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People can only flourish in all kind of positive
relations. Between partners who fall in love, the ultimate
questions is: "is this real love"?
Moreover "real" love leads to engagement (commitment
to a higher cause) and is accompanied by passion. "Unreal"
love leads to addiction and captiveness.
We present you with a few excerpts from
books by Osho and Erich Fromm (oldies but goldies).
This gives you some idea about how
we see love.
At the bottom of this page is an introduction to an
external link to 7 articles on passion and engagement.
Love poems are a great source of inspiration, so we
introduce you to lots of books with romantic poems.
Love is not thirst for
power. How can you dominate someone you love? How
can you make him dependent and still be loving? But what happens
in the world in the name of love is something else: the lust
for power, wanting to control others. Of course independence
is inadmissible then. You do everything to make the other
identical to yourself. You are afraid of the other person's
freedom, because freedom escapes control and freedom is unpredictable.
So all so-called love tries to kill freedom in any way it
can - and as soon as freedom is destroyed, love dies. Love
is very fragile, like a rose. You have to allow her to dance
in the rain, in the wind, in the sun.
Love is like a bird in the sky, and its freedom occupies all
of the sky. You can catch the bird, you can put it in a magnificent
gilded cage, and it only appears to be the same bird that
flew free and had the sky to itself. It just appears to be,
but it's not: you have killed it. You have clipped its wings.
You have taken its sky from it. And birds do not care for
your gold - no matter how precious your cage is, it is still
a prison. And this is what we do with our love: we create
gilded cages. We are afraid, for the sky is immeasurable.
There is a fear the bird won't return. In order to control
it, it must be imprisoned. And love is changed into marriage.
Love is a bird in the sky: marriage is a bird in a gilded
cage. And of course the bird can never forgive you. You've
destroyed all its beauty, joy, and freedom. You've broken
its spirit - it's nothing but a dead imitation now. But you've
assured yourself of one thing: it cannot escape, it will always
be yours, tomorrow and the day after.
Lovers are always afraid. There is the fear
that love comes as a cool breeze. You cannot produce it, it
isn't something that can be produced - it comes. But everything
that comes of itself can also leave of itself. This is a natural
phenomenon. When love comes, flowers blossom inside you, a
song erupts in your heart, a desire to dance but with a secret
fear. What will happen if this breeze that has reached you
- cool and scented - leaves you tomorrow? . . . because you
are not the edge of existence. And the breeze is only a guest
- it stays with you for as long as it wants and can leave
at any time. This causes people to be afraid and to become
possessive. They close their doors and windows to keep the
breeze in, but the breeze will not stay the same with your
doors and windows closed. Its coolness is lost, its scent
is lost - very soon it turns into something disgusting. It
needs freedom and you've taken that freedom - all that is
left is something dead.
Erich Fromm writes in "The
sane society":
There is only one passion that succeeds in
fulfilling man's need for bonding with the world and to give
him a sense of human integrity and personality at the same
time, namely love. Love is a bonding with something
or someone outside the self, on the condition that
personal independence and human integrity are preserved. It's
an experience of participation and community that first brings
about the complete realization of inner strength and possibility.
The true perception of love alleviates the need for false
images. There's no need to devaluate the image of the other
or myself because the truth of actively participating and
loving enables me to step beyond my individual separate existence,
and at the same time to meet myself as the bearer of active
forces that bring about the love act. What matters is not
the object, but the specific quality of love. This love lies
in the experiencing of human solidarity with our fellow man
as well as in the erotic love between man and woman, in the
love of a mother for a child, but also in one's love for himself
as a human being, and finally it is found in the mystical
experience of unity. In the act of love I am one with the
All, yet at the same time I am myself, a non-reproducible,
separate, limited and mortal human being. Because precisely
from this polarity between separateness and unity love is
born and reborn.
Love poems
There is whole library filled with love poems for sale at
Amazon.com. Find your favorite love poem by giving
in the search string "love poems" at the Amazon
searchbox below.
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