Standing in Love - Essence of being Creative

What is love? Shakespeare mused. The great bard was not the first to ask this. 

To most of the humanity love is something which “just happens”. People “fall” in love. It is considered something which is out of one’s control. Since ancient times, we have tons and tons of literature revering this casual numbing idea about love. It is considered as a powerful trance, when man loses his power to reason. Neuroscientists say love a neural itch. Evolutionary Biologists call it a powerful genetic urge. Psychoanalysts call it an expression of repressed drives. For poets it is an ecstatic state of being. For spiritualists it is communion with God. Since ages poets have gone in full length weaving a tapestry of magic around this thing known as love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley in his usual passionate style of writing beautifully sings about this magical feeling of love in the following lines of his famous poem – “Love’s Philosophy” –

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle -
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother:
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

There is an inherent passiveness in this paradigm of love; a mode of being a victim, a parasite. Love for most is tightly coupled with finding the right “object of love”. Love then, “just happens”. The trance continues till the object is able to fulfill one’s psychological needs. When that ceases, again the lover is in search of the next object of love. Or rather, is “stuck” by the cupid’s arrow, on the sight of another object. Love most of the times is considered as a reactive emotion, which is instigated by an outside agent – “an object of love”.

This traditional paradigm forces me to reflect about the ancient Egyptians in the 700 BC till a century hence. They took their thoughts and emotions to be the work of spirits and gods. Also the Mesopotamian cuneiform texts form 2000 B.C., for instance, refer repeatedly to the “commands” of the gods – literally heard as utterances by the rulers of society. Most of the ancient western world believed that the thoughts are something which is not created by man in his mind, but is put by an external God.

It was in 600BC when man for the first time started contemplating that thoughts are not casted by an external entity, but is created from within the mind. In India, Buddha attributed human thoughts to our sensations and perceptions, which, he said, gradually and automatically combine into ideas. In China, Confucius stressed the power of thought and decision that lay within each person. The signs of change were even stronger in Greece, where poets and sages began to view their thoughts and emotions in wholly new terms. The locus of control of the thoughts thus started shifting from outside to inside.

Unfortunately the emotion of love is still considered by most of the contemporary world from the archaic perception of the ancient Egyptians. It is the “object of love” - the beloved - who controls the button of the wellbeing for a man. Not only in romantic love, but also in other forms of love, it is assumed that if the object of love is worth, love happens automatically. Love is considered as a passive state, in which a person is seduced into with a magical spell, where he is powerless and tranced. This spell originates from the object of love. This spell continues till the object of loves behaves in a particular way. And then it ceases to exist, when the object of love fails to behave in that pattern. Slowly the emotion of love transmutes into hate. All the while man is paralyzed in the emotion of love and hate.

The state of love had been a subject of immense contemplation and research in the field of psychology. There have been many enlightening discoveries done by many modern psychologists on this subject, which is generally un-known to common man. In general parlance, still the world stays in the outdated superstitions on what love occurs to them.

Victor Frankl in his book – Man’s Search for Meaning, had given a powerful and thought provoking definition of love, based on his research on Logotherapy. He says –

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true”

Erich Fromm in his book – The Art of Loving, goes ahead and clarifies; love is not a passive state, where people “fall”. It is not about “falling in love”, but about “standing in love”. He says love is an active process, where a person chooses to think and act in a certain way. He says –

“Genuine love is an expression of productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility and knowledge. It is not an affect in the sense of being affected by somebody, but an active striving for growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love. To love somebody is the actualization and concentration of the power to love.”

He continues, “Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not towards one object of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism”

Now, that is interesting! The contemporary developments in psychology has a different outlook towards love. Love is considered as an art. The attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. In the words of Fromm, “If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, I love you, I must be able to say, I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”

Saying that love is an orientation which refers to all and not to one does not imply, however, the idea that there is no differences between various types of love, which ofcourse depends on the object which is loved. But the important thing is although nature of the love differs with respect to the object of love, but the essence of the state of being in love is the same. It is independent of the object of love. If by any chance it is being directed by the object of love, it is not love, but narcissism.

This realization of love is crucial in the contemporary world. It is important not just in the interpersonal relationships, but in the whole context of life. Being in love with life, its opportunities, its challenges, work, play etc, is at core of this realization. If this attitude is carried forward in our everyday thoughts and actions, it enables to bring about lots of creativity and harmony. Being in love is difficult, so is being an artist difficult. It needs patience, knowledge, creativity, understanding and above all, a zest to evolve and increase the sum total beauty in the world.

It is high time for humanity to wake up to the realization that it creativity and novelty does not come through a linear process of following one step to the other. But they are the fall outs of an attitude of being in love – an “active love” – “standing in love”. One has to keep in mind the following pillars of genuine love postulated by Erich Fromm - care, respect, responsibility and knowledge. I feel they are the essence of being creative. Only when you are genuinely in love, can you be genuinely creative.

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