Greenshade,

You have started a forum conversation which is limitless in breadth and depth. I would ‘love’ to interact with you on the subject of “The Science of Love: How Positivity Resonance Shapes the Way We Connect.”

This time I scanned the article with a little more focus, and followed a link to https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/01/what-is-love/, which is a collection of sayings. Browsing those quotes, it seems people are talking about very different things, and calling all of them love.

From there, another link took me to “How to Love: Legendary Zen Buddhist Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mastering the Art of “Interbeing”.

Inter-being sounds inter-esting and merits further exploration.

This subject deserves fuller attention.

How would you summarize the article on the science of love?

You replied to my comment, “Hmm that is an interesting concept…I think I’m struggling a bit with separating the cause (love) and effect (emotion)….”

So, you see love as the cause of the emotional response to it. And the emotional response to love if generally also called love.

To have a meaningful dialogue we need to have a common understanding of the terms. If love is the cause and emotions are the effect, how do you mean “love” in this context? Are you referring to love as the attraction of one to another? And then after that, the feelings of completion, expansion, cherishing, companionship, friendship, loyalty, and so on? You wrote,

“My understanding of love has been as something very human and very mundane in how commonly it is felt but very unique in that it is how we manifest the divinity in all of us.”

Interesting. I see how you understand it and agree that love becomes everyday in human activities and that pure love truly felt manifests the divinity in all of us.

Love in its original design is to me the nature of the One Being of pure consciousness which emanates constantly from its universal field and fills and animates everything. It is blocked from human awareness by social/environmental programming and the distortions of distance and density in the 3D world. What we call love is a distortion of the emanations of O.B., normalized in fragmented human historical perspective.

Re-reading your sentence to me, ” I would love to hear more about your understanding of it, especially if you think its possible to acknowledge the cause and the effect it has on us as separate, if that makes sense …”

Yes, then, would you agree I have acknowledged the cause and effect on us as separate? It is and it isn’t. The cause of love, the emanations of O.B., is separate in blocked human awareness from the emotions which arise in response to the filtered down stimulus of universal love. We then take this filtered down stimulus and do what we do with it, and call that love too. I will have to go into how the cause and effect are not separate, in another post.

I am up for more! You can also connect with me over the Whole Human site for a non-public dialogue.

Following are some quotes I picked up on my hyperlink hopping from the article you linked.

Best regards,

Gary

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“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.”

Kurt Vonnegut, who was in some ways an extremist about love but also had a healthy dose of irreverence about it, in The Sirens of Titan: “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

Stendhal in his fantastic 1822 treatise on love: “Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. … there are no age limits for love.”

Ambrose Bierce, with the characteristic wryness of The Devil’s Dictionary: “Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”

At the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” — that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction — be it physical or psycho-emotional or spiritual.) Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs — but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding.