It's not just "love." Every
noun is an abstraction of form from experience. Where the experience the noun symbolizes is shared by more than one party to the transmission of that noun, communication occurs. If I tell you about my "dog," is the objective reality of what I experience as "dog" entering your mind? Or is it merely an attempt to create in your mind a similar association of with your experience of "dog"?
It is of utmost importance to understand the difference between the
signs and the
things signified.
When Lao Tzu wrote that the Tao that can be spoken is not the Eternal Tao, I don't interpret that to mean that talking about the Tao is a waste of time. I think it means that we must understand that the words we use to describe our experience are just symbols based on our need to organize our intera ction with the Universe and, if you're lucky, share that experience with someone who associates a similar experience with the same symbol, but they aren't the Tao itself. Words are a
sign pointing us to the Tao as the
thing signified, just don't confuse the sign with the absolute truth of the Tao. Joseph Campbell said something similar in his dialogue with Bill Moyers in "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth":
CAMPBELL: The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.
For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That’s literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy, Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility, But if you read "Jesus ascended to heaven" in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward – not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.
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MOYERS: Aren’t you undermining one of the great traditional doctrines of the classic Christian faith – that the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefigures our own?[/FONT]
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CAMPBELL: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.[/FONT]
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MOYERS: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.[/FONT]
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CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought. The myth puts you there all the time, gives you a line to connect with that mystery which you are.[/FONT]
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Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.[/FONT]
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The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going.[/FONT]
The process of communicating using symbols and signs involves sharing what feelings, thoughts and experiences we associate with a given symbol to see if we are communicating. We may not be able to do so. And some (like yourself) may claim to not want to engage in this process at all (though your participation here says otherwise).
I think that what you are offended by is the invasion of the sacrosanctity of your preferred symbol ("love") by an attempt to create a collaborative experience between individuals. You seem to feel that if somehow if we can find a shared meaning it strips the symbol of the personality you have invested in building yourself around it. Surely you can appreciate the irony of being so inflamed by this process and asking questions in a Jewish forum under a topic entitled: "G-d."
As far as
my decision to examine these symbols, I leave you with this from Prof. Henry Higgins:
"The question is not whether I've treated you rudely, but whether you've ever heard me treat anyone else better."
