Notes

Love is a feeling (an emotion).

We use this word to describe how we feel towards another person. It describes our emotional posture and our connection to those who are closest to us.

Emotion is what motivates the human animal into action. For example, the emotion of fear tells us that there is a potential for injury or danger. Fear calls our rational system into action. Fear tells us to pay attention to the situation and prepare to either stand up and defend our health, or to remove ourselves from the situation.

The emotion of Love is also a call to act.

The feeling of Love is an attractive feeling, it calls us to move closer to a person or situation.

Life is an emotionally binary existence. Nature provides us a two-part system for navigating our lives: Our emotional system motivates us into action while our rational system uses logic to figure out what choices, decisions, actions will result in an improved emotional situation.

Every human on planet earth at any given moment is working on the problem of navigating our human avatar away from negative emotional experiences, while at the same time moving toward more positive emotional situations. This is the entirety of human existence rendered into one sentence.

Our culture tells us that our emotional system is a weakness. We are told not to make our life-navigational choices with our hearts because our hearts cannot be trusted. We are told to instead rely on our logic (the same logic that our culture “educated” into our rational systems. As a side note, we need to be aware that our rational system can easily become corrupted by deceptions, lies, flawed reasoning and rationalizations).

Repressing our emotional system means that we desensitize our emotional sensors. Being emotionally tuned out or desensitized causes us to be apathetic to the emotional atmosphere, and blinds us to how our actions impact our overall emotional health. Our emotional effect on others directly relates to our ability to attract Love to ourselves and our ability to get our emotional needs met.

In our competition based society we are forced to live in a kind of emotional survival mode.

This means we are forced to be apathetic towards others as we struggle to get our own needs met.

The feelings of emotion are a sensation. Culture tells us that we have only 5 senses (sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing) but we also FEEL emotion. Our sense of emotion is how we feel our way through the multidimensional atmosphere of human relationships.

Love is also a form of energy.

Love is a force of nature which is subject to to the laws of physics. The energy of love has specific, predictable properties. This energy is not too different from the natural forces of electromagnetism or gravity and is also subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Like all forms of energy, emotional energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but can be generated and exchanged. Like electromagnetic energy, emotional energy is polarized into positive and negative fields.

Human social life plays out first and foremost in the invisible emotional atmosphere. When you walk into a room you can FEEL the energy in the room. A professional sporting arena during a championship match is an emotionally exciting atmosphere; When we walk into a church, or funeral service we can feel the emotional energy in the room.

Relationship is an exchange of emotional energy. Our interactions with other people have an impact on our emotional state. Some people make us laugh and lift our emotional spirit. Other exchanges leave us feeling agitated, frustrated or angry. Some humans are positive and upbeat and we can feel that energy. Others are negative and heavy. We are drawn to or attracted to humans who make us feel good and we are repelled by humans who make us feel negative emotions.

We can feel other peoples emotional energy especially if we work on un-repressing our emotional system.

Each human being is like an emotional atom on the periodic table of elements. We each have our own unique emotional disposition or balance. Some humans are emotionally stable, others are emotionally reactive. On the right side of the periodic table of elements are the inert gasses: some humans are not easily agitated or emotionally reactive. Other humans are less balanced and less stable, like the elements on the far left of the periodic table. These people can be emotionally explosive with little agitation.

Our world is currently heated. The emotional atmosphere is expressing, or venting pressurized negative emotional energy. Instances like road rage and mass shootings are examples of such social/emotional venting.

We carry emotional energy inside of us. Negative emotional energy is generated either by a personal imbalance (imbalance causes friction which generates heat) or by social imbalances (hierarchy, competition, master/servant dynamics).

The laws of thermodynamics tell us that expanding energy must be expressed; the more you try to contain expanding emotional energy the more pressure builds within the vessel of the human heart. Heated, expanding emotional energy WILL BE EXPRESSED, it cannot be contained.

The guy who expressed rage on the freeway did so not because you or someone else cut him off. The negative emotional energy was already inside of him, before he got into his car. Maybe he got in an argument with his wife. Maybe his boss at work is a jerk. Likely he is carrying a chip on his shoulder from his childhood that has absolutely nothing to do with driving down the road. He was carrying negative energy in his “emotional backpack”. That energy was simply waiting for the first opportunity in which he could rationalize venting that energy onto someone else. In the moment of road rage this man is dumping his built-up negative emotional energy upon others. At the end of the exchange your emotional state has been negatively effected.

Most of the time the words coming out of our mouths are irrelevant; because we are repressed. What we are saying we are doing is disconnected from what we are emotionally expressing.

The forefront of human existence; the root of human behavior and relationship; the most revealing reality of human existence is the emotional atmosphere. Everything we do or don't do is an effort to navigate ourselves within the emotional atmosphere first and foremost.

Gravity is the invisible force which attracts our feet to the earth; Similarly, Love is the invisible energy which attracts humans to each other and which bonds us together in relationship.

There is a resistance to life. We can know that there is an opposing force because we have to put effort into life to overcome the resistance to our existence. We know there is an opposition because life requires effort; if we do not put forth the energy required to meet our basic human needs we will be overtaken by the opposing force. Love is the force which compels life to put forth the effort to continue overcoming the resistance to our existence.

Love is a motivating force. Love is the energy which compels life to keep going, to keep moving forward, to keep putting in the effort required. Love is the force which compels the seedling to overcome gravity, to push thru the soil and to reach for the loving sunshine.

Love is the force which compels a newborn baby to take its first breath. Love is the force which compels the mother to nurture and provide for that baby.

When the human is in a situation of life or death survival, it is often the thought of loved ones which motivates the surviver to not give up. It is Love (of friends and family back home) which compels the stranded mountain climber or lost backpacker to keep trying, to keep fighting for life.

Our sense of emotion is the tool that nature has provided the human avatar for perceiving the energy of love within the emotional atmoshpere. Nature gave us eyes to perceive the 3 dimensional arena. It gave us the sense of hearing to perceive the world of sound. It gave us the sensation of touch to feel our physical surroundings. Nature gave us the sensation of emotion so that we can perceive the otherwise invisible force of Love.

Love is a basic human need

There have been scientific experiments which objectively prove that Love is an essential human need (look up Harry Harlow and his monkey experiments). When any of our basic human needs are not being met our emotional system will be agitated. This is how Love compels you (you are the pilot of your avatar) to navigate in the direction of getting the need met. If you are loving yourself then you will seek to improve or correct any negative emotional signals that you are receiving.

Each of our basic needs have their own unique requirements for replenishment. We can only last a few minutes without air. A few days without water. A few weeks without food. When we are deprived of the basic human need for food we become emotional. If we are deprived of the basic human need for oxygen the human will also experience an involuntary emotional reaction. The need for air is a very immediate need, this is a need that requires replenishment constantly, therefore the emotional response to deprivation of air can be panicked and emotionally frantic.

Lifeguards understand that they must be cautious when rescuing someone who can’t swim. If a rescuer gets too close to a human who is desperately trying to meet the need for air, there is danger that the victim will involuntarily cling to the lifguard pushing him under the water. Humans who exist in survival mode don't have the time to use their rational system to ponder a solution to their immediate emotional problem.

If we go without food for a few hours we get emotionally grumpy. When a human is extremely deprived of any need the avatar goes into survival mode and our emotional compulsion to meet the need overrides our rational thought. When we are deprived of basic need and existing in survival mode our rational system gets bypassed and we are capable of rationalizing just about any desperate act in an attempt to meet the deprived need. When the Donner family became snowed in the Sierra Nevada mountain, they resorted to cannibalism for survival. When in survival mode the human is capable of rationalizing the most desperate, even self-destructive and short-sighted behavior.

We can know that love is a basic human need because when we are deprived of Love there are negative natural consequences. Since we exist in an emotionally repressed culture everyone of us is existing in some level of deprivation of Love. This is difficult to quantify because the benchmark for defining “healthy” in this culture is “normalcy”. Everyone is emotionally repressed therefore repression is “normal” and not recognized to be an unhealthy state.

When a child is being emotionally neglected that child will “act-out” in an attempt to draw emotional energy and attention towards them. In a state of deprivation negative attention is a better alternative to no emotional attention at all.

We are a group species. We have a profound need to belong to the group. We need emotional security, validation, acceptance. As a herd species, rejection is profoundly hurtful to us. This is why institutions can so effectively manipulate human beings with tactics of judgment, shame and guilt.

When existing in emotional survival mode we will reach for anything that will mask, or suppress our emotional state of deprivation. Addiction to food is a way of using the emotional effects of food in an attempt to fill the emptiness of the deprived emotional need. We can get addicted to any action or behavior that alters or masks our emotional state. We do this in an attempt to fill the gap where Loving, validating social support should be.

The human animal is a tribal species.

Every species has a survival strategy. Some species are individual survivors who make their own way and only come together with other members of their species to procreate. Herd or group species, on the other hand, get basic needs met by existing in supportive relationships with each other. Our species figured out that it is easier and more effective to meet our individual and collective needs when we live and work together in cooperative relationships. A member of a herd species cannot survive on our own; “no man is an island”. Relationship is the fabric that supports our survival as individuals and as a species.

There is a synergy in group survival; the sum of the individual parts when combined is much greater than the potential of each existing as separate individuals. Every human being on earth survives by standing upon the fabric of relationship. Our success as individuals is tied to our ability to navigate social relationships. For a member of a herd species relationship is a basic need.

Love is a verb

Love is an action like walking or jumping. Love is something that must be done, it is not something that happens to us. Love is a way to act and behave towards each other.

When we are born into this world our human development is not complete. When we are born we do not know how to walk or jump, we have to learn how to do these things. Likewise when we are born our relationship skills are mostly non-existent. We have to learn Love the verb.

We have to learn how to communicate and express our emotional selves. We have to learn how to navigate complex relationship dynamics so that we can acquire emotional support, acceptance and validation. When we are born we have no skill in the dance of relationship.

We learn our relationship skills from the environment that we are in during our development. We learn how to our needs met, we learn how to get the things we want and need from the social atmosphere during our development. If our mentors are using tactics of manipulation, deception and violent force to get what they want and need, then we too will develop the same survival tactics. We learn our relationship skills from our culture.

Our culture teaches us to survive in a competitive social arena. Our culture teaches us that if we want or need something we have to stand up and fight for it. But there are many possible tactics for getting needs met. Rather than fighting, it is entirely possible to employ Love to acquire the things one wants and needs.

Love, the verb, is the skill and social art of existing in loving balanced relationship with each other. Relationship is a dance. The dance of relationship requires knowledge and skill.

A perfectly healthy relationship dynamic is defined as perfectly balanced. A healthy, balanced relationship dynamic is perfectly symbiotic; meaning it is mutually beneficial and neither party has an advantage over the other. Balance is defined as the absence of imbalance. Balance means that neither dance partner leads or dominates or puts themselves above the other.

Co-dependency is the definition of an imbalanced relationship dynamic. Imbalance is when one takes more from a relationship than they contribute to it (emotionally or otherwise). Co-dependency means that neither party in the relationship can exist as they are without the other.

Symbiosis means that both individuals are independently healthy and balanced outside of a relationship. You are not capable of participating in a healthy, balanced relationship dynamic unless you yourself are first balanced and healthy. If an individual is not emotionally balanced then they are not capable of existing in a balanced relationship dynamic.

Love is a relationship dynamic

Everything in the universe exists in relationship with everything else in the universe. Everything in the universe exists because of the physics of relationship dynamics. Relationship is the fabric that binds everything together. The earth only exists as it does because of its relationships with the sun and the moon. Life on earth can only exist because the relationship between the Earth and the sun is in a state of balance and stability. Human beings can only exist on this planet because of our relationships with the air and the water and the trees and the pants and animals that we rely on for our basic needs. Our species only exists because our relationships with the rest of life, and with each other. As an individual you only exist because your parents had relationship. Your body is a complex organization of individual systems, tissues, muscles, cells, molecules, elements, and atoms existing in relationship with each other. Relationship is the fabric that holds everything in the universe together.

Love describes, or defines the ONLY relationship dynamic (according to the natural laws of relationship physics) which will result in a balanced, sustainable, healthy and peaceful existence. Love describes the optimal way to relate to each other, the way that we can behave and posture towards each other that will result in a peaceful, balanced relationship dynamic.

Love is a blueprint, a formula, a recipe that outlines the only way to relate to each other that will result (natural cause and effect) in our peaceful harmonious, and perpetually sustainable relationships with the Earth and with each other.

Living separately from each other would mean no chance for conflict. But we are a tribal species and are therefore dependent upon our relationships with each other for our survival. When we live in groups it is inevitable that we will step on each others toes. Some heat and tension is a fact of life when existing in groups. The formula of Love has a means of managing that inevitable friction and actually capitalizes upon it for growth and development. If we live according to the pattern or blueprint of Love we are able to maximize our positive emotional experience and at the same time minimize our negative emotional experiences in relationship and in life.

In the dynamic of love there is no co-dependency, there are no master and servant dynamics.

The technology of Love:

there are specific traits or characteristics that define cultures which are truly more civilized than others. Entire cultures can out of balance. Ours is a self-destructing social order. We are not at peace. We are not existing in balance with each other nor with the rest of life. There have been cultures who have understood the technology of Love. The Native Americans understood the balance of our relationship with the rest of creation. But our culture is built upon the technology of competition and manifest destiny. If we live according to the technology of Love we can thrive, prosper, and flourish sustainably and indefinitely. Any way of life, any cultural order that is not based in Love will yield the natural consequence (physics; cause and effect) of conflict tension, instability and suffering.

Part 2:

In order to know what Love IS, it helps to acknowledge what Love is NOT.

Creation/Destruction: Love is the creative force in the universe.

Anything, any act that does not create and promote the health of life is not Love.

Love/Fear: Love is the promise of security and stability. Love is the carrot which leads life with the promise of a better emotional future. Love motivates with the promise of peaceful Loving prosperity. Fear is a threat. Fear hides in the shadow and threatens suffering. Love is the carrot while fear is the stick.

Fear has its place; fear exists within the universe therefore it is a legitimate element of the universe. Fear can tell us when we need to take action to improve the situation we are in or heading into. By heeding LEGITIMATE fear we are loving ourselves as fear is our emotional system that we need to change our situation. When we experience legitimate fear we will heed that fear out of a love for ourselves and our health. But if we make fear our leader we will not find peace. If fear is the motivating force in your life then you are not living in Love. If fear is the thing that is motivation your actions and choices then Love is not your leader. Be wary of fear-mongers; If someone is employing fear to make you behave or act, they are not acting as an agent of Love, nor are they advancing the cause of Love.

Truth/deception: Truth is the language of Love. Deception is a cancer that attacks our relationships by distorting our communication and our trust with each other.

Relationship is the fabric of existence; the opposition to our existence employs deception to attack and undermine our relationships. Deception is used to gain an advantage. Love desires equality and despises co-dependencies.

Humility/arrogance: The path of Love is one that requires constant growth and improvement, therefore the path of Love is prevented by arrogance. Ego is a false confidence. It is a form of deception. Ego is the lie that exits in the place that knowledge, self-awareness, and true confidence should be. Because Love is rooted in truth, there is confidence in Love. Knowledge of truth is strength and empowerment; when one does not have these things some humans will substitute ego as a way of hiding underdevelopment.

Empathy/Apathy: Love is inclusive and is concerned with the health and well-being of all of life. When we exist in competition humans are focused on our own survival and we cannot concern ourselves with how our survival tactics impact others.

Light/Dark: Love is the light. It is truth and knowledge. The darkness is the absence of light. The dark is everything except light.

Openness/Secrecy: Love has no secrets, it is open, honest and communicative. Secrets, privileged knowledge, lies, deceptions, hidden truths are elements used to create imbalances and advantages and disadvantages.

Knowledge/Ignorance: The path of Love is a path of growth. Growth is fed by a healthy diet of knowledge of truth.

Freedom/Oppression: Love is freedom, it does not possess or attempt to own or control. Oppression is anything which suppresses human life, human health, or human prosperity.

Balance/imbalance: The universe is made up of countless individual elements existing in relationship with everything else in the universe. The dynamics that govern the physics of relationship tell is that balanced relationship is the definition of healthy relationship. Balance means that no one is dominating nor submitting within the relationship. The dynamic of Love is perfect equality. Imbalance is when one places themselves above another, imbalanced relationships happen when one takes more from a relationship than they contribute to it.

A relationship can be only slightly out of balance (mildly co-dependent) or it can be severely out of balance as described in a master and slave dynamic. Balance is harmony and stability. Balance is the absence of friction and tension. Imbalance causes conflict and negative emotional energy.

These words are the same;

God is Love; Love is our God; Love is the thing we should be worshiping and serving and advancing.

Love is nothing but truth. The truth is our God; Truth is the thing that we should be worshiping and serving to advance. Anything that is not truth is not of God.

Nature and God are two words that describe the same loving creative force.

Love can only be advanced with tactics of love.

It is only possible to advance the cause of Love by employing the tactics of Love. Love cannot be advanced by tactics of domination, manipulation, deception, violence, or force. Balance canoot be achieved by domination or by infliction “authority” over another.

Love can only be advanced with empathy, knowledge, truth, nurturing, support, acceptance.

An act of love always results (physics, cause and effect) in adding more Love into the emotional atmosphere. Any act or behavior that is not an act of Love takes Love away from humanity.

An act of deception, even with the best of intentions, only results in adding more deception into the social world. Deception covers up and hides truth. An act of deception can never advance truth. Love and truth are the same thing.

No action that places one human above another can ever result in adding more balance and Love to the world.

An act of violence only results in adding violence. You cannot reduce violence by committing acts of violence; the only way to reduce violence is to stop committing acts of violence.

A superhero who advances the cause of love has only the tools of love in her tool-belt. A Love super-hero fights deception with truth, fights fear with knowledge and love, fights violence and imbalance with acts of love and equality.