Love is the capacity to
put yourself in the shoes of the other person. Sex has little to do with it. Psychological researches have shown that lust
is associated with motivation / reward areas of the brain, while love activates
the regions connected to caring and empathy.
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| Source: Here |
Those who care for others more
than for themselves as Mother Teresa did, for example, are the ideal ‘lovers’. She cared for the persons who had no one to
rely on when they needed help the most.
She cleaned the filthiest of human bodies and applied the balm of tenderness
on their festering wounds and lesions. Hers was a sincere interest in people as
people. Not as vote banks. Not even as potential converts, as alleged by
some, though her love did convert a lot of people into better human beings. Genuine love is transformative.
Genuine love changes
people. Into better human beings.
Not many are capable of
such love, however. But there are a lot
of social activists who have given themselves selflessly to certain humanitarian
causes. That selfless giving is love.
Contrast that love with
what gau rakshaks and such right wing activists are doing now. They are motivated by hatred and
vindictiveness. Some of them are
prompted by sheer profit motive. They
are extortionists wearing the garb of religion.
Genuine love can never be
violent at any cost, whatever the cause one is championing. Love is empathy, psychology tells us. Cruelty and violence have no place in it. No
one can play with cruelty without losing his/her sensitivity of mind, as Dag
Hammarskjold said.
Those who love cows will
look after cows and not attack people who live on their products. Those who love their gods will perceive those
gods in their fellow human beings as Mother Teresa did. Yes, for Mother Teresa, people were images of
her god, Jesus. To that extent, her love
was conditional. She loved people
because they were the living images of her god.
And make no mistake, there is no unconditional love in the world of
human beings. All love is conditional
and limited by many factors simply because that’s all what we, human beings,
are capable of. But such conditional
love is infinite times better than the hatred or the extortionist motives that
drive today’s guardians of morality, religion, gods and cultural nationalism.
Mother was without an iota of doubt a saintly person, leaving her poor European country under dictatorship and coming down to our city of joy to care for the poor.
ReplyDeleteBut there was no real need to ensure that the cared for persons align with her religious belief.
Did she convert? I wrote about it some time back:
Deletehttps://matheikal.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/mother-teresa-and-religious-conversion/
Conditional love or selfish love ? Oh but if love is conditional then but obvious those conditions are set for selfish reasons to begin with.
ReplyDeleteYeah, there's no difference between conditional love and selfish love. Human love is limited and I have no knowledge about any other kind of love ☺
DeleteSelfish love will seek happiness only for your own self....but love that is true, even if it is conditional, will try to ensure happiness of others.
ReplyDeleteThat's a fine distinction you make between selfish love and conditional love and I won't dispute it. But what I meant by selfishness was the quest for self-fulfilment. For Mother Teresa, to use the same example, her love of the poor and the abandoned was actually her way of finding self-fulfilment and to that extent it was selfish. I know I'm taking it to a different level. However, that clarification is necessary.
DeleteYou seem to take it to Rand's definition of selfishness. But, out of topic, is there any reason for you to not like her works?
DeleteI read Rand when I was in my twenties and fell in love with her. I was an idealistic dreamer then. Rand's worldview is idealistic. Rejecting the excesses of socialism, she embraced the extremes of capitalist individualism whose selfishness, when put into practicality, is what we see today: cutthroat competitiveness. Her idealism borders on the religious paradise, an earthly utopia, an impossibility.
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