“I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life: it is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found.”—John Nash
“If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level—indeed in the molecule itself—it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominid form . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”—Teilhard de Chardin
“We love him, because he first loved us.”—1 John 4:19 KJV
“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”—Marcel Proust
“Physics isn’t the most important thing. Love is.”—Richard Feynman
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”—Carl Sagan
“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.”—Albert Einstein
“When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn’t laugh, it wouldn’t be the Tao.”—Tao Te Ching 41
The following is a voyage into an idea. But what isn’t?
Everything that becomes something begins with a move from potential to manifest, from a known state where it doesn’t exist to a new state where it does. Even words themselves, in the wake of ideas, must have originated from shots in the dark at some time by somebody.
This reverie is only a story. But what isn’t?
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Like “a green red car,” “no-thing” is a logical contradiction. Wherever there’s a where, there’s a quantum field of possibility. We’ve been told the Big Bang was the sudden appearance of the universe from nothing. But there is no nothing. The Big Bang was the collapse of a quantum field into the manifestation of our universe. Perhaps from the seed of a prior or dead universe such as ours will one day be—but that only defers explaining the ultimate origin. We can avoid that endless loop only by stepping outside of time—into a state we have no experience of, the state that simply is. Aristotle’s unmoved mover. Kant’s noumenal realm. And we want to know it in its singular essence—that is, we want to give it a name.
The riddle we live in demands it. Brahman, God, the Big Bang—it’s the same no matter what name we pick. Just as Atman shares the nature of Brahman, we share the nature of that singular essence. It is an intuitive, not a rational, awareness. We can understand it only in terms of something we experience that informs both states. That part of our experience we call sublime.
What if—and at the borders it’s all what if—it is love?
In one sense birth (of anything) is a tragedy—separation from the whole—but more deeply, separation is an act of compassion, because pregnant in it are the story, which is love’s manifest nature, and the return to essence (possibility) that is its destiny. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because something is love, and love is will.
Our Big Bang, like all Big Bangs, was a cosmic cri de coeur. Everything—the expansion, the creation and bonding of particles, the forming of atoms and molecules, the arising and deflating of entities and systems, the rhythms of nature, the awakening of consciousness, the infinite layers of mystery to our minds—evolves from potential to reality by the energy of love. Love wills possibility into manifestation. Into its story.
We are in the habit of calling love “God”—but God, and synonymous labels, are just shorthand for the sum of all possibility. In our minds we create a being that is a symbol for that, but once we catch ourselves in the act of inventing it, we retract from this self-deception and say, I don’t know what it is, only that it is, and beyond me, though it harmonizes with the most sublime and pervasive and unfailing experience I know. It transcends and includes me, and its energy invites the response of my will, which is life—my own story. It is understandable to create a being to represent this motivation, but the being is only the face of the brand. Which is why I’m uncomfortable asking it for anything specific—it has already given everything by being what it is. It loved us first.
Love is possibility which engenders consciousness which engenders will. The fate of our universe is to exhaust all possibility in fully expressing and thereby knowing itself, and to enter the territory beyond “The End”—or, if you prefer, cease to exist. Or rather, in fully knowing itself, it will no longer need to exist. Its story will be fulfilled.
Some religious people tell us if we don’t believe the right political creed, we will not escape from manifestation into essence when we die, but will still be in the grasp of time, and punished forever. And that punishment will not only be physical torture but banishment to a place where we will be cut off from love. But there is no such thing as consciousness where there is no love.
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God certainly wasn’t love in the Old Testament. He was petty, vengeful, and cruel—indeed to the non-Judaic mind must have come across as evil, as the gods of one’s enemies tend to do. But Jesus changed all that, we are told, when people were ready to shift from fighting for a home to living in one, by declaring that God was not the monster of the Old Testament, but love. That sentiment was a truism in the environment in which I grew up: few people ever exerted any effort to understand it, but took the easy road of simply believing it. And why not? Of course we invent a father figure that loves us unconditionally, divinely—because we feel intuitively that the love of the universe is unconditional and divine. But something about the renegade rabbi of Galilee tells us his intuition was of a different order. And like all spiritual teachers of great insight, his ideas persist because something in them resonates with us.
And what about NDEs, psychedelic and other “spiritual” experiences—the reports of consciousness experiencing “limitless, undying love”? Or stories of people on their death beds regretting that they expended so much energy on state-sponsored pursuits and not enough on love, here at this final precipice where they realize love alone is real. I know it’s easy to translate these untranslatable experiences into empirical language and thereby “debunk” them—but even if they are only hallucinations, they are these hallucinations. And if these hallucinations are this good, how do we know what we call our base lives aren’t hallucinations as well? All stories are hallucinations. Of course these experiences follow individual idiosyncrasy, but there are shared factors: diminution of ego and a feeling of oneness with the whole, and the conviction of the primacy of love.
Infants, non-infants say, have no ego; they do not differentiate themselves from the whole. Their ego develops as they adapt themselves to their physical state of being. Ego, or the construction of self, is necessary for survival but by its nature it sets boundaries. The complete experience of love lies beyond those boundaries.
Or meditation—sinking into that peaceful place—not ecstatic, just ordinary and comfortable, undistracted by ego, where consciousness escapes personality and is not a boat on the sea, but a part of the sea itself. We feel gratitude, a synonym for love, and love encompasses all its synonyms.
Or love for life itself, for creation and all its stories. See E. O. Wilson on “biophilia.” Or just see E. O. Wilson on anything, starting with ants. The love of the primal, and only, miracle: Being itself. Not just wonder or fascination or the satisfaction of curiosity—but the same feeling you have for your children, your partner, your parents, your cat or dog or horse, close friends—things that love back: that feeling. A feeling beyond the reach of ego.
Or the love of the Tao—which can’t be named though we name it anyway. Love of the generative force of all things, which you can feel but can’t access through your senses. Love of the universe, life, love of the whole and its mysterious unfolding—love felt only in egoless humility. No love of God, no personality, no deity, just love itself, which is deity enough.
Love for us is not just another emotion. Nothing can compare to love’s appeal to the human heart. When all is lost, it remains. We are born from it, spend our lives searching for new versions of it, and return to it when our chapters are done. It is not such a stretch to see in the most valuable, enduring, definitive experience of human life a reflection of the primal force of the universe.
But obviously if love is the essence of all there is (at least in our universe—other universes, other essences, who knows?), that includes evil, and we must either say evil is an illusion and love alone is real, or enlarge the meaning of love.
As for illusion, I don’t know what that means. Evil is certainly no illusion when it is happening. How can we distinguish between something feeling real, and being real? We can’t.
I’m for enlarging the definition: recognizing that the emotion we think of as love is a facet of an all-encompassing generative and bonding force. The problem semantically is that we want a word for something that cannot be defined or contained by a word, and the best word we have is “love.” Paul’s famous definition in 1 (pronounced “first”) Corinthians 13 evokes an enlightened state of mind that seems to transcend emotion, and is altogether a pretty good summation of the Christian ethic, in spite of the rarity of its embrace in the modern church. Love is too pervasive to “mean” anything. How can something too obvious to see have “meaning”? Love is meaning. Victor Frankl’s synonym for love.
The theme of all teachers of transcendent insight is a sublime application of the basic truth that we create our own reality. We grow spiritually by urging the state of possibility toward an act of will—seeking to transcend our physical predicament, seeking to be born again, seeking enlightenment, or forgiveness, redemption, amazing grace. I do not believe those teachers had any direct communication with anything beyond themselves—just like you and me—only a deep intuition that the state-sponsored way of perceiving reality in which they found themselves was too small for actual human potential, and the mind had the power to discover, or will, something truer. Jesus taught that the fundamental reality is love—in his idiom “God” or “Father.” Or in the apostle John’s, “the Word.” Phenomena come and go, enmeshed in time; and before they come and while they are and after they go, love is. You can explain every mechanical detail of our existence completely, and still not account for the subjective experience of love.
I can’t call myself a Christian—at least not in the modern political sense: you can live the ethic and share the non-violent, love-centered mindset of Jesus, but if you don’t have the certificate it doesn’t count. This bureaucratic lunacy extends to the point where you can not have the mindset, and not live the ethic, but have the certificate and be “saved.” As long as you accept the politics, God will overlook your deviation from the ethic, but if you see the politics as meaningless but intuitively embody the ethic, he will not. In other words, you will be rewarded for not using your mind, and punished for using it. How can anyone read the Gospels and not notice the fundamental theme of the superiority of the spirit of the law to the letter? Jesus’ distaste for the self-righteous hypocrisy of bureaucrats (Scribes and Pharisees)? His warnings about false prophets? The religious right, I admit, never had much credibility with me, but what negligible trace it might have had it has lost completely in recent years as it has stopped even trying to hide its willingness to twist, distort, fabricate, justify anything to keep its basic myths alive and therefore its earthly power. Obviously if you can justify anything, you’ve got nothing.
Like Buddha, or Lao-tzu, Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, who had a profound insight about the nature of our lives. But most people don’t want what they were offering: a counter-intuitive harbor for the self in the greater consciousness. I say “counter-intuitive” because we are not genetically wired to surrender our egos. And obviously, to function in this physical world we need them. But we’re disinclined to see them as means rather than ends. We cling to “me.” Most modern religious people are not interested in life-changing modulations of thought. They want to buy, not create, peace of mind. They don’t want to understand, they want to have. Have what? Salvation. But from what? I think they mean death, but there’s no getting out of that. Hell? That’s a political concept, invented to terrorize and control people. What Jesus “saves” us from is the hypocrisy of religion and the prison of ego. From separateness, absence of will (love).
The sublime experience of salvation—being “saved”—“born again”—is very real, but it’s not about living forever, as though time were eternal and our capacity to be these selves inexhaustible—it’s about completing the circle. This is not a theatrical one-time thing—that’s getting a certificate—it is an exertion of love (will) that acts by the minute. The bliss of Heaven is not the endurance of these story characters we call our selves in a blissful eternity of hymn singing, but the escape from these selves back into the bliss of infinite possibility.
The universe we live in is dynamic, not static, and while we are breathing here we can live outside it only in our inner explorations. It’s no good to imagine a world of harmony and cooperation, without tribalism or judgment or competition—those innate human behaviors—because that’s not the darwinian story we’re living. The universe is love, telling its unfolding story to the audience of consciousness it has engendered. Melding with that deeper context is a struggle, which is the point. Love is a universal wavelength, which we can tune into or not; we call not tuning in “evil,” but without evil there is no story. Creativity takes energy. To be alive is to compete—or, if you prefer, interact—which includes all interactions of the human spirit with its physical context, including these reflections. Conflict drives the manifestation of reality and the stories of our lives. As Yeats observed about Hamlet and Lear (“Lapis Lazuli”): they play their parts and don’t break character. That’s what story is. And our stories exist in the context of an inclusive story: “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”
There are no miracles. The universe, our conscious existence, love’s energy—those are the miracles and there aren’t any others. If the evil weren’t real, neither would bravery be, or redemption. Or love. The message of the Book of Job is that however great human suffering is, it exists in a context of something bigger. Turning love loose to express itself gives birth to conflict. That is, story. And conflicts can embody grotesque evils, as we all know. But no matter what scale, it still exists in a context of story. “It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.”
It is the nature of love to put itself at risk. The universe is full of adventures—stories in every possible key. This happens, then it’s over. This matters, then it doesn’t. And the supreme artist, love, remains—“invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
Amor omnia vincit.
Our lives are our stories, and when they reach “The End,” as they must, we absorb them, and the universe absorbs us.