Read the new issues from “Warrior of the Light Online” :
The third cardinal virtue: Love
Terceira virtude cardinal: Amor
Tercera virtud cardinal: Caridad
Tag Archive for 'love'
According to the dictionary: from the Latin amor: strong affection that drives us towards the object of our desires; inclination of the soul and heart; affection; passion; exclusive inclination; theological grace.
In the New Testament: So faith, hope and love endure. These are the great three, and the greatest of them is love. (Corinthians 13:13)
According to etymology: the Greeks had three words to designate love: Eros, Philos and Agape. Eros is the healthy love between two persons that justifies life and perpetuates the human race. Philos is the sentiment that we dedicate to our friends. Finally, Agape, which contains both Eros and Philos, goes far beyond “liking” someone. Agape is total love, the love that devours those who feel it. For Catholics, this was the love that Jesus felt for humanity, and it was so great that it shook the stars and changed the course of the history of men. Those who know and feel Agape realize that nothing else in this world has any importance, only loving.
For Oscar Wilde:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
(Ballad of Reading Jail, 1898)
In a late 19th century sermon: Pour your love generously on the poor, which is easy; and on the rich, who distrust everybody and cannot see the love that they so need. And on your neighbor – which is very difficult, because it is towards him that we are most selfish. Love. Never lose a chance to give joy to your neighbor, because you will be the first to benefit from this – even if nobody knows what you are doing. The world around you will become happier, and things will become easier for you.
I am in this world living the present. Any good thing that I can do, or any happiness that I can bring to others, please tell me. Don’t let me put things off or forget, because I shall never live this moment again. (Henry Drummond The Supreme Gift, [1851-1897])
In an e-mail received by the author: “While I kept my heart to myself, I never had a single morning of anguish or a single night of insomnia. Since I fell in love, my life has been a sequence of anguish, losses, confusion. I think that God, by using love, managed to hide hell in the middle of Paradise” (C.A., 23/11/2006)
For science: In the year 2000, researchers Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, of University College in London, located the areas of the brain activated by romantic love by using a series of students who claimed to be madly in love. In the first place, they concluded that the zones affected by the sentiment are far smaller than they had imagined, and are the same as those activated by stimuli of euphoria, such as in using cocaine, for example. Which led the authors to conclude that love is similar to the manifestation of physical dependence provoked by drugs.
Also using the same system of scanning the brain, scientist Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University, concludes that three characteristics of love (sex, romanticism and mutual dependence) stimulate different areas of the cortex, and further conclude that we can be in love with one person, want to make love to another, and live with a third.
For a poet: Love possesses nothing and does not want to be possessed, because it is enough in itself. It will make you grow, and then throw you on the ground. It will whip you so that you feel your impotence, it will shake you to rid you of all your impurities. It will crush you to leave you flexible.
And then it will toss you in the fire so that you can become the blessed bread to be served at God’s sacred feast (The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran [1883-1931])
(next Warrior of Light Online Wisdom)
With reference to Brida, would you elaborate on the quest for the other, the soulmate, who completes a soul?
There’s a motto in Alchemy: “Concentrate and dissolve”. As you may know alchemists would, through laboratory studies, try to distill the mercury from the sulfur and then refine the mercury until it converted into gold. This quest would lead them to the Philosopher Stone (which was the solid component) and the Long Life Elixir. All the process of distilling is based on this very simple motto: concentrate – meaning extracting the essence – and dissolve – meaning mixing the essence with something else.
Many disregard that through this routine, alchemists were also training their patience and thus transforming their perception of the world.
I think you can apply this same motto to love: in order to preserve love’s freedom, one has to be able at the same time to dive into its essence and to share it others.
By Paulo Coelho
In this case the title of the newsletter is not right. Since in the previous Warrior of Light Online I said refused to write about the reasons why men love woman (I would be considered a male chauvinist South-American writer who despises the liberation movement of the opposite sex), a reader called Julia decided to do it for me. So now we have the feminine version of why we love women. Of course, I don’t agree with everything, but this is a (relatively) free tribune. Let’s see what Julia has to tell us:
We men love women because they still feel they are adolescents even after they grow old.
Because they smile every time they pass a child.
Because they walk down the street erect, always looking straight ahead, never turning round to say thanks or return the smile or compliment we make when they pass by.
Because they are bold in bed, not because they have a perverse nature but because they want to please us.
Because they do everything necessary for the house to be tidy and perfect, and never expect any recognition for the work they have done.
Because they don’t read pornographic magazines.
Because they don’t complain about the sacrifices they make for the sake of the ideal of beauty, facing up to waxers, Botox injections and menacing machines in gyms.
Because they prefer to eat salads.
Because they draw and paint their faces with the same concentration as Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel.
Because if they want to know something about their own appearance, they ask other women and don’t bother us with this type of question.
Because they have their own ways of solving problems, which we never understand, and that makes us mad.
Because they feel compassion, and say “I love you” precisely when they are beginning to love us less, to make up for what we can feel and notice.
Because sometimes they complain about things that we feel too, such as colds and rheumatic pains, and then we understand that they are people just like us.
Because they write love stories.
Because while our armies invade other countries, they remain firm in their private and inexplicable war to put an end to all the cockroaches in the world.
Because they cry their eyes out when they hear the Rolling Stones singing “Angie”.
Because they are capable of going to work dressed like men, in their delicate little suits, whereas no man would ever dare go to work wearing a skirt.
Because in the movies – and only in the movies – they never take a shower before making love with their partners.
Because they always manage to find a convincing defect when we say that another woman is pretty, making us feel insecure about our taste.
Because they really take seriously everything that is happening in the private lives of celebrities.
Because they manage to fake orgasms with the same artistic quality as the most famous and talented of movie stars.
Because they just love exotic cocktails with different colors and delicate little ornaments, while we always have the same old whiskey.
Because they don’t waste hours thinking about how they are going to approach the pretty young man who has just come on the bus.
Because we came from them, will go back to them, and until that happens, live in orbit around the feminine body and soul.
And I would add: we men love them for being women. As simple as that.
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