Love: a deceptively simple word we use to describe a stunningly complex phenomenon. Compassion, caring, comfort, support, desire, attachment, attraction, and appeal – empathy, affection, tenderness, infatuation, intimacy and ardor; these feelings and more are at work within love’s bind. Humanity as we know it is all but unthinkable without love.
Our experience of love, however, is limited by our altogether human frame of reference; our feelings, thoughts and physical sensations. When we observe that which exists beyond our human realm, one might conclude that all space, physical matter and the atom itself are bound together by the strong force of love (which physicists call “gluons”). Cosmologists say all and everything once was One, a dimensionless absolute singularity of perfect symmetry. Then one timeless day the Big Bang popped and the symmetry was broken. Perhaps the strong force of love is an irresistible memory of that oneness.
There surely is a force that binds: an all-pervasive, unobstructed, invisible, unconditional and indestructible essence without which the observable and apparently infinite universe – including Diet Pepsi – would not exist.
What is the mysterious force that underlies the replication of crystals, for example? Quartz crystals are solid arrangements of ordinary molecules of matter in a highly precise geometric self-replicating chain of rotated tetrahedrons. Quartz crystals are not alive, not living organisms like an amoeba or a squirrel. Such crystals have no DNA, no cells, no genes, and no membranes – yet under proper conditions, they reliably replicate in a precisely ordered crystalline matrix. That is what they do – but why?
A feedback system or innate essence of awareness that cannot be detected underlies the replication of quartz crystal otherwise the perfection that is quartz would not exist. The same is true for all non-living things – thus water is not ammonia, granite is not iron and gold is not lead. An ever-present, powerful unseen force is keeping things on track. Survival of the living absolutely requires real-time feedback systems; in people and other animals, for example, when a cell is imperfect or damaged, the body usually detects and replaces it. What is this force that relentlessly propels all and everything towards continuous self-perfection? Perhaps nature’s feedback loop is an aspect of the force of love.
There are those who would call the force I’ve described as sacred, and I suppose that designation is as fine as any other. But here’s the kicker – if this force is within and without of all things – then all is sacred, even the profane. Bound together in this way, essential unity is revealed: the force of love is all good.
The force of love binds the entire universe, and operates far beyond our human control. This is excellent, since people are terribly confused. Yet no matter how confused we become – scared, angry, violent, depressed, delusional, exhilarated or ecstatic – we cannot disturb the primordial force of love. This is the bind that ties: the inexorable, incorruptible expression of love operating within and around everything that exists. Beyond description, ineffable, ultimately unknowable except through observation and engagement with its spontaneous and brilliant manifestations, love is, and we and all and everything are simply and forever love itself. This, dear one, is the secret knowledge of the sages. Now you know; please pass it on.
