Love is a concept that refers to an emotion and way of being that is the most important aspect of human existence.
Love is the apex of existential experience.
Love should not be confused with lust. Love should not be confused with adoration. Physical love can, in particular instances, be an expression of real love. Real love does not seek pleasure for itself but only looks to please its focus..
To truly love is to achieve the highest experience available to human beings.
Attachment to love is not love. All creation is an act of love.
This is not to say that we did not evolve on our own.
Rather, it is to highlight the points at which beauty and human experience can coalesce to form a transcendent experience.
Love, in its true form, when expressed, is the apex of creativity and of being itself. Love is selfless and unconcerned with appearances. Love desires goodness and happiness for its object, be it the self or another.
Love is that which keeps everything alive and, without it, there is hardly any reason to see why we should go on. At the very bottom of the worst depressions, there lies a glimmer of light and that is the memory of love.
When the bad is washed away, love can fill up a mind and make it appreciate its being. Love is awesome. Love is the prime mover, the source, and the origin of all creativity. If there is a god then it it is a being made completely from love and composed of pure love.
Love never restrains or hurts or torments. Love never judges. Love is pure and it is home for all existence. Love is warm and comforting. Love is bright and helpful.
Love is nuturing and gentle. Love is the most important thing in all the world(s). No other emotion or concept has as much power as love and it is the king, the ruler, and the point of all existence. Without love of something, namely, one's self, other(s), or something you enjoy doing or place you enjoy being, there is hardly a reason to see why existence would be meaningful. Love is crucial for creativity.
But, the emotional perception we have is the most basic and present state and, I would say, the non-conceptual perception of emotion is a better compass to truth concerning aesthetics than any reason or logic can provide.
In fact, I think logic and reason tell us absolutely nothing about what is good but only how to form sentences about what our emotion tells us what is good or bad or neither.
If we can learn to love ourselves, primarily, then there seems little reason by which we would ever want to end ourselves except, perhaps, in those extreme cases of horrendous suffering where love of ourselves is trumped by want of relief.
I have no qualms with terminally ill patients who are in agonizing pain who also want to end it and I think love of others would inform this.
Love does not assume metaphysical systems that cause people to suffer.
Any technology must take love into account and the destruction of our capacity to love should be a paramount concern in new drugs and the uses of computers and other areas of scientific realization.
In many of the harshest regimes of history, love was absent in the running of the government. A government that does not treat its people with love will always stand in tension with its people and this tension can break toward the removal of that government.
My concept of love is greatly informed by Buddhist philosophy and psychology, the writings of Mark Epstein and the various teachers of the teachings of Siddhartha, who, I think, was free from the unneccessary ontological entities we find across modern Buddhist sects in the world today.
Love has nothing to do with religion.
