laugh at and think is bullshit; the experience of love brings about a belief, and a strong belief brings commitment and will-power. Power alone without commitment can never be truly powerful, and remains no more as ideas and meaningless moves (think kung-fu). We must be committed to our actions, and then can we really become really powerful and do good work.”

Christians believe that when God worked and created the universe, he used his infinite wisdom to create them, but the reason why he created was because of love. This is why Christianity says that ‘work is a usage of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, done in the service (love) of the community, to build up the church- the body of Christ’.

The second reason would be slightly harder to understand- known as the complimentary doctrine of life. Recalling from above, we all think that love is a form of ‘dependence’, ‘acceptance’ and ‘weakness’- although we all misunderstand it to be just weakness, we’re still quite right that if we love, we need to ‘hold our horses and rely on the map’. While we find the logical method to become successful and powerful in life; love brings us back down to earth by letting us experience and feel ourselves. Love also makes us less selfish and be share the good rewards (should they come) with our friends. We get to sit back and appreciate where we are currently in life, we get to see people’s good points, and we know what we still lack or don’t know in life was we try to be that better person.

The complimentary doctrine says that in any journey, the journey can never considered complete unless one knows the distance left to go, as well as the distance already travelled. Yes we can deduce that we are human beings from knowing that we are not a chimpanzee or an orangutan (or any other primate), but cannot be truly know who we really are until someone tells us we are a Human being. Similarly, we cannot be truly successful and powerful by finding methods to make us earn more money or improve our strength, but we also need to sit back, experience, appreciate where we are and love ourselves. This can be re-quoted as follows:

Acceptance of one’s strength and weakness is needed for if we want to be truly powerful. We cannot become infinitely clever or powerful to know that it is impossible to be perfect. You will never understand fully what you can do, until you know what you are still unable to do. Strength without acceptance of weakness is bullshit… and so is maturity without acceptance of our child-like ways… you may as well compare who’ll get the first pimple-

-Some girl

Of course we are not as extreme as that girl has made it to become, but we can see she has the same idea that we have today. Whether it is from commitment, or appreciation, the experience and love are very important if we really want to be successful and powerful, or do good work.

As a conclusion, we have discussed on the love and how does it influence work, success and the ‘living best’. In the next post we will dwell in greater detail into applied love and work, in the form of morality and ethics; to hopefully seek out the meaning behind these actions, and ultimately the meaning of life.