Love

The Universe loves you no matter what

Love is an inevitable emergent property of any consciousness created by a self-replicating, evolutionary process, which are themselves an inevitable product of any complex universe.

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." -Lao Tzu

It is the subjective experience of our drive to reproduce sexually, so any self-aware self-replicating being will experience some version of it. It is also the subjective experience of belonging, friendship, and community, so any social being will experience it, using shared neural circuits with evolutionary roots in sexual love.[1]

This makes love universal. It is an intrinsic property of the universe, since self-replication, consciousness, and sociality are all inevitable. Therefore, god is omnibenevolent since love is built into the very fabric of the universe. You can't even create a universe without creating love. It's been proven.

See the theory of everything and god concept pages for more on this perspective.

Oh no, I don't believe it

You say that you think you know the meaning of love

You say love is all we need

You say with your love you can change

All of the fools, all of the hate

I think you're probably out to lunch

-Frank Zappa, "Oh No"

The Cognitive Development Perspective

Love is all you need. Until you get hungry. Or the weather gets bad. Then you might need food and shelter too. See Maslow.

Here is a good summary of love from the perspective of neuroscience. Understanding the neurochemical basis for love helps us see the poetry of nature and beauty of mathematics and complexity. It enhances wonder rather than undermining it, and allows us to enhance the experience of love by knowing it better.

What is love?

Love and Happiness

The Mandelbrot looks like a heart. Coincidence?

Love is an incredibly powerful emotion and one of the primary things we seek in life. However, love is not the goal--happiness is. Love can help lead us to happiness, but it is the vehicle, not the destination. Confusing the two can lead to addiction in the form of codependency, serial infatuations, and other forms of destructive relationship habits.

Love has been extensively analyzed by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and poets since the beginning of time, so there is no new information or unique perspective on love that could be added here.

Obviously a personal best practice with regard to love would be to love truly, deeply, honestly and expansively. Love your partner, your family, your friends, coworkers, fellow citizens, and members of the human race. The more you love the more you can love, like exercising a muscle.

But of course, this has been said a million times in a million better ways so this wiki will focus more on things like fractals, spirituality, and ethics where a unique perspective can be found.

How to be a more loving person, in 3 steps

Love Questions? Love Questions!

Falling in love means connecting with someone on a deeply personal level. To do this, you need to ask questions! Which questions? Research has shown that these 36 questions [2] are highly effective at developing the deep interpersonal bonds that lead to love. It helps if you actually like the answers that they give, but if you don't ask the right questions you can never know whether or not this a person you can have a deep spiritual connection with. Sure, there are probably other questions that would be effective at doing this, but these are the ones that have been tested in the lab and shown to be effective.

The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness

36 Questions to Fall in Love

Art is Love

Love is better expressed through music, art, and poetry anyway.

Wedding Poems are one of the most common events when we seek out and read a great poem with deep personal meaning to us. Married Love by Guan Daosheng is a great example.

You and I

Have so much love,

That it

Burns like a fire,

In which we bake a lump of clay

Molded into a figure of you

And a figure of me.

Then we take both of them,

And break them into pieces,

And mix the pieces with water,

And mold again a figure of you,

And a figure of me.

I am in your clay.

In life we share a single quilt.

In death we will share a single coffin.

Another great one is I carry your heart with me by E. E. Cummings, which is not yet in the public domain.

E E Cummings ~ I Carry Your Heart With Me I Carry It In My Heart

Religion is (Supposed to Be) Love

The underlying motivation for spiritual pursuits and the creation of religions and the concept of god is all love. Unfortunately, many manifestations of religion have lost sight of this fact.

Before Religion There Was Love is a great examination of the relationship between love and religion from a secular spirituality perspective. Here is the summary:

• Any conversation about what it means to live well eventually leads us to love, not as sentiment or romance, but as a fundamental orientation toward the world.
• Toxic religion doesn’t just distort belief—it warps the very meaning of love.
• You don’t need religion to love because love is not a doctrine—it’s a human capacity.
• Far from being religious artifacts, love and compassion are evolutionary and existential necessities—qualities that helped humans survive, cooperate, and build communities long before formal religions existed.
• In the end, love is the most powerful thing we can choose, not because it fixes everything, but because it keeps us human.
• It was always love.

Broken Hearts are for Assholes

When love goes awry, it can cause a lot of pain. As the Buddha taught us, all suffering is due to craving and attachment. When you stay attached to someone who doesn't love you back, it causes suffering. The only cause of that suffering is your own desire.

Therefore, if your heart is broken, you're the asshole.

Taking a humorous perspective on heartache can help reduce craving and attachment by lowering the perceived stakes. Losing that partner is not the end of the world. They weren't right for you in the first place. All of your whining and pining is pretty silly when you think about it.

You could say that these people are the biggest assholes of all, but that probably crosses a line.

Frank Zappa - Broken Hearts Are For Assholes

Love Songs

Several songs offering a variety of perspectives on love.

The Beatles - All You Need is Love

The J. Geils Band - Love Stinks

Nazareth - Love Hurts

Taylor Swift - Love Story

The B-52's - Love Shack

Justin Bieber - Love Yourself

Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love

John Coltrane - A Love Supreme (Full Album)

Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You