Lusting after Love, yet not Loving your Lust !!!!!!

There are 4 major types of feelings we experience for our surroundings and in most cases it pertains to the people around us. Those are the feelings of Like, Love , Lust and Hatred. Barring the last feeling the above all feelings along with the feeling of understanding the feelings of others, what we call as Empathy come under the umbrella of Compassion. All these feelings seem alike but all these feelings including the feeling of hatred come under the idea of giving importance to the other. The only counterpart of these feelings is the feeling of Apathy. One has the feeling of apathy for others because one doesn't really give other that much importance.

This time it's neither about Apathy, nor is it about hatred, it's about the positive feelings, and in that too, the most intimate ones. The most basic feeling of these is the feeling of Like, This feeling is more like a seed implanted in our hearts which when nourished as per our choice and understanding may grow to the feeling of Love or the feeling of Lust. Which brings me to the belles of the ball. 

Love the feeling which is ambiguous yet it brings a lot of clarity in life, or may be not, maybe this is its ambiguity. Often finding it difficult to explain why is it considered the purest feeling of all. Love is been given the status of purity and divinity yet it has faced prejudice and discrimination, not only because of the people we choose to love but because of the type of love we may have. 

Love does change its dynamics as per the type of people we are surrounded by but then, this is the Love for the soul, the feeling for someone beyond it's physicality, for the Love for that is called in a very foul manner as Lust. Lust in it's dictionary terms is defined as a strong sexual desire, further surfing in the net will give you a definition that calls it a psychological force producing intense wanting (in simpler words desire) which goes beyond sexual desire. The way I see it, it is a feeling of attraction juxtaposed with the feeling of desire and appreciation for the physical appearance of the subject of the feeling. People have also went on to say that lust leads to love if given time. It is not given a stature of love because it is often confused and portrayed in a negative light. Lust is confused with obsession. 

One forgets that as humans we have the potential to love, but one doesn't contemplate further to realize that this love that we have inside us constitutes of all kinds of love, love for the physical and love for beyond physical. this division of love for physical being lust and love for non physical being lust is also superficial as we have went on to "Lust" for non-tangible things like fame and power and have ended up loving things that are physically present. 

Love and Lust can be seen as twins, that's one of the theories I can come up with. They are the twin children of Desire , Love has a choice though it can be desire free or with desire, the former leads you to a path of selfless love and a completely desire free person, like a hermit.The latter though instills an energy in you to invest your time feelings and energy till you have the subject of your love in your life, the kind of love that could be generally called as passionate love. Lust on the other hand is the prodigal child of Desire, it's definition has this word so one can't ignore that desire does exist.

However lust still has a choice, a kind of choice that even passionate lovers are prone too as they are attached to desires, and the choice is to embrace Obsession. Obsession is a notch beyond passion, where if the desire is not satisfied one gets so obstinate and possessed with the subject of the same that one destroys self and everything in it's path. This is a blemish that needs to be washed away for all those who lust but are not obsessive. 

Thus there is hesitance and apprehension in admitting our lustful feelings, fearing the prejudice, most of which is self prejudice. The question is that will this diminish the existence of our desires or fantasies? Won't acceptance be a key in understanding and then making the correct choices? This is not a feeling instilled by external influence, it is an in built feeling which stems from the seed of attraction. 

Then there are relationships judged because they are solely on the basis of Lust. The question is what is wrong to choose to have such a relationship as long as it is with mutual consent of the concerned people and there is no case resulting from an unwanted obsession. If a bond can be made by pursuing the feelings developed out of our desire and attraction towards the aesthetics and appearance or the attraction of the other, then there is nothing wrong to be found. Sometimes lust leads to love as well. It acts as a channel of appreciating the person beyond its physicality through the physicality, hence lust is also needed to express love. "If you don't lust after what you love then how will you make love to your love??" 

Yes in this pursuit of aesthetic and desire based feeling one has to make sure that the one that they have this feeling for shouldn't feel harassed, violated or stalked and uncomfortable for if you find yourself under such situations , the feelings then need to be checked if they aren't adulterated by obsession and whatever our feelings be we have no right to impose it on others. 

Many of us who chose love over lust assume that they have chosen true love, but love is infinite in its ways and can't be restricted to a kind. This means we have just chosen a side of love so that we or the people who keep judging us are comfortable. Isn't this biased with love, isn't this a lust for love to a certain level ? Love is meant to dissolve divisions but here we are creating divisions within the shades of love itself and not appreciate its various ways or faces. 

Lust is always given a sexual connotation but as mentioned before even love is expressed sexually, having said that don't we lust to live a lavish life ? don't we lust for fancy clothes, gadgets and food ?then why such a restricted mindset to make a feeling that we are born with look so bad ? Lust is indeed a representative of sensuality but sensuality is not about the sense of skin and feel alone. It is about our other sense organs as well. We lust to see beauty, lust to taste good food, lust to hear melodious music, lust to smell enchanting fragrances. Then why shy from this feeling, why condemn it. 

Love as we know it is more about beyond the appearance and aesthetics and is about soul. But for that we need to be honest and appreciative of our soul which is in turn giving it an aesthetic appeal. So will it lead to love or lust ? Contemplate and then choose to which feeling you want to give in to. 

"LOVE is about soul or spirit hence is seen as a form of SPIRITUALITY,   LUST is a bout our senses hence is a representative of SENSUALITY. 

            Spirituality and Sensuality may seem different but the common thing about these two is that both of them get you high, both take you to places beyond time and space. Both give you  pleasure and enlightenment."

Reflections I saw in the "Shades of Mirror"- an understanding, an interpretation, an introspection

I am no critic, nor am I an enlightened monk who understands how this world works or should work. I am just a vagabond soul, with my mind wandering in various horizons of thoughts exploring, experiencing and trying to interpret the best out of the situations around me, the incidences around me, the experiences around me. My mind was craving to satiate its wanderlust and then it was drawn towards this book "Shades of Mirror". The title caught my attention for one sees the way one is in the mirror but in the inner mirrors of conscience, desires, emotions and feelings how does one see oneself ? This book helped me find a path to the answers of these questions. 

The poets Shivangi Goenka,  Yash Kanodia, Saransh Gupta and Disha Agarwal   with minimal sentences yet with deep thought provoking ideas and heart and gut wrenching emotions show you reflections of the very human nature and its transcendence and regression and the very same reflection of how our society is. In each of the 60 poems in this book, I smiled for the amusing tales, I cried for the trauma and tragedy faced by the protagonist in the small tales of the poems, I found myself related to the poems as if they were the stories of my own life. 

The common experience I had while reading all these poems was, that I saw; I saw how life can be ruthless and merciless, how the trauma caused by various incidents of life, force you to end your life or live it lifelessly for very rare come out as survivors. There are times when we are lost, we have lost our paths, we forget where are we supposed to be headed and have no idea of where are we heading towards. Then there is also the case of not being able to look beyond the visible, how we believe everything we see, hear and feel what lies in front of us but not ready to expand our vision and accept the various possibilities and probabilities that could make the visible, we also aren't too flexible to see from the other end.  Our desire to explore the other, in the physical, emotional and relational aspect helps us see ourselves and also the world around us, how romance for ourselves and for others not only changes our perspective but also enhances it.

All the above situations are the themes or as the poets rightly put it, the Shades through which our gaze is widened not only to see the big picture but to see in which shade does our reflection lie,  for after seeing our reflection, after seeing who we are and what the world around us is, we have various choices at our disposal.

When we see ourselves in the mirror we are conscious and embarrassed by the flaws in us, we cover them up and then see ourselves again, we hope for those flaws to be removed so that when we see ourselves again we can be relieved, hence we work on them, the similar case can't be said while looking in the mirror of our mind. "The mirror shows us how we really are yet our mind craves to look in a certain way, similarly the mirror of our mind shows us WHO we really are but that craving to see our better self is lost ". Similarly when I began reading it I was disturbed, scarred and uncomfortable, for maybe because i wasn't ready to see the truths that the book was asking me to face, the possibilities of human nature and potential that I found hard to come to terms with, that face of the society, that I wasn't ready to see yet I knew it existed, but it was through these poems of the book that I could see my possibilities, an ability to see myself and decide as to how I choose to see myself and the world around me. 

To conclude, I'd say all these shades are the shades of one mirror. We walk around as individuals, we come alone, we leave alone, but we are "WE" even when we walk alone we are with our shadows, hence we aren't really alone. There are many instances that when I read this book, I felt emotional for incidents i never experienced, yet I managed to empathize with the story in the poem. Thus the reflection of apathy which is a reality in today's times leads to a vision of empathy, which is a possibility. This can be a shade we would love to see in the mirror when we see ourselves again.