Peace Party: What is love?

Love man . . . wise words from one of history' most admired individuals

By TOMMY HOLGATE,Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, Chesterfield

It is amazing to be able to enjoy such a great plethora of wisdom from heroes of the world gone by.

In my teenage years, the thought of getting your Nokia 3310 out of your pocket to Google the words of a prophet from the 1400s was less than likely.

And not only because 'Google' was nowhere near becoming a verb back then.

Great figures like Martin Luther King are among the many iconic figures of human furtherment who are now immortalised in the form of a photoshopped image with text overlayed, and posted on to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook galore.

And I love it.

Martin Luther King, pictured top, said:
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. darkness cannot drive out darkness - only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

As Einstein [whom it brings us great pleasure to find as an inspiration on the topic of peace] said: "Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be achieved through understanding."

Which got me thinking, 'maybe that means, on some level, we need to try and understand love'.

Yesterday, I wrote of my desire to still be chucking love in the direction of Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, after a disastrous radio interview the previous morning.

But in 1993, Trinidad-born-German-vocal-artist Nestor Alexander Haddaway pondered: "What Is Love?"

And it's difficult to know the answer, even 22 years on.

John the Baptist said: "God Is Love."

That was ages ago. Now it's on car stickers. Is God a car sticker? Or is God in the air.

"Love is in the air," as John Paul Young sang (1978).

It is traditionally defined as:

noun

1.

a strong feeling of affection.

So I like to think about what sort of force it is that keeps us alive by sending electric pulses to our heart and that somehow extracts the oxygen from the air and sends it through our blood that moves to the muscles and organs, and what sort of feeling that is imbued with.

I would say we are fairly affectionately kept alive by our subconscious abilities to digest food, reproduce cells at a staggering rate and enter into slumber for a recharge every night.

So if it's the universe doing this, the universe loves us.

If it's 'us' doing this, that is to say our bodies, then our bodies love us.

But then we are our bodies.

So perhaps we are love.

That's a nice thought.

Persian Sufi mystic love poet Rumi had some good things to say on the topic too, as per the images below...