love and violence

johan flod — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:43:30 +0000

Our fascination with violence and love is pretty interesting and do they have something in common ? I happened to see one of Oshos lectures where he said love and hate are the opposite sides of the same coin and that started my thinking. Today I got totally absorbed when I saw the Finnish player Ruutu tackle people in the NHL and just out of curiosity I looked up “NHL best” on you tube to see what the best is from nhl. I have to admit I was a bit surprised when a big fight came up instead of some Gretzky goals which would have been my first guess ( ” Unbelievable Hockey Fight” with close to 12 million is beating Gretzky almost 12 to 1 ). I am a fan of hockey and what really gets the emotions going is the tackles and the roughness. I watched the young Swedish team get beaten by the Canadian team in the world Junior Hockey Championships just some weeks ago and I was totally caught in the moment and I really thought that Canada did not play fair at all and the referee was bad. Now I look up some clips and I can clearly see that the Swedish goalkeeper really fell over easily. My emotions totally took over and sound judgement was put aside.I can just imagine how it is for the players on the ice. Almost all of us have come in contact with the fight or flight mechanism when we are in dark back alley and suspect somebody is following us or we see a horror movie on TV. the fight or fight mechanism is wired into our brains and our logical thinking is totally shut off when it comes into place. When our fight or flight response is activated a lot of chemicals ( for example adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol ) are released into our body and you could say that we get an altered state of being where all our daytime worries disappear and our only focus is on the object that caused this reaction. I cannot help but to find similarities to what we normally call love . the love between two persons which causes all our daily trouble to disappear and we focus only on the object of our love.

from wikipedia

“Lust is the initial passionate sexual desire that promotes mating, and involves the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and estrogen. … Recent studies in neuroscience have indicated that as people fall in love, the brain consistently releases a certain set of chemicals, including pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, which act in a manner similar to amphetamines, stimulating the brain’s pleasure center and leading to side effects such as increased heart rate, loss of appetite and sleep, and an intense feeling of excitement. Research has indicated that this stage generally lasts from one and a half to three years”

Now both fight and flight and love states will disappear after some time and we are left with Withdrawal symptoms.

With this in mind I think it is rather confusing to say “you should love everyone” because it is something you will only do for a period. Maybe that is the reason why Buddhists use the word compassion instead ?

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love and violence