Add these as well in this

Evolutionalry reason -

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYP1CFr_QLo
  • Infants are half baked in humans, so they cannot survive on their own, so only those survived who had love mechanism as a commitment device.

Blog - Whom to love

We often read a theory and judge it based on our knowledge, guts, practicality and gauge the benefits to decide if we agree to it or not.
We also read a lot of theory and often fail to bring it practically in life, be it psychology, health advice or life philosophies or even core tenets of our own religion.

So a theory not making it into our lives can be potentially because of below ordered levels of gap :

• Level 1 - Lack of knowledge, not aware of the existence or depth of a concept.
• Level 2 - Even if you get your hands on the resources to read about it, you might be stuck around truly accepting it. Maybe you need more convincing or more deep analysis
• Level 3 - Even if you truly understand and agree to it, you lack the will to implement it in your life.

I want to talk about the level 2 that I am stuck at regarding love.
I understand that love is a mohniye karm in effect, raag towards another thing or person is not a property of our soul. Karuna and raag are different, being friendly to every being and being a well wisher is different from being in raag with someone. karuna is not being specific, it is common for everything.
So theoritically I understand love for a specific person/s is not a core property of soul and causes Kashay which leads to more karm bandhan.
But a part of me for some reason feels that Love is pure, maybe coz how it has been portrayed in ramayan or other epics and stories. I feel if we really want to justify even a technically bad thing, we can find some reasons.

And I found one reason how love can help in liberation.
Love allows you to detach from self, and focus on another person or thing. If you truly achieve selfless love, it can help you get rid of the strongest feelings of all, "Ego", or mamtva. Once you are able to get an addict out of their inherent addiction which is very difficult to get rid of, it can be easier for them to then get rid of their secondary addiction?

Lemme share my context from which this question sprouted.

I am deeply spiritual, it's in my genes and in my upbringing too, I am a minimalist, ahinsawaadi, I stay away from raag and dvesh as much as possible and I abstain from reacting too. I always tell the truth. I am 26 now so it's marriage O'clock at home.

I have avoided getting into relationships, not from the angle of raag and dvesh but from coz of the practicality and cons of it. I always have more important things to focus on.

I have been debating about all the cons of Marriage with my folks and they are agreeing to it too and not pushing me for it. I can talk at length about the problems and all the points but here I want to discuss on the Jainism angle of it.

Munis don't openly talk against it coz they don't want to meddle with the societal setup, also the fact that we indeed need next gen! We all cannot just stop creating babies and no one who has a lot of crowd listening to em should endorse that view.

But let's extract ourselves from the societal setup and think truly in terms of atma.

Does it make sense to indulge in raag? Why do it at all? If you're a deeply spiritual being then you might have thought at length about it and might have removed the default setting of our brain to crave emotional and physical relationship.

From the aatma perspective, a marriage will only bring more karmas, if you love the other person truly and deeply then high amount of raag otherwise all shades of raag, dwesh, irshya, anger, mithya, etc intermittently. You can't stay inert in a relationship coz well it'd be unfair for the other person too(if they don't want it, and they get stuck with an inert person) and bringing in another variable in your life can affect your journey in weird unexpected ways.

I get that in primitive times, munis and even all the tirthankars have had wives and families. But I think at that time people were more dharmic and also the responsibility of creating offsprings was important given there was very less population. They used to live for hundreds of years so few years of family life could have been compensated with longs years of sadhna.

I personally am confused which path to take. Idk why but pure love in out of instincts just feels right and a good thing to have in life. May be it is coz of our genes, hormones, fomo or mainstream societal norm and behaviour that love feels right? But at the same time the fact about love bringing in raag and karma accumulation also makes sense.

What's your take on it?

I think if I truly accept the karma angle, I can slowly train myself to not crave it. ( NO NOT SUPRESS IT, INFACT TO GET RID OF IT, mindfully by accepting the facts and reiterating it to myself over and over again.)