WHAT ARE THE OTHER FORMS OF LOVE

Compassion

Another form of love is compassion. Concern for others’ pain  helps divest us of ego-centeredness. This is why compassion can so easily be a bridge to the agape style of loving.

In my own life, I noticed an advance in compassion in a singular way. I saw a film version of Macbeth, and instead of my usual dislike of the main character, I felt compassion for him. I saw how
caught up he was in ambition and fear, and I felt sorry for his woebegone state. I did not condone his murderous behavior, but I appreciated his plight in a more humane way than I had in previous readings and viewings of the play. Something had happened in me; there was a new judgment-free openness, a way of connecting to others, even when they were not very appealing. That was a
sign that I was moving more in the direction of agape, which is always a move away from judging others. I have gradually realized that openness is how love happens.

In this context, compassion is not based on pity for someone’s plight. It is not top-down but nondual. Indeed, compassion is not a virtue that we may or may not have. It is the way love, always in
us, responds to others’ pain. That pain tugs at us because of our natural bond in the worldwide human family. To forgo a compassionate response is to contravene a natural inclination. Compassion
in this sense is not just feeling sorry for the suffering of others.


Rather, it is self-investment to relieve suffering and, if possible, to change the conditions that led to it.
As our circle of compassion widens, we begin to appreciate suffering not just in particular humans but in the human condition.

We are touched by what Virgil, in The Aeneid, called “the tears in things.” We appreciate that built into all existence is a grief about impermanence; a vulnerability to disappointment, hurt, and loss;
a resignation to suffering. That touches us both as participants in the givens of the human story and as loving witnesses to it.

Hamlet says, “Use [practice] almost can change the stamp of nature.” We know that the practice of showing love and compassion transforms our hearts. We are thereby somehow changed deep within. That change is a richer relatedness to the human family, the essence of agape: “You belong to my heart.” Eventually that solidarity helps us realize that our shared givens of pain and impermanence are not predicaments we put up with but the very essence of our connectedness—and a path to our
enlightenment.

The ancient Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus realized that love was the point of religious practice: “I suppose it will become evident that the laws in the Torah are meant to lead to a universal love of humanity.”3 For “the laws of the Torah,” we can substitute our spirituality, our psychological work, our religion, our schooling, our political party, our nation, our family, our relationships, our commitments, our birth, our death, our breath, or our life span. In fact, there is nothing that does not have an everwidening love as its purpose.

May I be a guard for those who need protection, A guide for those who journey on the path.
For those who wish to cross the water, May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.
May I be an isle for those who yearn for land, A lamp for those who long for light.
—SHANTIDEVA:

The Way of the Bodhisattva
Liking and Other Connections
Other sensations can be confused with love. Liking is regarding someone as pleasing and preferred over others. We use the word love sometimes when we mean like. For example, we say, “I love
lemon meringue pie. I love Hawaii. I love Mozart.” The pie, the state, and the composer do not represent caring, but they are pleasing and preferred over others. We enjoy them.

Love is an unconditional positive regard with or without continuous liking. Love is like grace; it does not have to be earned. Liking is like approval; it does have to be earned. Liking people happens in response to their persona, the way they look, the way they act. This changes throughout the day. Love happens in response to the real self, the deep reality of our humanity, where we are unchanging. The word deep is a metaphor for the underlying reality of something, its essence, what is required for its fulfillment.

Love is our essence, because love is connection, and we remain connected to one another and to all of nature beyond like or dislike, birth or death, damage or despair. To say that love is our essence has a consoling ring. But it can fill us with terror when we feel unloved. Not to be loved or responded
to as lovable then becomes the equivalent of having no essence, being all alone in the world.

We can confuse loving (always) and liking (sometimes). When we say, “My mother loved me, but it was conditional,” we may mean, “My mother loved me but did not always like me. She loved
me wholly but liked me only when I was behaving in ways that were satisfactory to her.”

We may also confuse love with loyalty. Without realizing it, most of us were imbued with a deep loyalty to our families, schools, and churches. In the child’s view, loyalty is directed toward
institutions or families and the authorities who lead them.

In the adult view, our loyalty is to the meaning and purpose of an institution. Thus, we are loyal to our families when they provide safety and security. We are loyal supporters of our government’s
policies when they reflect the principles of the Constitution. We are loyal to our religion when its teachings honor its founder’s principles; encourage our full self-emergence; and help us cocreate
a world of justice, peace, and love.

On an interpersonal level, we might feel loyalty to a partner and imagine that to be love. We might stay in a relationship that has lost its liveliness or has become intolerable in many ways. We remain
because of allegiance, not because of mutual happiness and affection. Then our work is to undo the inappropriate identification of loyalty with love. For instance, we can remain loyal to someone by preserving a caring connection, but that does not have to mean living under the same roof.

Infatuation is attraction to and fascination with someone and involves a strong erotic component. When our hormones are activated by the woman across the room on some enchanted evening,
we lose our ability to distinguish real love from immediate desire and enthrallment. We might then be seduced by our own fascination with her. In an authentic intimate relationship, romance turns into selfless love and then into egoless commitment.

Agape frees eros from being stuck in infatuation. Our journey then goes from enchanted evening to enlightened dawning. The in-love state is caring connection with dollops of adrenaline for excitement and oxytocin for pleasure. When only the caring connection remains, we say we love someone but are no longer in love. This may be the result of noticing that our partner no longer, or only occasionally, arouses our sympathetic nervous system and increases our heart and breathing rates. We may mistake such physiological arousal for love when it only ever signified fascination.

This happens because our brain is not sophisticated enough, without careful training, to distinguish subtle hormonal messages. Since both falling in love and falling into fascination have exactly the same physical components, we can confuse them, especially when that first kiss makes us feel like we have at last come home, found what we always wanted, entered nirvana, and found our soul mate. Given the ecstatic feeling, it is understandable that we are not sure what is really happening.

“I need someone” plus “You are desirable and available”

can feel like:

“I am in love with you.”

To fall in love is often to fall for an apparent, but not necessarily accurate, matchup of our own need and our discovery of a person who will fulfill it. In the in-love state, we see a reflection of our own pleading longing in the other’s smile.

Adults will not trust their hormones until they align with good sense. An adult knows it will take much more than a welcoming or come hither smile to make the case for real love, a love that is an
enduring commitment. A bond based only on sexual excitement can’t sustain itself through the vicissitudes of adult relations. We need a deeper resource than honeymoon energy to stay connected
through the thick and thin that we’ll be going through.

Even in our infatuated state, we may realize that this is not the right relationship for us, that it has no future. Yet we often can’t let go. We may refer to this inability as our heart speaking, when it is actually our adrenals. We are under the influence of our own adrenaline, the hormone that keeps us attached whether or not our feelings are real or a relationship is good for us. In the world of drama and adrenaline, a relationship begins with infatuation.

In the adult world, relationship begins with investigation. We recall the humorous lyric from “At Long Last Love” by Cole Porter:

“Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy, or is what I feel the real McCoy?”

Infatuation and fascination are sensations—legitimate, enjoyable, but temporary. They can be phases in a burgeoning relationship or flashes in the pan. Real love includes romantic fascination but then moves on through conflict to commitment. It is not always pleasurable, but it is reliably enduring. Infatuation craves exhilaration as well as safety and security; love provides them through sustained trustworthiness.

Fascination includes erotic attachment that can become compulsive clinging, an addiction, a form of consumerism for something more or different. The mature alternative is a connection that feels good without the stress, compulsion, and restlessness that are so prominent in addictive attachments.

To project is to imagine that someone has qualities that we may not have. We see in another the reflection of our own desires, beliefs, feelings, needs, and fantasies. An example of this projection
is a crush, a usually short-lived infatuation. We can tell the difference between this hot, stressful reaction to someone and a warm, serene affection. The former is like an active volcano; the latter is
like green pastures and restful waters.

We can also tell the difference between being really loved and being the object of a crush. Mature adults will not find the latter ersatz projection-love appealing, nor will they take advantage of it
for their own benefit. In fact, a crush is painful, so in spiritual consciousness, we may feel compassion for the person who obsesses about us in that way. When we know we have no interest in
reciprocating, we feel uncomfortable and sorry for the other person.

A Buddhist teaching is that being caught in attachment is a cause of suffering for us. Yet it is also a form of suffering for others who become obsessed by their attachment to us.

In this and all the charts that follow, keep in mind that between each column are many gradations of possibilities depending on each individual’s unique feelings, thoughts, and behavior. There are no either/or’s in human experience.

Projection/Crush On Us Authentic Love for Us Is based on a subjective assumption
Is based on the reality of who we are

Can end as quickly and as irrationally as it began

Begins and lasts through the vicissitudes of relating
Remains firmly entrenched no matter what we do
Is responsive to changes in us
Idealizes us, failing to acknowledge our shadow side
Remains aware of our shadow side and works with it creatively
Comes from a unilateral need Is about mutual fulfillment of needs
Becomes an obsession Takes our presence or absence in stride
Is aroused and maintained by adrenaline
Leads to serenity Can be followed by hate or indifference
Can only turn into kindly regard even while letting us go

Heart-Centered Feelings

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, makes it clear that there is no discrete stand-alone “religious experience.” Rather, a religious sentiment can be part of any feeling. He says
there is “religious fear, religious awe, religious joy.” Religious love is “only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a religious object. . . . Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a
forest at twilight . . . only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations.” James adds, however, that religious emotion is “a higher kind of emotion,” so for him, it is
qualitatively different not merely different by reason of its lofty object.

Likewise, love is not a feeling in itself, but every feeling can happen with love:
• We can be sad and show it in a loving way by feeling it without self-pity and with compassion for all who suffer as we do.
• We can be angry at someone but still love that person. We show this by expressing our anger without blame, violence, or intimidation.
• We can be afraid for someone’s safety because we care so much about him or her.
• We can feel joy in such a way that we pour it out to others and are enthusiastic about sharing it with them.

Finally, all our feelings can be experienced at either of the two levels we find in our own psyches: ego-centeredness and self-giving. For instance, joy can be experienced in an ego-only mode or
in full-self mode. We feel joy at the egocentric level when we are exulting only in our own personal satisfaction. We feel joy at our fully giving self level when our own experience of pleasure gives
us a sense of connection with the wider world, and we wish others could feel as we do in that moment.

Melodramatic, operatically expressed emotions are drenched in ego desires and adrenaline. They commandeer our attention by their plea to our most superficial or sentimental emotions. They
play on our “heartstrings” (adrenals again). They seduce us by inveigling us into drama. Emotions that tap into our deep, existential experience in the human community draw our attention by their sincerity and authenticity. They touch our hearts more than our adrenals.

We can look at specific feelings to understand what they look like in ego-centered mode and in their higher self-giving mode, where love happens most easily:
Feeling Ego-Only Level Full-Self Level
Sadness Self-pity, caught up in our own story, especially as victims
Grief that combines our own sorrow with a compassionate awareness of how others suffer as we do
Anger Aggression arising from a sense of personal affront
Displeasure at an injustice, without violence or the need to retaliate
Fear Worry about danger or threat to ourselves
Worry about danger with a terror of disconnection
Exuberance Pleasure in having what we want
Joy in sharing and in our sense of connection


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