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The Choice to Love
- Thread starter Willamena
- Start date
See, and I happen to think that if we love we have no choice about that. Loving describes what we are in that instance, a particular type of relationship with the object of affection.
Can we choose not to be in relation with another? To say we can is to say we can arbitrarily pull ourselves out of that relation to that thing. That doesn't describe any love I know.
Can we choose not to be in relation with another? To say we can is to say we can arbitrarily pull ourselves out of that relation to that thing. That doesn't describe any love I know.
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
I think we choose to let ourselves go, a bit like sky-diving once you jump there's no going back. But first you decide to jump.
Do you? Do you say, "Well, this jump looks good, let's be in love then, shall we?" *snap*
Or do you rather suddenly find yourself in love when you realise that you already are? That's more like how it works for me.
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
When I look at your post you seem to be right. I hesitate to say that you are because the implication of your being right is that we then have no free will at all, just the illusion.
But then
Would you say the illusion of free will is the same as free will?
doppelganger
Through the Looking Glass
I definitely don't. "Commandments" are the antithesis of love - a shallow substitute for the Spirit that that is frequently (nay, usually) turned against love.
doppelganger
Through the Looking Glass
Of course. Both are constructs. Whether we have free will or not, from our perspective we can't help but appear to ourselves as making choices, even if the "choice" we make is completely determined by biology and memory. Put another way, not having free will would look from the individual's perspective the same as having free will.
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
doppelgänger;1050439 said:
Yeah, I agree.
dingdongknockknock
Member
God gave us a choice. He didnt just make all of us programmed to love him. If you believe in him which i do, you love him.
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
I agree with her, too. Love grabs you. You don't grab love. Love always comes to us from outside ourselves. We love God because God first loved us. We cannot choose to be loved. The choice to be made is, how shall we honor that love? That's our free will -- to accept or reject having been loved.
I would say, as I have in the past, "Illusions exist."
Leonard Cohen said something similar in one of his songs:
I am not the one who loves
It's love that seizes me
doppelganger
Through the Looking Glass
. . . as further illusions . . .
sandandfoam
Veteran Member
I'm going to have to sit down with a bag of something herbal to think about that.:cigar:doppelgänger;1050497 said:. . . as further illusions . . .
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
I do hope it's oregano...
Re free will, it is only an illusion when you realise the illusion --that is, you make the illusion real through recognition (reconstructing) of what you thought was one thing as another thing. What stands in contrast to that is participation in the "illusion," wherein it cannot be considered an illusion. That's where free will is real.
I like the analogy of the crescent moon. It hangs in the sky as a crescent --a real crescent --so long as we participate in the illusion that light and dark have presented of what we could, if we give it some thought, see as a partly-lit sphere.
The same thing happens with those pictures of the old/young woman. While you see one --that is, while you participate wholely in one image --the other is suppressed.
Reality to us is a series of images.