Love

Love is an inevitable emergent property of any consciousness created by a self-replicating, evolutionary process.

"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 a universal 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 page for more on this perspective.

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.

What is love?

Love and Happiness

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.

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, religion, and ethics where a unique perspective can be found.

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.