Definition of Terms: “Love”

Posted March 18th, 2010

“Love” is one of those words that has so many different meanings that it has almost become meaningless. It causes confusion when one intends one meaning and another hears another. Ancient Greek has at least five words that are all translated into English as “Love”. Latin had several words for “Love” as well. In Hebrew, the language of the old testament, the word “to Love” is an extension of the word “to give”.

“Love” can mean romantic love between a man and a woman (or between any number of combinations of different genders), it can mean brotherly/familial love, it can mean the special love of a mother for her child, it can mean universal love from one soul to the collective, and it can mean the “energy” of connection between every living being.

So why did we choose to use this ambiguous term in our name? Why do we print it on our products? We have our own definition of the word, and it includes ALL of the definitions mentioned above, especially the last one.

We believe in logic and clarity. Formal logic requires a definition for an ambiguous term. What follows is our definition of Love, so we are all clear on the meaning we intend to communicate.

Love is a feeling, an emotion, an “energy” (think: intellectual + emotional + physical meme) that has the capacity to be transmitted among living beings. By humans it is absorbed and it is expressed. We are conduits of this positive energy. That is, Love is traveling THROUGH us and among us in a vast network. It goes out at the same rate as it comes in. When we give more, like a vacuum more is absorbed. When we receive an influx, there is an outpouring. Sometimes the conduit runs slow and we need to loop it back through ourselves to get it moving again (“Love yourself first”), before we reconnect our conduit to the network.

“Practice Love” asserts that absorbing and expressing this “energy”, this emotional, physical and “spiritual” meme, are natural abilities we all have and that they can be honed to make our conduit bigger. They can be practiced in order to make ourselves a more powerful force of Love in the universe.

How to practice? We practice by feeling it. We dance, we create, we inspire, we aspire. We do whatever our particular minds and bodies LOVE to do, we feel the Love, and then we GIVE it away unconditionally. The more we give, the more we absorb. We get it from other people, we get it from the sunshine, we get it in our dreams in our sleep, we get it from standing at the top of a mountain, literally taking in the beauty surrounding us. We don’t grasp for it; we relax as we stand tall, and we sweetly breathe it in.

We capitalize Love to denote that we are referring to this definition, not out of pretension. Lower-case love refers to more general, contextual usage, like “Dude, I love the sandwiches at Cheba Hut. They are hella good.”

Sources: The Meaning of Love, as understood from Hebrew Language, Love – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia