h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

To love is wonderful

To be loved is evn more wonderful

To amalgamate the two is beyond words.


There is one problem with this however - finding it, sure it is easy enough to be emphatuated with somebody, but to love them, now that is different. The same is true in reverse, it is easy to be admied, but to be loved is special and should nt be taken lightly.

When trying and failing to find love causes such pain why do we still try? What drives us? Is it the knowlage of what is to come or the fear of not trying? Does anyone have any other ideas?

Not a clue matey

I don't have a clue with regards to why we fall in love, but I can say with emphasis, falling in love and to be loved i.e. to find that precious someone and to keep her is the best feeling in the world.

Sun rises in the east & sets in the west . Luv rises in the heart & sets after death . Luv is a thing that can't be xplained , it touches the heart & affects the brain !

After failing so often and so painfully, why do we continue to search for love? Because it appears to be the only thing in life worth having. What good are riches if you can't share them? What good is safety if the only thing being protected is your own life? Love gives you something, the only thing, to care about. That and sex is a whole lot of fun. But that isn't even all that great without love.

Or maybe we're all just too stupid to realise that life would be a whole lot better if we never expected or hoped for anything, that trying only ever leads to failure, so why bother? I guess we're just stubborn. But my first answer sounds a whole lot prettier.

I have a theory that you can't help falling in love. Maybe its impossible to stop yourself, maybe its a predisposition for humans to be and fall in love. Of course, this doesn't take into account all the assorted baggage and assorted misc that makes people build up walls when actually approached by love, but still I think its a really really natural state to be in love.

The greatest adventure in human experience is being in love and loving others.
Yet no subject inspires more prolific drivel or dross or amazing profundity and heartfelt prose than this.
As most clicking on this thread ,I think about love symbolising a personal thing attached to definitions of success,passion,sex and wholeness. That is only one facet of love.

Love is in God's creation (and if that puts you off cos of the g word , circumvent your prejudices for a moment)it is in the way you treat each other and the small acts of selflessness ordinary people do each day.It is in the hearts of aidworkers and cuddly primary school dinner ladies, inspirational lecturers,charity givers and the few people who bought the last gary barlow record.

That said many think of love in only it's most conditional sense,as applied to the status quo utilitarian outlook of self satisfaction.
So the question is ...is it love that we are trying to find?
How does this kind of love compare to the aforementioned types...is it more fulfilling or more appealing....I'm asking ,not preaching and am unsure.
However since I mentioned the g word it would be safer to assume I'm a close-minded judgemental bigot and in need of a philosophical arse-whip but I assure you that's not the case more than any of us logging on in cyberspace on machines that could feed villages and clear cataract clinics in India if sold on the open market)

The greatest adventure in human experience is being in love and loving others.
Yet no subject inspires more prolific drivel or dross or amazing profundity and heartfelt prose than this.
As most clicking on this thread ,I think about love symbolising a personal thing attached to definitions of success,passion,sex and wholeness. That is only one facet of love.

Love is in God's creation (and if that puts you off cos of the g word , circumvent your prejudices for a moment)it is in the way you treat each other and the small acts of selflessness ordinary people do each day.It is in the hearts of aidworkers and cuddly primary school dinner ladies, inspirational lecturers,charity givers and the few people who bought the last gary barlow record.

That said many think of love in only it's most conditional sense,as applied to the status quo utilitarian outlook of self satisfaction.
So the question is ...is it love that we are trying to find?
How does this kind of love compare to the aforementioned types...is it more fulfilling or more appealing....I'm asking ,not preaching and am unsure.
However since I mentioned the g word it would be safer to assume I'm a close-minded judgemental bigot and in need of a philosophical arse-whip but I assure you that's not the case more than any of us logging on in cyberspace on machines that could feed villages and clear cataract clinics in India if sold on the open market)

You raise good questions. I would offer that a mature individual is capable of giving more of him/herself because there's a better developed person there to provide support, care, and kindness to a partner.

I think the selfish love we so often see is a primary result of looking to others for solutions that have to come from within the self. Boredom can give rise to promiscuity, as can lack of self-respect. Self-absorption can make someone incapable of the kind of compromise needed in a relationship. A balanced, mature, relatively happy person will generally make a wonderful companion. Of course we all have our weaknesses, but we try, for our lover's sake, to grow beyond them, if we are ourselves good companions.

I also think, that in a religious context, a strong bond of love is a reflection of an individual's relationship with his or her God.

You are both right. I have lost a man who loved me much more than I loved him - and that is why I loved him very very much - after living with him for 22 yrs. Since I depended on his love for me I was devastated after he had to leave. After some awful time I started searching for the whys and so I meditated and trained myself to start appreciating consciously again everything God had created, including people. By systematically thanking God every morning for every lovely little example of his creation that came my way, I started loving again. We have to love. We are nothing without loving. I know now that God has loved me all my life long, only I did not know. By having learned that he did, I feel loved again and I can survive on that love alone. Instead of dedicating myself to sadness, I can love my memories and be grateful and loving.

I did read your coments on Love and i do agree and understand what you mean.
But it is also about the choices we make making the most of opinitunies that arise.
We can make the right choice or the wrong one hopefully if and when we do make a mistake we learn from it amd aim not to do it again.
We are all seeking our soul mate but not everyone finds theirs.

sorry to hear of your loss, but hardship is the pathway to peace, and i glean that you have grown spiritually from the experience. a book that helped me survive a devastating break up is "The Road Less Traveled" by Scott Peck. as God would have it, i came into possession of it within weeks of losing the woman of my dreams. there is a chapter all about love, the difference between and infatuation, love is not an emotion (it is committment), and much much more.

i like what you have to say. do you live in GB? i'm in the US, in a town that was part of the Old West. hope to hear (read) more from you.

Hi Yankme. I am pretty new here too. I have just visited your space and I think you'll go far as a writer, reminds me a little of Dean Koontz. I also have the urge to write about everything that happens to me, that I see, that I feel... I am not good at fiction though. I don't live in GB, I am German and live in Brazil, for the time being anyhow. At the moment I have to decide once again about what to do with my life, though I have put everything into God's hands, hoping he'll show me somehow what to do now. Well, that's all for today. Wish you luck with your writing. How old are you?

"The Road Less Traveled" is a beautiful statement about love and personal growth. I highly recommend it. I have bought copies for several people, even for a woman who dumped me once, after the breakup. Two years later she gave it back! Hahahaha!

two books i am constantly giving away-- the Road and Codependent No More, How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Taking Care of Yourself, Melody Beattie

soooo many people need to remake their lives, find their place, understand where true happiness can be found, learn to live comfortable within their own skin... there's just too many unhappy souls walkin around these days, not facing their fears, their anger and confusion.

9/11 was terribly predictable. just too much misery in the world and no way to express it. sad. lucky for me, i have a switch in my brain that shuts off the negative, turns on the positive... only sometimes a fuse blows and the switch doesnt work. oh well.

Ok--sounds interesting.

I don't get the link to 9/11, though. Could you elaborate?

hiya butcher,
i thought it was pretty clear. 9/11 was the manifestation of MILLIONS of miserable muslims, who choose to live in fear, anger and confusion. i did a fair amount of research in 6 different publications of the Qur'an. i found it was much like other holy books i have delved into, in that there are passages preaching peace and goodness and mercy and other passages where people are exhorted to fulfill God's angrier edicts.

i have not been able to determine what percentage of the Islamic world believes Mohammed to be a suitable role model, but the ones who do, emulate him. sorry, but the man was quite the male chauvinist, to say the very least, and a megalomaniac, to say the most. he glaringly begins the Qur'an admitting that he has borrowed from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, then goes on to clear up the misconceptions he found there. nothing wrong with that-- a person should feel free to interpret anything any way he/she desires. but to gather armies behind you and have them kill people by the thousands because you are the last great prophet of God Himself and you say it's okay... oh yeah, there's something definitely wrong with that.

the Human Race needs to mature, find a way to settle differences without violence. greedy oil dynasty heir Bush needs to learn that right quick before he throws America another level down in world opinion, causing even more people to align with terrorist principles.

Love is the only weapon we have against violence-- in our personal lives, so that domestic abuse will become a thing of the past; in our communities, so neighborhoods will relearn what it means to be a good neighbor; in our cities, so crime and corrupt officials will diminish; and in our countries, to put an end to the legalized murder that we call war.

Love. and more of it. that is what this particular conversation is about-- right? turn me over, i'm done.

Hmm.

Love doesn't work when there's a guy twice your size pushing you around in high school.

Love doesn't work when someone is so hateful that they're trying to develop weapons that can kill the populations of cities.

Love doesn't always do what you want it to.

When someone hates you, irrationally, and you aren't out to get them, you can't do anything to appease them.

I agree that the terrorists hate the USA and western culture. The thing is that they are brought up in a culture of hatred. Not all muslims are, but the hateful ones are.

Arab governments sell oil to line their own pockets. They have not used it to develop their economies, educate their women, and create prosperous, free societies. So their people are unhappy. What do they tell their people? That it's our fault. I don't know how, but they do. Like the way one palestinian terrorist told his children that Israeli soldiers ATE arab babies. A lie. But tell enough lies over enough time and you can get entire cultures believing things like that.

Love can't fix it. You gotta take the hateful bastards out.

dont want to get too deep here, but someone sent me a very enlightening article that i almost didnt read because it looked like religious clap-trap, which it isnt. here are some excerpts (gonna try to put the entire thing in My Space, dunno if the links/references will come out):

Just and unjust wars in the Christian tradition: what does history teach us?
By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
President, Chicago Theological Seminary
Sermon preached at St. Peter's United Church of Christ
Elmhurst, Ill.
Feb. 23, 2003

We seem suddenly to be living in extraordinarily anxious times. Terrorists invade our cities, people die of anthrax from opening their mail, the economy is very unstable, and snipers pick off random citizens doing their ordinary tasks of shopping and getting gas. Israel/Palestine is in flames. The so-called war on terrorism is amorphous and difficult to define. Public enemy #1 only a year ago, Osama bin Laden, disappears from the public screen and is interchangeably replaced with Saddam Hussein. Then bin Laden reappears, perhaps, and issues vague and yet horrifying threats. Apparently the recent tragedy at a Chicago nightclub was precipitated by people panicking because they thought pepper spray was a terrorist attack. Are we at code yellow, code orange, code red? And what does that mean? Exactly how anxious are we supposed to be? Debates on CNN-- shall we attack Iraq or not? Will it increase world threat or decrease it? How to begin to decide? How strange these days seems and how frightening.

The pluralistic religious factor in all this anxiety is also new. Threat and counter threat are couched in the language of religion against religion, of god against god. Words not heard dominating in the political sphere for centuries, crusade and jihad, seem to give the new world struggles a transcendent frame. Are we struggling for good and is the enemy evil? Is the struggle about freedom? About oil? About markets? About who is God?
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Aquinas' time was far different from the cosmic struggles of Augustines. In the high Middle Ages the divinely run society seemed finally to have arrived, at least for the elites. Influenced by the reintroduction of Aristotle's writings into the West via the Muslim world, Aquinas posited a seamless, great chain of being from God as first cause to the last spec of secondary causality in the material world. Whereas Augustine was preoccupied with intentionality and the corruptions of the lust for power, Aquinas, as a rationally deductive thinker, took Augustine's question "What is the moral evil in war?" (City of God, Book 22) and sanitized it to the question "When is a war just?" His answer is not an exploration of the corruptions of the will to power, but a straightforward list: "For a war to be just three conditions are necessary."
(Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae.23-46) The list is not unhelpful. There needs to be 1- a right authority to declare war, 2- a just cause and finally 3- a right intention on the part of the belligerents, i.e. achieving some good or avoiding some evil. This list is subsequently expanded to eight.
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Dr. Thistlethwaite ends with this:
Martin Luther King, Jr. captures this spirit of Jesus when he says, "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." (from Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), p. 594.) Amen.

So by finishing with the quote from Jesus, we tend to appeal to a sense of pacifism.

Jesus did say turn the other cheek. He also violently destroyed the money-changers' tables in the temple. He said, "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword." He was also wise enough to put down angry mobs ready to kill with words alone.

Would Jesus approve of me getting in a fist fight because someone cut me off on the highway? No.

Would he approve of me letting a big kid beat the crap out of a little kid in front of me? I really doubt it.

I can't think of any case where Jesus told us to fight. At the same time, I don't believe he meant us to ever let bad things happen.

It's rather confusing to be a Christian sometimes, or even just a follower of Jesus. But I have to think that there are things worth fighting for.