love

When a poet wrote: It’s like trying to shovel smoke with a pitchfork into the wind, maybe he’d been searching for a definition of love. It’s a word with a thousand meanings, or none at all, depending on who you ask. As a semi-Christian semi-scientist, I think John the Apostle said it best: God is Love. Two undefinable terms, describing each other. Like some strange subatomic particle, or wave, or field, love defies description by our feeble minds; but, like sunlight, we find ourselves bathed in it. Perhaps if Einstein had figured out his Unified Field Theory, he would have arrived at love.

While confessing my profound ignorance on the entire topic, it’s still my favorite. Having little understanding of photons or radiation, I enjoy getting a tan while tending my garden. I consider love a worthy subject of research.

So would I even attempt a definition? Again, I think John’s is best, but we can also get more specific. Part of the challenge is that love seems to inhabit a spectrum, which, like light or sound, exhibits different properties at its extremes. Low or high frequency sound waves behave in markedly different ways, and, upon entering our ears, produce markedly different effects. I find this a useful analogy: love has octaves.

In love’s bass clef, we find a universe-wide force or state of connection, mysterious (at least to me) but consistently noted by researchers throughout the ages. Some have described it, fittingly, as the sound at the root of all sound – the Om. Others call it the Great or Holy Spirit, or the Tao. It could be considered the supreme unifying principle of the universe, a force behind gravity and magnetism and quantum fields, behind the endless dance of yin and yang – behind even time and space. Just as it pervades the stars and quarks, it permeates the biological world, and all aspects of human existence. Perhaps Einstein was bravely trying to describe with mathematics the idea that the whole universe is in love.

Is this love actually “God”, or an emanation from God, or even evidence of a God? Is this “God” perhaps another name for consciousness itself? It seems that words fail us here. Mystics through the ages have claimed to be in communion with this force or state, but none of them claim that it is understandable by the mind. Consciousness witnesses the mind; not the other way around. But accounts of “cosmic consciousness” invariably include descriptions of what might be called pure love.

A little higher up the scale, we encounter “chemical love”, such as that combination of neurons and hormones that can cause us to exclaim, “I love hamburgers!” Contained in this octave is, I suppose, much of the significance of our daily lives – the attractions and aversions, highs and lows that physiologists and psychologists try to map to specific biochemical reactions and brain centers. There’s an appeal to this endeavor, a possibility that we might fully understand and even tame love; but, given that this octave is interfaced with all the others, biochemistry can, at best, tell only part of the story.

Higher still, love becomes more subtle, but no less powerful. A definition of this next octave might be: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. In human hearing, the frequencies centering around 2,000 hz are crucial, containing much of the information found in speech; perhaps this realm of love is analogous, leading some to consider it the only “true love”. Here we’re dealing with values and intentions, with understandings of self, and with relationships. Philosophers like to debate whether this octave even exists.

But then there are higher octaves – harmonics that stretch off to infinity, elusive, but, like ultraviolet light, perhaps more powerful than we appreciate. In these overtones of the great Om, we again find ourselves in the realm of pure mystery: of synchronicity and serendipity, savants and miracles – phenomena that so overwhelms our understanding that we’re tempted to ignore them entirely. But there they are.

One could spend a lifetime exploring even one of these octaves, but the totality of human existence asks us to consider them all. None are unworthy, but our orchestra would be impoverished if it consisted only of tubas or piccolos. It’s when we’re confronted with the full spectrum of love that we’re left speechless, beholding something well-described as The Great Wow – i.e., God.

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