Great post Pericles, your wisdom is appreciated!

I think and read about this kind of stuff, but it is
not something that can be discussed in the bar of
a country pub :)

Luckily OLO has some great thinkers, such as yourself.

Goleman in his book "Emotional Intelligence" defines
emotions as "In essence, impulses to act, the instant plans
for handling life, that evolution has instilled in us".

What first got me interested was the realisation that
I could feel one thing, yet think exactly the opposite.
So the conflict between the emotional and rational centres
of the mind became clear.

I figured that to understand how an engine works, we need
to understand each of the components and how they interact.
So why not the same thing with the human mind?

There is actually a great little website called "Neuroscience
for kids", which is a great place to start, for those who
are interested in humans and what makes them tick.

After all, the mind is what the brain does.

Dear Romany,

What an interesting thread.

It's made me think about so many
things and of course I don't have all the
answers. I'm still on my own journey.
We all go through transitions and transformations.
The important thing is that we learn from them.

For most of us, most of the time, our experience of
life and its potential for joy is limited by the
constriction of our own hearts.

So many people have helped
shape me into the person I have become (and still
hope to be).

Love is very much a part of my life -
it's a deep and enduring emotional regard whether
its for my husband, my children, my family, my siblings,
my friends. It's part of my nature - and I nurture it
and watch it grow and the light within me salutes the
light I see in others. Because I believe that we are
all a part of each other. The love within us is
meant to extend outward.

Foxy,

Yes, well I enjoy exploring things in the abstract (it’s the thing I miss most living in a non-English-speaking country!). I think that leads to misunderstanding on threads here at times: the minute one posts understanding of a concept or puts forward another aspect, people assume one is being subjective.

I took this question of love into a classroom discussion where one student described love as "the only truly pure emotion" which led us into all sorts of different areas - most in direct contravention of the "selfish" aspect.

But still the actual term "love" has defied definition.

I think my own view is that love is the name given to positive energy forces. Though not a believer, I often go into empty churches just to absorb this positivism.

Therefore it would have to transcend selfishness which would bring negativism to it. This also allows me to understand why some people label this force "god" as I touched on earlier.

I too believe that just as certain rocks, minerals etc. have been proved to contain such properties as radiation, it is not at all off-the-wall to posit that this love/positive energy/gods/God - whatever label various people attach to it, is not simply a human construct, but could, one day, be proved to exist empirically, just as radiation was.

However, I also firmly believe that many people go through their entire lives without ever actually experiencing this emotion/force. That’s where the human construct comes in; we have learned to equate lust, companionship, propinquity, functional chemical processes etc. with love. Therein lays the selfishness which can attach to any of those things.

So, as usual, I conclude that being my usual wimpy self, I can't really come down on any definitive side - even though I was the one who introduced the topic

I'm not sure what love is. I would love it if a quantifiable answer was one day presented but, until then, I'll probably be as unable to make up my own mind about it as I am about why the queue I join is ALWAYS the slowest one.

Dear Romany,

We live in a world of tremenduous polarization.

For some people life is either black or white,
right or wrong, good or bad.

I was pleased to read that you're not one of
those people.
Who of us is the "expert" that we want to be?
Most of us, quite simply, are all learning.

I often wonder why we separate LOVE from our Self when we think/discuss what it actually IS. We seem to consider it something created from within then projected onto (or towards) the objects (living or not) of our affection.

Or vise versa - as something received.

It struck me when contemplating this point, maybe we have such a hard time agreeing and thoroughly defining what love IS, because many of us fail to truly generate and express love for our Self throughout our lives.

How can we claim to understand or accurately define a certain 'thing' when many of us spend our entire existence expressing (or receiving) what we may consider to be LOVE towards (or from) others, when we have failed to truly know love in the first place - from within ?

If Love is being generous to others - do we show that same generosity to our Self. If we are to be patient and considerate to others - do we treat our Self to the same graces ??

Hmmm .... Food for thought ?

.

JosGar
now there you have a concept which I personally find simply impossible. The feeling or emotion that I associate with love is just not capable of being directed inward.

Besides, there were all those formative years with red-faced nuns lecturing us on the sins of pride and conceit.

Yeah, sure, I've read all the books about fronting up to a mirror and gazing deep into my own bloodshot eyes and murmuring "I love you" to the image reflected there...I shriek with laughter at the thought, I'm afraid.

Nah, the best I've ever got is telling myself that at least I'm not as bad as some other people. Probably. Maybe. ...and then again even serial killers might have their good side. Which might be a whole lot better than my whole side. So maybe.....ah, the hellwith it..which is when I give myself a shamefaced grin and sidle off.