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→Human Love
== Human Love ==
Ordinary human love is vital, emotional and physical and always egoistic—a form of self-love. The psychic element is very small except in a few.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/human-relations-and-the-spiritual-life#p55</ref> <center>~</center>
Human love is mainly vital, when it is not vital and physical together. It is also sometimes psychic + vital. But the Love with a dominant psychic element is rare. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/human-relations-and-the-spiritual-life#p56</ref>
<center>~</center> Human love is nothing but divine love perverted and distorted by the instrument through which it is expressed.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-534#p4</ref> <center>~</center>
Human love is mostly vital and physical with a mental support—it can take an unselfish, noble and pure form and expression only if it is touched by the psychic. It is true, as you say, that it is more usually a mixture of ignorance, attachment, passion and desire. But whatever it may be, one who wishes to reach the Divine must not burden himself with human loves and attachments, for they form so many fetters and hamper his steps, turning him away besides from the concentration of his emotions on the one supreme object of love.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/divine-love-psychic-love-and-human-love#p41</ref>
<center>~</center> He was speaking of human love manifesting as Bhakti, as a force of devotion for the Divine, and he says that at the beginning your love for the Divine is a very human love with all the characteristics of human love. Yet if you persist and make the necessary effort, it is not impossible for this human love to be transformed into divine love through identification with what you love.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/16-june-1954#p61</ref>
=== Physical Love ===
There is a vital love, a physical love. It is possible for the vital to desire a woman for various vital reasons without love—in order to satisfy the instinct of domination or possession, in order to draw in the vital forces of a woman so as to feed one's own vital or for the exchange of vital forces, to satisfy vanity, the hunter's instinct of the chase etc. etc.This is often called love, but it is only vital desire, a kind of lust. If however the emotions of the heart are awakened, then it becomes vital love, a mixed affair with any or all of these vital motives strong, but still vital love. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p30</ref>
<center>~</center>
There may too be a physical love, the attraction of beauty, the physical sex-appeal or anything else of the kind awakening the emotions of the heart. If that does not happen, then the physical need is all and that is sheer lust, nothing more. But physical love is possible. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p31</ref>