The Heart of the Matter

Love. It is a word that stands alone. It has been the subject of much pleasure and strife in human history. We give great credence to this word. It fulfils us, inspires us, and takes us to new heights and depths. It renders us helpless—yet frees us to soar upon the heavens.
What is this stuff called love? Is it simply an illusion or an actual force of nature? Is it both, neither, nor?

With human beings, love is a messy affair. You can say whatever you wish about the human realm of love, but it is often a complex mess of emotions and feelings that make it hard to decipher. One of my good friends, a fairly rational thinker, feels that love is simply biology. What humans call love, he states, is simply a wash of hormones and neurotransmitters released by the brain, evolved for the purpose of passing along our genes. Although I can follow his reasoning, for it is hard to find fault with it, yet it doesn’t ring true to me. It never seemed like the complete answer.

Once I looked deeply into some of the fundamental roots of the joys and difficulties of relationships I realized that my friend was only partially correct. Although he thought he had ‘love’ all figured out, I felt that he hadn’t truly reached the heart of the matter.
Human beings are undoubtedly one of the most complex species that have ever evolved on this planet. We evolved our emotions the same way as our mammalian cousins. We evolved such feelings simply so we would — simply — connect.

If one examines the world of love and relationships purely rationally, one can see that they do not quite make sense. Human beings, with our ability to rationalize, must see the illogic even more clearly than our animal brethren. It seems that love is such a complex and powerful mess of emotions for human beings simply for the fact that we need to overpower our strong rationalities in order to connect at all.
It dawned on me that love is simply ‘connection’. Love is the ability to connect. Absolute love is a completely open connection. When you love something such as a person, or the joys of painting, or sailing, or eating chocolate, you are connecting with it. The stronger the connection, the stronger the love is. ‘Loving people’ are people who are simply open to connections.

Under this line of reasoning, the opposite of love, of connection, is repulsion. Repulsion is what we experience as fear. Fear drives us away from things, where love attracts. In the centre, between love and fear is simply ‘disconnection’. Disconnection means nothing; there is neither love nor fear.

This insight certainly seems interesting. What made me even more curious about this line of reasoning was that it took me to something else that I have been thinking about for quite some time — that ternary logic might provide some insights to some of the mysteries of our universe.

With computers we have a binary system of fundamental building blocks — the ‘O’ and the ‘1’. With these two components we can build an infinite variety of hardware and software, all of which rests on this binary foundation.

With atomic forces we tend to see three behaviours — Attraction, Repulsion, Neutrality. The interplay of these forces create the molecular world that we experience on a daily basis. Whether the entire universal building blocks, whether quarks or strings or something else not yet discovered, are also governed by three types of behaviour is not yet certain, but perhaps it is something that might end up being true — universe being a ternary system.

This ternary idea made me think of Taoism. With Taoism the universe separated into two fundamental forces, the dark Yin force and the light Yang force. According to Taoism the interplay between these forces created all that was in the universe. Although, according to Taoism, there was another ‘something’ or ‘nothing’ that these yin and yang forces originally derived from. The balancing that Taoists attempt to achieve is hoped to bring a closer to this ultimate universal essence. This original nothing-essence seemed to me as the third state that I had been thinking about with my thoughts on love and fear. Disconnection, which is neither love or fear, lies somewhere as the potential to be either.

-1 — 0 — 1

Fear — Disconnect — Love

Repulsion — Neutrality — Connection

Now one of the more interesting things about connection is that it unites and creates diversity and complexity. Single-celled life forms connected billions of years ago to allow multicellular creatures to exist. One day, the connections that we are laying, in this information age, may allow the human species, and maybe even all Earth-based life, to connect in ways that would be as revolutionary as the rise of multicellular organisms. The more we connect the greater we become. Perhaps this is a fundamental mathematical truism stemming from the very ternary nature of our universe itself. Perhaps our biological mess of emotions is simply an echo of this primary law of the universe.

Now this same friend once lived in a Taoist temple for a couple of years as a teenager. He used to believe — and perhaps still does — that when Buddhists masters seek enlightenment they are pointlessly shooting their energies into a black hole, turning their life force into nothingness.

Years later, sitting in a beautiful banyan tree in my neighbourhood, I was reminded of my friend’s statement, made over a decade ago. It just popped in my mind. Curious to know why this particular statement had so suddenly appeared in my mind, I examined it and suddenly I received an insight. I surmised a thought experiment that supposed that my friend was right about the Buddhist masters; that they were actually resulting in nothing while attempting to achieve nirvana. And perhaps this was exactly the point.

In this framework, a master — being aware of subtleties that we cannot ordinarily comprehend — would be aware of any agent that causes fear. Fear cannot exist at this state if the master wishes to progress. Now what could be the absolute, most frightening concept that is known to exist in the universe? Entering a place where no escape exists, where time and space are meaningless, a prison cut entirely off from the rest of the universe — a black hole.

A black hole is known to cosmologists as a singularity. All laws of physics break down inside this singularity. The only other singularity that has ever existed in the known universe, besides a black hole, is the universe just before the Big Bang itself.

The Big Bang. It was essentially a black hole just before the universe began. Now this singularity is the source of everything, of all life, of all death. If these Buddhist masters were actually shooting themselves into such singularities, the eventual outcome would be the same. Certainly, they would be cut off from this universe, yet they would eventually be part of a singularity that would eventually become its own source of everything in its own universe.

In this thought experiment, facing this ultimate fear results in the ultimate love: the creation of All. And this practice, of hunting down and conquering fears, ends up balancing things out to allow the greatest expression of love of all — pure creation.
Giving the great peace that is ‘nothing’ to your fear as you face it, causes it to die, which then gives birth to love.

Give your negativities the gift of peace to subdue the negativities. Then—as the next step—love that peace to amplify the positivities. This alchemical dynamic may very well be the source of our abundant existence & the greatest love of all.