A friend and I made a "study" of love once. We had come to the sad conclusion that the only thing we knew or even thought about love was how boy-girl love felt...which is to say, good. Anything that didn't feel good, if not dislike or hate then, was simple indifference.
We came to the conclusion that love is simply a non-resistant welcoming...to everything. Pretty much an impossibility for walking-around humans, but an excellent goal to use in training for still more spiritual growth.
On a practical level, i.e., in daily life, love is not reacting in kind to perceived slights, snubs, barbs and put downs. And here's a key: It is also not accepting those things in order to win the other over, or to shame the other, or anything, any action that we know very well is ego-based.
Our spiritual goal is to know oneness with the universe...with God, in short. I personally don't know how many people achieve that, but I do know it is achievable. I do know I have experienced spurts...short spurts (or is that redundant?)...but in those spurts is the hook that keeps that as the only worthwhile goal.
Love is, in fact, the absence of fear. The trouble with knowing that is we tend to make love our self-determined objective in order to avoid fear...in which case we shoot down the whole thing. That avoidance of fear becomes our god, our focus, our one-ness.
Self-determined objectives are different from goals...self-determined objectives depend on our own efforts. Goals are our hoped-for plans if it be God's will. If we are honest with ourselves, we know the difference...if we don't, just run it by a friend.
Love is also the absence of ego. It may be in this lifetime the best we can hope for is the deflation of ego...which is never gifted to us although it only comes by grace.
Thank You.
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