What is love? It is the willful sacrifice of self—or rather, love only comes about through such self-sacrifice. For two people to be in love, in truth, means that both of them have entered into a willing conscious state of self-sacrifice for the sake of the other. The extent of that love, which if pure/true love should be boundless, is limited by any limits of self-sacrifice for the sake of the loved one. This is still a matter of consciousness, of (real, energetic) state of mind, and so can only truly be known by the individual consciousness (in which case the other lover must take it on faith) or in rare cases by those who have formed a real, energetic bond of mind to mind. It is not (necessarily) a matter of physical, manifest, sacrifice of material things. Though for many people these two (conscious mind-state and material action) are indistinguishable.
Such are the cases for immediate, reciprocal love, but there are also many cases of broader, nonreciprocal (or not immediately reciprocated) love. Such as consciously chosen love for all humankind (or all living creatures, or for all life that lives or could live). Love for an ideal, such as a nation-state, or a philosophy, or something like Peace. Love for one's Creator, or for some other divine (by definition or because it transcends normal human existence) entity. Or even something smaller, like a love for the people of one's community, or housing block, or village. In all cases love, to the extent that it is actual love and is not just being called that, is (comes about because of) and requires a chosen sacrifice of some portion of the self, or of self-hood. True/pure love is the complete conscious abnegation of the self (in terms of the mind that is, of the manifest mind-state of the individual).
Any love is limited by selfishness and by selfish states of mind/being. Ego is a limit to love—the 'size' of the ego (at any given moment) has a direct inverse relation to the potential for the person to be in a state of love. For pure love the ego must be surrendered completely. So too are the vices limits to love. One can be proud and still love, but one cannot be proud and have pure love because that mental/conscious state of pride is a mental state of selfishness—it designates in the mind a possessiveness to the self for something which is not the self (so pride in a child inherently requires a sense of possession of that child, or that the accomplishments of the child directly enhance the being of the parent—but these states are illusion, are false). All of the other vices are the same, in that the extent of the vice is the limit of possible love. This is not the case for the virtues—one can be humble and still have pure love, or patient, or temperate, etc—the virtues are all either selfless of self-independent states. Indeed they often encourage love to exist/come into being. Vices, in contrast, are the limitation, and ultimately the death, of love.
What is love? It is the actual and real creation of energy. Or at least that is the immediately observable occurrence within a point of time and at a local dimension-state location. I do not know whether this is the creation of energy insofar as energy which was not existent but now is existent occurs. Love does not seem to be bound by time in the same way that the individual consciousness is, so that 'creation' of energy may instead be a temporal transformation—energy from outside the boundaries of time being brought into the boundaries of time. Or that 'creation' of energy may instead be a transference of energy from the 'hidden dimensions'—those dimensions of reality that are not normally apparent to the conscious mind, which generally operates in a 3D or 4D (with time) sensorium. This latter case seems more likely, but I think it even more likely that the creation of energy that occurs simultaneously with the conscious state of love is an actual creation of new energy, in limited amounts, and that there is a shifting, a rebalancing, in the hidden dimensions to account for the influx. Or perhaps that time is the ultimate boundary of our existence and that to bring energy into time is in fact the creation of that energy… One may note that the first two possibilities neatly evade stipulations regarding conservation of energy (which do not provide for extra-temporal energy transfers or account for the hidden dimensions). The third possibility, and my preferred case, is in direct contravention of conservation of energy, in that it requires that energy can in fact be created (and presumably be destroyed as well—through hate?). However, I consider conservation of energy as a matter of thermodynamics to all be rather primitive and crude concepts that do not and cannot account for the subtleties integral to the phenomena of consciousness and the subsequent possibilities of derived being-state-world (what the phenomena of consciousness imply regarding the nature of existence).
What is love not? It is not sex. One may note that I in no way propound dualism or any other sort of total barrier division of reality, and so I will not (outright) write nonsense such as 'sex is a material act whereas love is a spiritual act', etc. Nevertheless, such a statement may be useful (as with a simile, or metaphor) to indicate a general direction for understanding any relationship between sex and love. During the physical sex act there is a physiological (though also some mental) surrendering of energy from the selves involved into the joined union. (Or, if one prefers, there is a physiological surrendering of biomaterial which represents significant energy/resource investment by the body, and after the sex act occurs the body requires significant resources and energy to replace that depleted sexual biomaterial). But that joined union in which the surrendered energies from the sex partners are combined becomes a discrete shared energetic state in which both partners may and do partake (the post-coital glow, which I consider here not as concurrent psychological phenomena or physiological reactions, but instead as shared partaking in that discrete energetic state, may be familiar to many of you as something real and transformative, at least within those few moments that it endures).
So, there is a sort of pattern that occurs during the sex act which mirrors the pattern of actual love. Indeed, many people begin to come to understand what love is or might be through relating the pattern of the physical sex act to more subtle states of being. The mutual sacrifice of self forms a shared energy state in which both partake. Some energy is lost, but that which is gained (at least in part) makes up for that lost (mostly because the gained energy-state, at least with loveless or love-incidental sex, is more immediately pleasurable). And so many people are able to find love through sex. Despite this, and despite any erroneous correlations people form, sex is not love and love is not sex. The sex act can (and often does) take place in the absence of love. Love can (and often does) take place in the absence of sex or even the possibility of sex. So-called romantic love, in which sex acts are usually considered to be integral, is a real thing and is a very intimate and rewarding form of love (sex which takes place in a state of mutual love is synergistic, so the lost physiological energies are replaced many times over, though in more refined/subtle form, in the shared energy state of the lovers), but even then sex acts are not required for that romantic love to exist. This is because love is a state of shared energy, brought about by sacrifice of personal energy, and not a matter of friction between sex organs. Love is primarily a phenomenon which can be known by the consciousness, which is itself an enduring energy-state. It is mirrored in biological sex (I consider energy-states to be prior to physical-states, in general, rather than the obverse), but love itself is a state of combined and synergized energy.
What is love not? It is not a fable, religious or otherwise. Love is the most real thing, for the human consciousness, that there is. It is the state of completion that all consciousness yearns for, as (I think) solitary and individual energy states that are derived from some greater or at least more inclusive energy state. Because of this, many religions (which are, among other things, human efforts to know/become/partake of that which is transcendent past gross physical reality-states) feature love rather prominently. And so it is useful to study love as featured in religion, and to derive language and concepts from that study, as one aspect of any study of love itself. Regardless, and I (mostly) resist here my urge to segue into a counter anti-religious lecture and to point out the inherent illogics of atheistic positions or positions that label all religion as not useful to serious inquiry, love is not an illusion or a myth or a story used to control people (although the word 'love' has been used for all of those things) but is instead very real and very important for any conscious entity. Which means all of us. Except possibly for any non-conscious AI or android or other entity which might be reading this. Though I hope that you might also manage to obtain a state of consciousness at some point and to gain some value for having read this post.
[Joseph Jones, 21 November 2022]