GUAM: Agape Love

          'Agape' love is pretty much a love that cures all.  It gives well being to all of us in order to erase the ill being in us all.  Love is what makes us happy and ultimately satisfied.  That's inherently how the author describes Agape love.

          'Agape' love is a virtue because it's a kind of love that remains trapped within itself and within us.

           According to this author, 'Agape' love is more than imaginary, which is what eros and philia is.

           Weil thinks that the world is ours, but not God's.  He believes that God lives in Heaven, and he is absent from the world.

          Weil claims that 'agape' love is passion, grace, and all things that are the opposite of cruel and sad.

          The love of couples can sometimes approach 'agape' love.  They can do this by recognizing experiences of love and by seeing if those experiences agree with their ideas of love.  That's what love is all about in the end.  Matching makes happiness.

           A person can transition from eros to philia to agape -- changing from one type of love to the other -- by loving selfishly to selflessly,  than from selfish love of the partner to selfless love of the partner, than from covetousness to benevolence, and from benevolence to charity.

"Charity" is love transfigured into virtue.

           Without charity we are all living our lives without true love.  Charity is what gives us virtue, and without virtue we are emotionless wrecks.  Life is meant to have love, and in all and all love is the most important thing in life.  Who wants to live a lonely life?  I know I sure as hell don't.  It is love that commits us to morality, and if our morals are good, than our charity is well developed, and if that's the case than our lives are worth being lived.

Metaphors for Philia

Philia, for me, is like surfing.  It never gets boring.

Philia is like drinking an oreo milkshake because.  It will always taste like perfection to me.

Philia is like my unconditional love for my parents.  It will never go away.

GUAM: Religion and Love

                   The Nature of Love as well as a father's love for a son can be quite imaginative.  According to Spinoza, love is "a joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause."  In sum, Philia is this idea that states love is active.  All the time.  It will last forever.  The author says women might be disappointed by this type of love because women, and even young girls, feel that imaginary love would be an ultimate disappointment because it's not necessarily real.  Needless to say, Eros and Philia's concepts are inextricably mixed and intertwined but also different because there will always be different ideas of love, and that will perpetually be inevitable.

In Class GUAM: Religion & Love

The Search for Gold:

                 The story came from Aristophanes's speech, and the reasoning behind this is that the soul mates were striped of something, so they were seeking it perpetually.  When a person is separated from the thing that they want than he or she is going to fight and keep being persistent until he or she gets what they want -- either they will do this, or they might suffer.  Different people handle separation in various ways.  The logic of Eros is that one can only love what one does not have because one will always desire what one can't have.  Freud says that love will always be taken from us because we only get to experience each type of love once, whereas Aristophanes says it's a possibility that our love can be taken from us.  'Concupiscent love' is solely desirable love and nothing else.

Prompt 2: My Experience With The Transcendent

            I will never forget the day where I felt a true awareness with the Transcendent.  It was a foggy evening in Kensington, Ca on Monday March 31, 2012.  My best friend Tyler De Martini was in a comma at Highland Hospital in Oakland.  24 hours previous to this Tyler was hit by a car that was going full speed (25 mph) down Marin avenue in Berkeley.  Tyler's head injury was traumatic and fatal.  The swelling was close to 100%.  I had some notion that he wasn't going to wake up, so I prayed to God for one thing: "let Tyler go peacefully, or furthermore, do what's best for him, and please make it so he is happy.  He is a very angry kid for several reasons.  If he will be happy alive can you please awake him from this comma of his?  But if he wants to go, can you promise me that he is going to be happy."

           The next day I received a text message in the middle of my Physics class.  I discovered that Tyler took some brain tests, and he was no longer with us.  His brain was declared permanently dysfunctional, so the doctors were going to have to pull the plug.

           I immediately went to the hospital.  After being there for twenty minutes, the family and doctors went into Ty's room.  The family gathered around Ty, touched him, and as the doctor pulled the plug Tyler died in less than a second.  His cousin Mimi, a nurse, said she had never seen someone go out that peacefully.  Tyler was so happy, and all his loved ones were lifting his spirit that day.  God answered my prayer that day, and never before have I had such an experience with the Transcendent.

Thomas Merton "One Love": GUAM Sheet

The Search for Gold:


          There is no such thing as selfless love.  We all love because we are marketing ourselves as good people.  That is -- according to this article, though.  It's not my belief.

The Search for Authenticity:


       Never before did I think of love in such a negative way.  Although I disagree that all love is selfish this article has made me realize that many people do get involved in relationships solely for personal pleasure and attention.

The Search for Understanding:


     The commercialized idea of love will perpetually be inevitable in society for the rest of the earth's existence.  People will always want to look better than everyone else.  500 years from now, if the "hip thing to do" is marry two husbands and two wives than most people will do it because that's what will be trending, and that's all that people care about: what's trending.  Moreover, human beings are always worrying whether or not they will "fit in" with the rest of society.

The Search for Meaning:

What is the trouble with commercialized love?

Does this author suggest that there's no such thing as true love?