Michael Chui

Christmas Day 2005 Discourse

Introduction

What is love? Not a question, I admit, the average person bothers asking. More often they ask whether it's love, or if that love is true, or they talk about how you should love, could love, whether or not it's important... all of that nonsense. Well, perhaps it's not nonsense: but it's frivolous and ultimately meaningless because they are unable to tell you what it is.

In my tenth year of schooling, this is exacty the quandary I was faced with. I thought I was in love. But then again, was I? I couldn't tell. And my breakthrough realization, you might say, was realizing that the only way to be sure of whether or not I was in love was to decide what love is.

A definition.

Since then, I've been treated to a slew of discouragements, the most relevant of which is the assertion that some things do not need to be defined. I disagree with this notion, on the basis that the very nature of a word implies the presence of a definition, if you seek it out. Its heart, you could say, lies at the overlap of everyone's personal definition. But what if no such overlap exists? There are two possibilities: either the word is meaningless, or someone is wrong.

To this end, I have sought to define what love is. When we can agree on its meaning, we can agree on the question of whether or not someone is in love, whether or not you should love a spouse forced upon you, whether or not friendship is isolated from love, etc. Many questions become answered, when the fundamental one is sure.

The Definition Proposed

So let's throw it at you straight up; the conclusion at the start.

Love, v.t.: to completely understand, include, and grow with.

Love, n.: the process of loving something.

The Definition Explained: Overview

Because there may be some initial confusion, let me hasten to address the easiest and most obvious reactions.

First, the issue of emotion. There appears to be no emotion in the definition. There is no joy, no tingly feelings, no melting knees, no breathless awe. This is because while many instances of love are associated with various emotions, the central act of loving is not inextricably tied to these, and can be separated and applied elsewhere with no dilution. Consider the act of kicking: you can feel joy, or anger, or satisfaction, but regardless of the emotion, it is still a kick.

Second, the issue of object. I do not restrict it to people, though I restrict its actor to people. This means that you can love a – let's be broad here – lamppost, but a lamppost may not love you.

Third, the issue of verb. To tackle this, we go to Josh Fredman's Noun Typology, which is an alternative to the weaker primary school categorization of “person, place, or thing”. The work cited herein should not be considered a perfect reflection of Fredman's typology. Fredman offers four types of noun: object, process, condition, and concept. By and large, emotions are considered conditions: you're either sad, or you're not sad. In the recent traditional framing of love as an emotion, it is considered much the same way. A person is either “in love” or not. I argue that this is untrue.

I argue that love is more properly classified as a process. This means that I say that love begins, ends, and continues for a period of time. It is not turned on or off; it is started and stopped. So what we have here is a noun, “love”, that is a process. The process is a verb, also “love”. The real question, therefore, is no longer so much what love is, but how it starts, what it does, and how it ends.

The Definition Explained: Compassion

Why does a person love? What motivates them down the path? Broadly speaking, you could theoretically assume that all human beings are not merely capable of love, but have begun to love. And while I am unconvinced that anyone has ever reached the end of the path, it certainly could happen. But I was speaking of beginnings.

I use the word Compassion for the motivator of love. When we kick a ball, the motivator is an intricate chain reaction of cerebral activity, synapse firings, and muscle tensions. In this way, you could say that the motivator is not differentiated from the action itself, but rather a part of process: it simply marks the beginning.

To understand compassion, we must take a journey into the concepts of identity and self.

The self is a convenient mental device that encapsulates everything that you consider you. It contains your identity, without which you are not you, and everything that you identify with. Perhaps as a child, you had what is called a security blanket: an object you refused to be parted with. The reason for this is because you identified with this object: in your eyes, to be parted with it was to tear away a piece of yourself. In the same way, you have heard the tales of lovers feeling torn apart at the departure of their beloved, of parents feeling bereft when the nest empties, of a once-rich man deprived in poverty, of a celebrity fallen from fame utterly frazzled. Why?

Compassion.

When you have compassion for something, someone, you include it in your sense of self. It becomes as much a part of you as your heart is to your body. This identification brings you a sense of self that is larger than your identity. Compassion is what drives friendship, what drives community, that sense of national, ethnic, cultural identity. Your sense of self expands to include something besides just you.

The Definition Explained: Comprehension

The workhorse of the definition is comprehension. You might find this both strange and validating at the same time. Most people understand comprehension to be an intellectual feat; after reading an academic paper, if you know the concepts and can re-express them and argue for or against them, you've comprehended it. Of course, there's more to it than that. Comprehension has a sister word derived from the same root – comprehensive – which suggests more than mere summarization: it suggests holism, a big picture outlook.

There are three stages in comprehension, and these stages are, unfortunately, recursive. By recursive I mean that although the stages go 1-2-3, it's more accurately 1a-1b-1c-2a-2b-2c-3a-3b-3c, except even deeper. It's a headache to even imagine it. And I don't have the words to describe the nuances of different objects, and how they are embedded in each other (a planet is a part of the whole universe, and a person is part of a planet, and an individual is a specific person), and how it interrelates. I can only feebly protest that it is complicated beyond even my long-winded ken and beg off.

The first is the stage of ignorance, where you know nothing. On the highest level, this stage typically extends, in a typical person, from the first spark of sentience to roughly somewhere between the teenage years and fifty years. Whoa! you say, that's a long time. And yes, it is. And to make it even more complicated, remember that love is a transitive verb, which means you love something. You do not just understand; you understand something. In the first dawn of your life, that something is the manifestation of total compassion: it is everything.

But there are smaller scales, like your boyfriend, or your parent, or a pet. This is where the waters get murky, because you started on the journey towards understanding these things long before you were aware of them: those first few seconds as an infant. And thus, as your sentient mind reaches out into the universe, you form for the first years of your life deep-seeded and powerful assumptions, and the older you get, the more assumptions you carry. And the ignorance necessarily fades.

The second is the stage of sophistication, where you know stuff but you don't understand it. It's knowing that dropping a rock into a puddle of water causes ripples, but you have no idea why. You know that calling your girlfriend a bitch will make her back off, but you don't understand that you're simultaneously alienating her. The nature of the transitive verb is obvious here: obviously, if you're more sophisticated, you know more about something, even if it's everything in general.

Sophistication fuels ego; ego expands, and when unchecked, becomes cancerous; a cancerous ego leads to arrogance; arrogance leads to stagnation; stagnation leads to death. Someone who stays in the second stage ultimately dies; someone who loves only halfway will inevitably fall away (unless they physically die first; we have time limits here). So sophistication is an alright thing as long as you keep a check on your ego and shy away from unjustified pride (which I term, above, arrogance).

But sophistication has a second fatal flaw, which has victimized a large proportion of the go-geters of the 21^st century. And the term for this is information overload. Though it pains me to phrase it this way, the simple fact is that they know too much. But remember what it means to be in the stage of sophistication: to know without understanding. And that's just what the problem is.

The third is the stage of spontaneity, where your knowledge is internalized and instinctual. I also call it the stage of expertise, but the word must be used with caution. In the classroom setting, it means you're no longer hauling out the cheat sheet and looking for the right equation; it means you snap your fingers and go, I can use this principle and those laws and *fiddle fiddle fiddle* that's the answer! I must caution, here that spontaneity is not the same as random. Spontaneity is an intuitive process, essentially mimicking a conscious, rational process happening a thousand times faster. To achieve spontaneity, called “improv” in the arts, is essentially the pinnacle of understanding. It is a holistic breakdown, a complete view from the very large to the very small. If you would believe it, that is the essence of what the physicists are pursuing: a grand unified theory of everything.

But here, I must make a caution. Spontaneity and sophistication are capable of coexistence, as is ignorance. This should be an obvious statement: you can know a hundred theorems of mathematics and be at a total loss to explain why a photograph is beautiful. You can dance given just a floor and some music, but when playing the piano, you have to painstakingly pick out individual keys. No one has even really dived in deep into the sophistication stage of Everything, not Steven Hawking, not anyone. There really is, simply, too much. But step by step, component by component, we're getting there, standing on the shoulders of giants.

The Definition Explained: Creation

This section is probably the most philosophical, most abstract, and weirdest section out of all of them. But the best way to explain it is by the simple device of a story: a beginning, a middle, and an end. That is how I've been describing love, defining the base conditions for it as compassion, its processes as comprehension, and its end conditions as creation.

Creation is, in fact, slightly more general. It requires that you look again at the iterative process mentioned briefly in the previous section. Imagine, in your mind, a filmstrip. Say this film is just a picture of you, walking along a sidewalk. The film begins with an infant, sitting. The infant grows, crawls, gets on its knees, and becomes a toddler. The toddler learns to stand up right, walks, and expands upward with growing confidence. The adolescent strides along, with increasing certainty and fixation, until slowing as the aches and pains of body enter. The elder walks slowly, perhaps aided by a cane, and the film ends.

Now, if we take this film and look at the filmstrip itself, we will see perhaps a few thousand rectangular shapes, called frames. And this is what I am saying: creation occurs in each frame. If you have ever seen a flipbook, every page is creation. Creation is a constant process. Unlike love, which is characterized by its beginnings, creation is characterized by its endings, its final products. However, creation is a process, too, and love is but one type of creation.

For every instant of your life, you are a different person. The chemical makeup, the position of various particles, the stages of reproduction your cells are going through, the thoughts going through your head, even the simple counter of how many seconds have passed since you were born: all these things have changed since the last instant. This is why the birthday is typically surprisingly unremarkable, when you look back a day later. The change is so constant that it is unnoticeable; but, once upon a time, you crawled on your hands and knees and even standing straight up, you wouldn't have reached three feet.

The key revelation is not that your identity is meaningless; it's not. But rather that every instant has its own importance. The instant a bit of pollen is inhaled is the critical instant in which the allergic processes will eventually be set into motion, triggering the aching and sneezing and scattering your mind, causing you to do too poorly on one critical exam, flunking the class, graduating late, viewed as unqualified for jobs, etc. A different instant, a different event: a musician is inspired to write a song, a record label likes it, sells it, a child buys it, their parent listens to it, shares it with a friend, who writes a story, a publisher likes it, sells it, a teenager reads it, hears it, and decides not to give up one more day.

I call these event cascades, or more poetically, ripples in the sea of people (an analogy derived from watching ripples from stones dropped in water), but they don't need a special name. In the same way music can be produced by strings vibrating in harmony, and orchestral music may include hundreds of strings vibrating in harmony, so too do events produce sums greater than the parts that made them. But more importantly, these events have causes, and these causes are of no small part the action of human beings.

Actions have consequences, and consequences have outcomes. A process is synonymous with an action, and so you see that creation is an action with far-ranging, even unintended effects. And love is such a thing, and while its outcomes are not guaranteed to be positive, its pursuit necessarily results in nothing less. How do I know?

The Definition Explained: Courage

The core difficulty of anything is that you don't know what you don't know. Because this is ultimately the original intent behind my investigation: how do I know if this is love? We have a definition. We have a reasonably thorough explanation. But it's a difficult animal to tame.

Courage is my word for the measure by which you can determine how well you are doing. A kick can be measured by the velocity and angle of the ball, the accuracy of the shot, how well you recover from it, and so on. Courage, put simply, is the reduction of fear. Some people say that it's the ability to continue to strive despite fear, but as a measure of the extent of love, the extent to which one understands, it is the complete reduction of fear, not simply suppressing it.

Fear ultimately derives from ignorance. Fear is what you have when you don't know what will happen. Love, you should recall now, is to completely understand. It means that, at the point where you complete the process, you are effectively omniscient regarding the object. There are no surprises. Ignorance is absolutely absent. And thus, there is no fear. At all.

It's not a perfect measure, because there are ways to suppress fear and ways to reduce is through other means. The term “recklessness” comes to mind. On the other hand, love is a sure way to reduce fear: the better you understand, the less you fear. In the real world, such a blanket statement is not as simply applicable, but it is not untrue. But there are no shortage of incentives to reduce fear. Fear sets the preconditions for many ill things in the world, from simple stage fright to potentially world-devastating nuclear stockpiles. Understand your enemy totally, and what need do you have of war? There would be no enemy: only another friend, not yet embraced.

The Definition Explained: Bringing It Together

We go back to the original definition here, and perhaps you're wondering what all of this has to do with that original statement, which has only one word beginning with the letter C, and it's an adverb. Well, fret not over my roundabout ways: it really does make sense.

A process takes time, in many cases, much time. It begins and it ends, and in the middle happen many things. Compassion is how love begins, and there is no love without compassion. If you strive to understand a thing you do not care for, have no identification with, then it is not love. Comprehension is how love moves, and there is no love without comprehension. If you identify with it, but do not investigate, then it is not love. If you do not seek to know, to explain and predict, to recognize the whys and hows, then it is not love. Creation is how love manifests, and all love is creation, just a type of the thing. If it does not create, it is not love; it does not need to flashy or showy, merely present, and that is enough. Courage is how love is shown, and love can be measured by the retreat of fear. Because love in its advance is the dawn of knowledge and the great illuminating omniscience that brings with it the power to dispell the darkness of ignorance from which fear springs full-grown.

If you love a thing, then you must discover its workings. If you love an event, then you must partake of it. If you love a cause, then you must join it. If you love a topic, then you must study it. If you love an ideal, then you must strive to achieve it. If you love a person, you must experience them.

Conclusion

I have always spoken here of a very simple thing, no matter if it has taken six pages to explain, and I am not certain it expresses my thoughts perfectly, and especially not the thoughts that will take place in the future. But love is not a simple thing, not when it is placed back into the context of the world from which it is born.

Consider the case of the average upper-middle class American. This person has an immediate and extended family, is married and has children, owns a home, has a reasonably well-paying job, owns some various gadgets, and so on. Does this person love their spouse? Probably. Children? Probably. Job? More likely than not. Parents? Probably. Grandparents? Probably. Uncles and aunts and cousins? In-laws? Television? House? The pool? The membership to a country club? Their car? Their lifestyle? The organizations they participate in?

A bit much, isn't it?

One final, crucial comment on what love is is that it is an intellectual feat. It is often expressed physically and experienced in tandem with emotions, and some would argue it has powerful reverbations on a spiritual level. But it is an intellectual feat: the simple strive to understand.

If you would love your wife, then you must understand her. None of this mysterious female race crap. If you would love your husband, then you must understand him. None of this dense, incomprehensible male drivel. They are human beings, too. If you would love your children, then you must understand them. None of this assumption of naivete and blindness; they have the same five senses you do.

But they, too, are different people, and thus the conclusions they reach are not the same as yours; at least, not always. It might be a preference for rare over well-done steak, or an enjoyment of a wintry evergreen forest to a white sandy beach. It might be favoring the death penalty or believing in Islamic teachings as opposed to Baha'i teachings. Large or small, these are differences, and they are differences that you must not merely acknowledge, but also understand. Not merely accept, but also challenge. And neither are your views sacrosanct, for they should do unto you this, too. But proactiveness is generally good.

If you would love God, then understand Him. If you would love the environment, then understand it. If you would love America, then understand it. If you would love yourself, then understand yourself.

Understand completely. Include, as an intrinsic part of your Self. And grow with.

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