"bikhar jaaoon main ban ke roshni ka sailaab" : Love , loyalty, and relational bonding

How can anyone love everyone ????????? What is the question, please ?? You can desire someone, admire someone, adore someone, be in relationship with someone , yes. Bu love everyone ???

You  can desire someone, adore someone,  possess , belong to or be in a relationship with  someone or  be attached to someone - and so on. But can you call this limited and well defined " arrangement" love? Can you really call it love?

You can't have relationships or bonding or attachment with everyone. True. But you can only love everyone. You just can't love except everyone. And the converse is also true: you can not desire everyone, can not "possess" everyone, can not be in a relationship with everyone, you can not admire everyone: you can only love everyone.
And yes, so can everyone love you and everyone else . And in fact if that someone tuly is in love and understand what love really is and how it differs from relationship and attachment and claims of possession, he or she not only will but MUST love everyone and everyone always.. That, I have always said,is the difference between desire and relationship on the one hand and love on the other. That also is the reason why petty violent instincts or sentiments like desire, possession, exclusivity in relationships, 'strings attached' deals called relationships etc. get confused with an all encompassing peaceful sentiment like love.

 Some part of the "relational bonding' is an  in-built mechanism in  Nature's  constraints of survival and the consequent laws  - like mother's strong bonding with her off spring, all through Nature. That's the most beautiful example of  relational bonding, but it still is not love in the sense that an all encompassing surge of love for all creation that sweeps through the hearts of poets at the highest  peaks of their creativity. Nor is it anything like  the peace-giving, sublime feeling that a saint perhaps feels towards the whole universe, blessing everything he sees.

In the end, A mind superior to mine with expression skills more forceful and creative than mine can do justice to the experience of "love" that I refer to but can not adequately express in words, much less make you experience it. In fact, I can not make you or anyone else understand or experience the intensity even of ordinary phenomenon like romance. So no surprise that 'love' that takes everything in its sublime embrace,  touching  everything  in equal measure,  is nearly impossible to convey in language.

The problem of inadequacy of language in describing subtle and forceful phenomena of Nature is something that even modern scientists have acknowledge as real. Scientists often encounter inexpressible situations while talking about glorious paradoxes in Nature even as they search for some sanity, some continuity, some coherence in natural phenomenon.

The problem arises also when we try to apply the idiom of something very limited in nature - like feelings of belonging, attachment , possession, relationship, moral or sexual loyalty etc. - to something as beautiful as love for all that one sees and hears or touches etc.

You  just said that "You can love everyone but so can they." Not only can but MUST. He or she will have no choice if he or she is also feeling something that I am feeling, which is not creating new relationships as triumphs, trophies or achievements on romantic territory but something as light and beautiful as fragrance.
In a state of mind like that, you want to embrace not Kim Kardashian but the entire mankind, the entire womankind,the entire Nature, the entire sky. .

I guess what is bothering you in my concept is the place of loyalty in relationships based on "love" ,Loyalty itself is essentially a concept in relationship. A person who has risen to the level of a saint has moved beyond the need for loyalty because he has also moved beyond the need for well-defined relationships that have names like lover, husband, wife and so on. This in itself contradicts the infinite range of love for the entire creation that lies invitingly in front of you,, asking you to hug it and be hugged back.

The problem is that minds not accustomed to living at a level where attachment driven relations are confused with love drag 'love' down to a question of indulgence, sleeping around with more partners than one, being 'loyal' to more than one person, and so on. These concepts do not even operate at that level,
In a layman's language (my own language, I mean) when someone says he is in love with everyone,obviously what he/she means is NOT that he/she is sexually drawn towards everyone - and so on. We must not lower the level of debate to by refusing to see the difference. These ideas and contradictions ( of sexual loyalty/disloyalty) themselves are the product of a mind that refuses to go beyond sexual attachments, possessiveness, achievement based on a need to feed one's vanity,or fill an emotional emptiness inside, etc,> Now that is something which our minds have always glorified as love.
For one thing, When someone experiences love for everyone, that "everyone" will include men,women, young, old, children, destitute, beautiful glamorous women, sensuous stars as well as lepers and handicapped, stinking gangrene stricken people, long and filthy slums inhabited by poverty stricken , foul mouthed men and women And move beyond that too, to animals, birds and so on. And sun , stars and the skies.

You can laugh at it. But if you ever happen to be in an extremely happy ( not indulgent and pleasurable but happy) state of mind, you will feel that inner expansion yourself. You must have, I bet, had moments when you felt so happy and full of love for everyone in this world. All of us have those moments. With the saint, these moments have been turned into a normal and everlasting state of mind. Sometimes, poets come close to this: "Dil ye chaahe bahaaron se kheloon, apni baahon main aakash le looN....."....OR....."Aur aag main apne dil ki har dil main lagaata jaoon"...Or ...."bikhar jaaoon main ban ke roshni ka sailaab"...

The problem of inadequacy of language in describing subtle and forceful phenomena of Nature is something that even modern scientists have acknowledge as real. Scientists often encounter inexpressible situations  while talking about  glorious paradoxes in Nature even as they search for some sanity, some continuity, some coherence in natural phenomenon.

The problem arises also when we try to apply the idiom of something very limited in nature - like feelings of belonging, attachment , possession, relationship, moral or sexual loyalty  etc. - to something as beautiful as love for all that one sees and hears or touches etc. You just said  that "if I am free to love more than one person, then that other person is also free to do the same."  Not only free, he or she will have no choice if he or she is also feeling something that I am feeling, which is not creating new relationships as triumphs, trophies or achievements on romantic territory but experiences something as light and beautiful as fragrance.Suddenly you want to embrace not Kim Kardashian but the entire mankind, the entire womankind,the entire Nature, the entire sky.  .

I guess what is bothering you in my concept is the place of loyalty in relationships based on "love" ,Loyalty itself  is essentially a concept in relationship. A person who has risen to the level of a saint has moved beyond the need for loyalty because he has also moved beyond the need for  well-defined relationships that have names like lover, husband, wife and so on. This in itself contradicts the infinite range of love for the entire creation that lies invitingly in front of you,, asking you to hug it and be hugged back.

The problem is that minds not accustomed to living at this level drag 'love'  down to a question of indulgence, sleeping around with more partners than one, being 'loyal'  to more than one person,  and so on. These concepts do not even operate at that level, neither do these concepts arise. In a layman's language (my own language, I mean)  when someone says he is in love with everyone,obviously what he/she  means is NOT that he/she is sexually drawn towards everyone - and so on. These ideas and contradictions themselves are the product of a mind that refuses to go beyond sexual attachments, possessiveness, achievement based on a need to feed one's vanity,or fill an emotional emptiness inside,  etc,> Now that is  something which  the minds os such people have always glorified as love. For one thing, when someone experiences love for everyone,   that "everyone" will include men,women, young, old, children, destitute, beautiful glamorous women, sensuous stars as well as lepers and handicapped, stinking gangrene stricken people,  long and  filthy slums inhabited by poverty stricken , foul mouthed men and women And move beyond that too, to animals, birds and so on. And sun , stars and the skies.

You can laugh at it. But if you ever happen to be in an extremely happy ( not indulgent and pleasurable but happy) state of mind, you will feel that inner expansion yourself. You must have, I bet, had moments when you felt so hapy and full of love for everyone in this world. All of us have those moments. With the saint, these moments have been turned into a normal and everlasting state of mind.  Sometimes, poets come close to this: "Dil ye chaahe bahaaron se kheloon, apni baahon main aakash le looN....."....OR....."Aur aag main apne dil ki har dil main lagaata jaoon"...Or ...."bikhar jaaoon main ban ke roshni ka sailaab"...

In religious or mystical poetry, too, seers are known to have touched these heights:

"Sagal sang hum ko ban aayee"

 "Hum sabhna ke saajan" .

 Saach kahooN sun le ho sabhe, jin prem kiyo tin hi prabh paayo"..... all this is not mere socialistic sense of responsibility towards soceity or even humankind. The Guru  is talking here of a profoundly moving feeling that floods his heart. Surely, Guru Gobind Singh could not have been asking for a moral license to indulge in the sense in which you have brought in the question of loyalty.

 And what a paradox again that people who truly feel  this amazing experience of love for everyone move not below but above the need for relationships...To them, everyone is a relation. "Hum sabhna ke saajan"

 Properly understood, this is also the experience of Lord Krishna, something which we Punjabis in particular have never ever strained our intellectual or mental muscles to try and understand. We insist on misinterpreting his myth as one of sexual or at best  romantic licentiousness. And we cover our lack of understanding by resorting to our pet ploy: ridicule.