Stupidity About Love And Relationship
The scientifically and logically inclined people have said it and most have gleefully admitted it that – Falling in love is a beautifully enticing trap set up by nature and human visceral wired behavioral choice is designed such a way that even this innate ‘fight and flight’ mode ingenuity does not help people in creating a ‘diversion’ from the ‘trap’…!
Means; there is a definitive Game Plan of nature, which it has wired in our body-mind mechanism and what we see and accept love as, is nature’s own machination, unveiling in mystically magical ways, making most of us fall in line with its diktat. Probably, this seems to be why, the popular expression about incidence of love is – ‘To Fall In Love…!’ It is like, finally falling in the ‘trap’ and meeting the inevitability of nature’s wired realism…!
Science confirms, human visceral wired behavioral choice is designed such a way that even this innate ‘Fight And Flight’ mode ingenuity does not help people in creating a ‘diversion’ from this ‘trap’ of nature. Science confirms, not only humans, but many species often compromise with their innate drive for ‘survival’, falling for the most powerful drive of intimate love. It is simply because, it seems, nature means business and it is concerned only about business of procurement – incessant reproduction…!
This means, what we feel so great about and what we never fail to celebrate with all possessions of lifetime, is essentially a sort of wired or instinctive optionlessness for most humans – men or women. So, essentially, what most of us popularly accept love as is an optionless incidence of inevitability; yet we assign and align all our energies, not to ‘free’ ourselves from this ‘trap’, but enjoy and celebrate this nature’s trap!
The best way to free oneself from this nature’s trap is to understand the mechanism and process of love and its incidence. Most of us however, fall for the trap, well before our consciousnesses evolve to a stage, where this desirability of understanding love installs itself in our minds.
It is strange but seems very true – Love happens when body-mind dualism plays at its worst best and we are in most precarious positioning of righteous judgment. Still, humanity has evolved to ‘celebrate’ this confusion, chaos and conflict of life and living. This is populism playing at its worst best for humanity. And, this emanates from ‘erroneous’ understanding of process and mechanism of idea and reality called Love.
The core idea is – Love is a passive incidence and nobody can be sure about it because, it is the way our body-mind mechanism works for us. In some weird sense, this very sense of ‘I’ is a passive incidence for most of us; though we never admit it.
However, such a state of ‘I’, our consciousness, is a very calamitous proposition. This is the state, which makes us see and accept, how powerful and intense is the trap of nature, installed in us, deep inside our body and mind mechanisms. This is the situation, we need to be cautious of and recall all our conscious elements to stay warned and decisive.
Love, as most of us popularly see and accept is not a celebration idea and realism. It is a trap and a trap should never be celebrated but conscious ideas must be evolved to come out of it. The situation of love, or for that matter, the situation of any other choice of life and living, must always be made consciously, with full awareness of all causalities that lead to the situation and choice. Being there as a matter of ‘conscious choice’ and as ‘trapped’ to be there are two hugely different proposition – Love always needs former but usually lands in the later situation.
In any case, what humans, especially young men and women need is ‘Compassion’ and not ‘Passion’. What we all need for life-living wellness and excellence is not Love but empathy of thoughts and equanimity of consciousness. This alone makes us endowed and empowered to rise above ‘drives’ and ‘visceral traps’, to consciously choose the path of righteous options. We have little choice – We all need poise and control, never indecisive optionlessness of body and mind. Unlearning the viscerality of love to learn the artistry of conscious compassion is a must.
As the wise say – ‘What we desire is what we ‘want’ but all we want, is not what we ‘need’. This is nature’s trap working within us. It has installed desires deep within us and this very potentially powerful trap is our ‘wants’. Love is some stupid ‘want’, most of us seldom ‘need’. What we need and what we should want is – compassion, equanimity, amicability and objective thoughtfulness of logical discretion.
Though, this powerful and universally transcendental desire to fall in love is a sort of wired or instinctive optionlessness for most humans – men or women; love happens to be a cumulative mechanism of multiplicity of brain processes, which itself is a complex cooperative function of various brain parts. That is probably why science is yet to decipher the ‘singular code’ of incidence of love and bio-chemistry of love. Yet, there are some good scientific revelations, tumbled down after some researches, which definitively land us in better preparedness and readiness of incidence of love. We all must know it and keep into account. To know is to journey the road to empowerment.
According to study conducted at Rutgers University, USA, there is a ‘factsheet’, which we all must know and factor in, in love –
The study reveals: “How our brain decides, we are in love” –
How beautifully mystical yet so given to confusion and chaos; as is common in love matters! We all may be very enthusiastic about saying and listening the pair of words – ‘I Love You’, but the study shows, and we all have little trouble accepting it, that words often fail or do not matter much in love matters of hearts…!
This acceptance about futility of words (Only 7% weight) also opens up the big door of confusion about love and its incidence. If 55% of love signals are wordless and only signs, there are bound to be ‘wrong-signaling’ and ‘misreading’. There is also this question as how good our brain is in ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ these wordless signs. Moreover, when even words can be used as ‘effective tools’ of deception and hypocrisy in love, how easy it can be for anyone, who wishes to fake love and master his or her craft of deception in love. Many do it, more people are mastering this ‘craft’ and we all are very careful about deception in love.
If whopping 93 percent of ‘love-signs’ are without words, only ‘sight and sound’, is it not very easy for ingenious men and women to masquerade this whole economics and chemistry of love…!
This however is not the end of trouble for lovers. Love is more mystical to discount any lesser troubles. According to the study by Arthur Arun, on an average, the mind of a person takes between 90 seconds to 4 minutes to determine whether it is struck by love or not.
Now, we all know, our brain takes 20 minutes to register that our stomach is full and that is why we often overeat; then how can one be very sure that what his or her brain has decided in less than five minutes about love, is right? This is stupidly mystical!
If we accept that 93 percent of signals that our brain depends on for judgment about ‘incidence of love’ is ‘sight & sound’ and not words, which we all are also not very good at, then we all are inclined to accept that this must be a tough task for our brains to test the validity of such ‘abstract signs’. Naturally, we imagine, such difficult judging business must take some good hours and days, if not weeks and months…!
We all know that science has proved that love emotions are handled by different parts of the brain as love involves three stages – Lust, Attraction & Attachment. All three stages involve different sets of hormones and therefore are handled by different parts of our brain. Naturally, this cooperative and symmetry business of ‘well-aligned’ decision-making should ideally be a long-process, assigned some good hours, if not days and weeks…!
However, what the scientific study suggests is that our brain decides this all-important ‘love question’ in less than five minutes! And, we have reasons to believe this study as we all know and accept that we all are huge ‘Mega Entrepreneurs’ in ‘judging business’. We take less than five seconds in judging people and most crucial aspects about our choices. We may not accept it but we do it very often…!
Let us also know a bit about how our brain decides and arrives at what choices we make in our lives. Let us have a peek-o-boo at how our brain decides –
Science says – Our brains appear wired in ways that enable us, often unconsciously, to make the best decisions possible with the information we’re given. In simplest terms, the process is organized like a Court Trial. Sights, sounds, and other sensory evidence are entered and registered in sensory circuits in the brain. Other brain cells act as the brain’s ‘jury,’ compiling and weighing each piece of evidence. When the accumulated evidence reaches a critical threshold, a judgment, a decision is made.
If we accept that decision-making by our brain is like a ‘court-trail’, we then must be aware how our courts work. The core hypothesis of all judging business is – Even if hundred culprits go scot-free, an innocent must never be sentenced for culpability. This then means – Judging and decision-making about culpability is a serious thing and therefore must be assigned good amount of judicious time and space…!
However, study shows, we are wired to make decisions about love matters only in less than five minutes and that too based on 93 percent such ‘evidences’, which are abstract, not tangible. This somehow points at as why ‘court-trail’ of mind decisions in love matters is not good and needs sound evidences…!
Now, you decide…! And, think about the ‘judicial process’, your brain must adopt and accept for ‘delivering judgments’. Let us all be ‘good judge’ and follow golden principles of judgeship. Let there be sound and objective basis of jurisprudence in judging business. Success of love and in love is not only about individual choice. Rather, successes of love are crucial for social and all collective wellness. When love succeeds, life succeeds! Good society is made of successful lives.
Love is ideally acceptable with its three elements of Mystery, Magic and Marvel. Most of us feel, if love is made to be understood with objective technicalities of science, the three ‘M’s’ of love withers away. The three ‘M’s’ land most of us in inexplicable troubles and pains of love, still, we do not wish to understand the mechanism in its objective and scientific terms, which can put us in good stead, vis-à-vis all the love troubles.
This mysticism of love is what most lovers get attracted to initially. This suits the consciousness of love. This marvel of love gives the young men and women huge kicks of life. Young minds get huge thrills in journeying amidst the mist of mysticism of love as precariousness of the enterprise always has its own joy. Similar is the human desire, when it comes to religion and spiritualism. Mysticism is preferred state here too. However, this mysticism further confuses those in love and faith and this confusion in turn leads to calamitous patterns of behaviors and actions in love. The resultant pain and chaos is cyclic.
Sciences may not be in a position right now to tell us in perfect details as why and how, what happens in love. However, there are huge research-backed substantiations, explaining lot many aspects of the purely physical and bio-chemical mechanisms and processes of love, as human mind handles them. This surely takes away lots of mysticism, magic and marvel out of the age-old notion of love and archetypal imagery of love in society. However, it is hugely helpful in clearing the mist of confusion and chaos around the very core idea of love. This also helps us to unlearn the visceral stupidity of love and move to a hugely facilitative evolved consciousness of compassion, which is what we all need.
It is a humble suggestion that objective knowledge about something never ever takes away the subjective joys. It rather enhances them. We all know it very well that an actor on the movie screen is just portraying and professing a role or character still, we cry with them and get emotionally one with the fictitious character. The knowledge, that the actor is actually not dead and it is only the character he portrayed is dead in the movie, does not anyway reduce our emotional joy and satisfaction of movie viewing. The knowledge surely enhances our joys and nullifies the pain, as we know, at the end of day everything is back to real.
The dualism of love is actually the root cause of why such a beautifully powerful and beneficial facility called love becomes a cause of pain and trouble. When we do not understand the mechanism of something very clearly, mysticism is bound to creep in and it shall unleash the destructive energy of confusion. We need to understand the mechanism of love in scientifically explained terms to enhance the joy of love.
The mechanism of mind, explained in terms of detailed neuro-chemical and neuro-electrical processes in pure scientific traditions may not be suitable for all of us. Therefore, what we shall talk about here is just an outline and simplified description of the mechanism.
What we are attempting to bring out from our discussion is the ‘dualism’ inherent in the mechanism and processes of love, as human mind handles it. We also need to accept that it is not something which science is telling us now. Thousands of years back, great minds of spiritualism and philosophy have told similar facts about consciousness, the cardinal position of love in it and the dualism, which consciousness faces about the emotional positioning of love.
Human mind is where all mysticisms emanate and end. The multilayered mechanisms of mind is one huge mystery, humanity has been attempting to unravel since thousands of years. The spiritualism and philosophy have given its own interpretation. Science has taken over and presented great facts about mind mechanism, its structure and functions and this has led humanity to understand lot many things about consciousness.
Human brain is the central mechanism for ensuring the survival and excellence of human body and it has to be accepted that the conscious and subconscious mind accepts and expresses almost everything in terms of its primary and pivotal role of ensuring a mechanism for survival excellence. This interpretation of human mind looks so demeaning as we all are inclined to accept ourselves as something big and a lofty and special creation of God. Accepting ourselves as an entity, with base idea of survival is revolting.
That is why, science says, “the idea of a self, in objective terms is often pitted against the ‘self’ itself, which we have been used to accepting subjectively since thousands of years.”
Just for knowing the mechanism, we need to accept that human mind ensures this survival and excellence through a continuous and complicated maintenance of a process called homeostasis – better understandable as ‘poise’. All wisdoms, old or new, since thousands of years, have talked about the importance of this idea called ‘poise’, explained in terms of philosophy and spiritualism. Science unravels its physiological, bio-chemical and psychosomatic aspects.
In lower organisms, the homeostasis or poise is only physiological and biological but as human mechanism is very complex, human mind has to perform a complex and multidimensional homeostasis. In humans, the poise also has to be bio-sociological, psychological, emotional, spiritual as well as volitional. We are talking about this all because, love has to do specifically with this homeostasis thing and the trouble it creates also emanates from this.
There are sufficient scientific researches to establish that when people are in true love and absolute intimacy, their overall homeostasis is in great shape and this reflects in their healthy state of mind and body as well as behavior-action. The reverse has also been established as researches show, when people are in instable and unsettled love elements, their body gets affected and they land in serious body-mind dysfunction and even death.
Science has also established that most of the behavior-action of humans is instinctive and intuitive. Even the learned behavior, the nurture part, in time becomes part of instinctive behavior and nature. The simple idea is, almost everything, which our conscious and subconscious mind accepts and expresses, has to be in consonance and conformity with the larger homeostasis, which is essential for survival and excellence.
The conscious as well as the subconscious minds operates in a way, which is mystical for most of us as most operations and processes are intangible and we are mostly oblivious of it. That is also why, love, which is a very potent, cardinal and critical element of behavioral and emotional expression of our consciousness, remains in the mist of mysticism, magic and marvel.
However, we all can now understand the mechanism of this mysticism of love consciousness and come out of the veil of mysticism, standing tall on the ground of practical and tangible realism. This we can do by understanding how essentially our larger consciousness is an intangible expression of homeostasis process and how love is the strongest and most authoritative voice of this consciousness; seeking perpetuity of ‘poise’ – the larger homeostasis.
The process of making of consciousness, which stays with us lifelong, starts even when we are in mother’s womb. The sense of ‘self’ or to say, the question as ‘who I am’, starts to take shape when in womb. A child gets the feel of sounds and vibrations around in the womb itself. The unconscious mind of child starts accepting these elements of his immediate milieu as part of its homeostatic requirements. Science admits; a newborn child is designed to be born as a genius. It readies itself for the environment outside the womb by imbibing the signals it receives inside the womb. That is why; modern couples start the education of their kids well in the womb itself.
From the day first, the human child is instinctively loaded with one facility, which helps him or her evolve his or her ‘self’ – the subjective consciousness. This facility is instinctive inquisitiveness – the insatiable inclination to know. This desire also seems to be a beautiful expression of the homeostasis mechanism of body-mind consciousness. The mind can maintain poise only when it incessantly updates information about the surrounding environment and makes prompt decisions about the utility of these information for maintaining homeostasis.
It is here the trouble seems to start for humanity. The need to know exposes the mind to loads of multiplicity of information in the larger environment. As subconscious mind of the child starts to accept and adopt most of them as ‘essential’ for his homeostasis, he or she becomes unconsciously predisposed to these information and they become part of his or her larger consciousness, which science refers to as love/belief system.
Even before a child grows up to become an adult, he or she already accepts thousands of beliefs. However, most of these beliefs are based on his or her personal and subjective interpretations of experiences, inferences, assumptions, probabilities, deductions, inductions, and loads of oversimplifications, which the subconscious mind is expert at making. Most of these beliefs are very much part of the subconscious mind and continue to present themselves as potent referrals for conscious mind even years after. We all have heard people saying, an adult’s love is very much a reflection of what he or she got in childhood. We all know, a love-deficit childhood engenders an adult with troubled love life.
All these beliefs, which a child acquires, form part of the ‘self’, the subjective consciousness, about which we always keep asking question as ‘who I am’. Our subconscious mind starts building an image of ‘self’ and this process expresses itself in mystically intangible ways. We unconsciously start extending the limits of our ‘self-image’ in things and beliefs around us. It starts with we identifying with our body first, then with our mind, our family, friends, neighbors, teachers, partners, the special someone and later with our career, assets, ethnicity, nationality, gender etc. As we grow in life, we identify more with ideas and issues. All these are expression of our ‘self’, the consciousness.
We adopt them in our minds and guard them very ferociously as if they were part of our ‘self’. We fight over our people and beliefs like we fight for our dear life and well-being. It is because, they are part of our self and anything against them threatens our homeostasis, making us react fiercely. This is mystical. We may think, we are fighting for the cause of our dear ones or dear beliefs but essentially, we are fighting for our own survival, which is expressed in terms of homeostasis.
We all know, how people feel so strongly about their family, loved ones, ethnicity and nationality. People go to the extent of sacrificing their lives for the dear cause of family and even nation. It is very simple to understand why people do not think twice, giving up their lives for lovers and even something as vague as loss of their favorite football club. People commit suicide even when their favorite pop star falls from stairs and hurts him or her seriously. This is no joke. These incidents somehow are very intense and as some people accept it as something seriously threatening their ‘self – their very homeostasis wellness, they feel, their very survival is threatened. The reaction can be very disproportionate and precarious. They often are in love!
We all need to understand and accept it with a non-judgmental and objective mind that usually, when we are in love; we are in the ‘mystical middle’ of a very intense and powerful dualism. True love is one beautiful and everlasting ‘poise’ of person and personality. However, in our pop culture, we all can see how love is one huge ‘psychosis’. The trouble is, both poise and psychosis can be simultaneously present and active in one single person, at any given time.
A person seeks to be in love to internalize this ‘poise’ to the core of his or her personality. However, the same person is battling against the psychosis on the periphery of his or her personality as the culture and society we live in, exposes him or her to loads of conflicts and competitiveness. This dualism often expresses itself in chaotic love emotions.
When we love someone, he or she becomes an essential and ingrained part of our ‘self-image’ and systemic wellness homeostasis. We start taking him or her for granted as part of ‘me’ and ‘mine’. That is why; when there is trouble in love, or a situation, where it seems the love-situation is unsettled, we feel hugely threatened. We unconsciously feel that our very survival and core wellness is threatened. In this unsettled situation, the very person, who was the ‘receiver’ of all our love- largesse, poses as the one, who is a threat to our wellness.
We all have experienced and witnessed this situation all around us when a lover kills his or her beloved and also kills himself or herself. Why? This dualism plays the villain. The dualism of the subconscious mind makes us do all unimaginable things. The simple reason is – when your love is threatened, your unconscious mind quickly attempts to identify the ‘enemy’, who threatened your survival instincts. As your beloved himself or herself is someone, who jolted your love-wellness, the unconscious mind identifies him or her as enemy. The war is then declared against this ‘enemy’.
The dualism is playing its mystical marvels to us. The special someone, the beloved, whom we love so much that we cannot think of living a moment without him or her, becomes our enemy number one. Depending on how we all have been culturally trained to treat our enemies, we start executing our battle-tactics against him or her. Those, who are well groomed, trained by parents and family to be accommodative and compassionate with even the enemies, shall never opt for violent and overtly physical battle-plans. However, they can be sadistic about them. Those, who have a culture of violence, can go to any limit as it is said, “Everything is fair in love and war”.
Global data shows that intimate partner violence is hugely on rise. Failed love and intimacy has become the chief pain-inflictor in our pop culture. The easiest expression of the desire to inflict pain on intimate partners is ‘promiscuity’ and ‘character assassination’. Sadism, aggression and behavioral hostility are sure signs of a troubled and unsettled wellness homeostasis of the person. This person shall be hugely intense and passionate in love. However, be sure, when things are on the low, such a person can be calamitous and extreme with expressions of his or her desire to secure his or her wellness.
As we said earlier, researches have confirmed that when a person’s dear ideas or people are in trouble, his or her bio-sociological, psychological, emotional and volitional homeostasis is disturbed and this leads him or her to dysfunctional health and even death. The perception of threat to their homeostasis is very subjective, varying hugely.
That is why, we all need to understand and accept; love needs huge preparedness. We all are given enough time for the preparations. When I am perfectly settled and in absolute ‘poise’ of my overall wellness homeostasis, then only I am ‘ready’ for assimilation and integration of love. Moreover, the special someone, I love, has to be in this ‘poise’ too. Then only the magic works!
A young father has his little daughter growing fast in a very big city of United States of America, where pop culture has taken the teenagers in perfect grip. The mother is very concerned and even tense. She worries for her teenage daughter and asks her husband, what to do to avoid any ‘accidents’. Nothing new! However, what the father of this teenage girl said to his wife is interesting. He said, “I am trying to figure out, what my daughter can do, which I cannot forgive. I love her and I think, the sky of my affection and compassion for her shall always remain much larger than her arms can stretch for possible wrongs.”
True love has to be like that. Love, in all its manifestations and expressions has to be like that. Love liberates, never suffocates. The ‘compassion’ of forgiveness shall always remain larger than the ‘accidents’ of ‘passion’, when you are in true love and absolute intimacy.
The father, in the above story, is in perfect ‘poise’ of his wellness homeostasis. His wellness is not threatened by his subjective ‘self-image’ of right and wrong. It is his poise, which is so beautifully and magnanimously reflected in his behavior and action. It is only natural that this father is a sure hero for the girl and this girl shall grow to be one ‘poised’ person.
From the day we are born, we are muffled by love, in one form or other. Our preparedness starts from that day. Initially, it is the responsibility of parents and family but later, we ourselves have to learn and unlearn our ways towards this ‘poise’ of our larger wellness homeostasis. If we have this poise, love shall be one huge theatre of song and dance within. And, when we choose to extend this wellness poise to someone special, we need to be sure, he or she is in the same ‘poise’.
Love, as an idea, deeply associated with the entity of homeostasis, is hugely beautiful and highly useful. Love is a mystical expression of the ‘sense of larger wellness’, which is a cardinal and potent condition for homeostasis.
What mind receives and expresses are through neuro-chemical and neuro-electrical processes. However, these processes are intangible and our conscious mind never is able to see or perceive them. It is when, these processes are translated in behavior and action then we understand and accept it. That is simply why; there is a sense of mysticism, in all our behavior-actions, which are expressed in subconscious state of mind.
The affectors of human emotions, which in turn impact the human mind’s decision-making choices of behavior-action are mostly intangible. That is why; there is a sense of mysticism and marvel around it. Love also being an expression of intangible nature and essentially a neuro-chemical and neuro-electrical expression of the larger need of body’s homeostasis wellness, lands in the domain of mysticism, magic and marvel.
Love is an intangible and very subjective expression of emotions in terms of behavior-action to extend the domain of self’s homeostasis wellness in the ambient environment. When the self accepts and adopts something and someone as right and good for its homeostasis wellness, there is a neuro-chemical and neuro-electrical impulse to merge in, as part of its larger ‘self’. This Process Is Body-Mind Consciousness Expressing In Terms Of The Emotion Of Love.
Love is essentially an extension of one’s ‘self’ and subjective consciousness to accept and accommodate a thing, idea or person in its fold. Therefore, love basically is a very selfish and self-indulged emotion, an expression of the self’s ever-present need to maintain its homeostasis. It is our higher consciousness, which assigns and aligns this ‘selfishness’ to lofty and noble values of life and living in societal space.
That is why it is very important to accept that incidence of love shall always be mired in conflation and conflict as it is like just the birth of a child, which we all nurture, evolve and mature in time with care and perseverance. Love too happens or delivered in precarious mode but needs to be evolved definitively. Love evolves in echelons, like consciousness, which rises up with the energy of unlearning.