The power of love, not love of power

There isn’t a more fun topic to discuss, bathe in, or write about.

At the core of our humanity is the beautiful feeling we all know as love. No matter what the language, the culture, the gender, or ethnicity, it is the sense, vibration, and fragrance we all warmly respond to when we’re in its presence.

Love of beauty and the beauty of love form a circularity in which our daily lives have the capacity to enjoy as naturally as our own breath.

Love goes by many names, as does God, yet everyone knows what they mean when they say it. It is this inherent je ne sais quoi (a quality that cannot be described or named easily).

The ancient Chinese sage, Lao-tse, speaks of the Tao as the “ineffable, that which cannot be described or named”, yet everyone knows what it is. It’s so close to us, like our face, we cannot see it, but we can feel it and know it.

Perhaps the life-force is the Universe’s way of saying “I love you, so now out of love may thee propagate, multiply and go forth. Live and let live! And as you do, you are, by nature, propagating and multiplying love through you and around you.”

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love”, a quote attributed to both St. Francis of Assisi and to Meister Eckhart. No matter who said it first, it’s a beautiful way of saying that “love is everywhere”. It depends on through which lens one chooses to see.

Glimpses of love

Sometimes, as I walk down streets in New York City and I see a man holding a door for a woman or the other way around, I experience an immediate feeling of the love behind this simple, ordinary gesture. Gestures of kindness are acts of love.

Why does the gesture exist? Why does kindness, courtesy, or chivalry exist? Certainly, the person can open the door for themselves—it’s not about ability. For the collective good, our ancestors embedded high-minded values into the very fabric of society, which encourages, supports, and assures that acts of kindness flourish and are plentiful, to propagate and to “multiply like loaves”.

When I observe a door being held by someone of any color, gender, size, shape, background, or socio-economic status for another person of any combination of these, it demonstrates the Global Good and Universal kindness that I strongly suggest is inherent in us all.

Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (an honorific title for a highly respected religious leader), established a program in the 1980’s called Shambhala Training¹, which was based on Buddhist principles but absent the religious component. Its premise was that all beings are inherently and essentially good. If someone acts at variance with that, it’s because they have lost touch with their essential nature.

It’s pretty obvious that many humans across the planet, especially those in positions of leadership, are “at extreme variance” for any number of reasons, due to actions in this life or previous ones. It’s up to us all to help them, shepherd them to “find their way back” to their essential nature.

When people act in ways that are contrary to the expression of love, their fundamental nature, one can reasonably suspect that they have experienced extreme prenatal and postnatal trauma. Unfortunately, with the number of wars and violence on the planet today, these numbers are not dropping but increasing considerably. The reason for more love to be generated to heal these wounds becomes all the more evident.

Love is everywhere

When you look from the point of view that love is everywhere, as the mystics have always said, you can see love everywhere, in the smallest gesture of helping someone on the street to the grandest wedding ceremony of two people in love.

This is what gives love its universal nature, the thing everyone wants more of. This is why almost every song, aria, novel, dance, or film is about love, its loss, or our longing.

Love is the biggest motivator on Earth. When you see love everywhere, you see beauty everywhere. This is what uplifts the spirit and enhances our physical, mental, and emotional states like little else.

In effect, seeing love everywhere is a spiritual practice with profoundly healing and health-producing consequences. The quality of one’s life becomes elevated to another level. People can see it and feel it “in the air”.

The different flavors of love

If love is the life-force of the Universe, it comes to us in different forms and varieties. We’ve all experienced them all at one time or another. This variety and breadth of experience are both healthy and attune us to a higher intellectual and emotional intelligence.

Before zeroing in on the one most popular among most cultures and one in which we all love to partake, Eros, romantic love and its obviously juicy, ebullient, effervescing chi, I find it useful to take a broader sweep of love as it “comes from the Gods, from Heaven to Earth” as some ancient cultures, such as the Greeks may say, from Eros to Agape. Each has its place in the broader scheme.

Having a feel for love’s largesse is useful.

Plato & Aristotle offer seven types of love²

Eros

This is what we know as romantic love, charged with passion and sexual attraction. Almost every song, poem, opera, and film are either about this explicitly or at minimum, tangentially. It rouses our imaginations, our emotions, and our libido.

When we think of love, we typically conjure images of lovers and courtship. It’s beautiful, and everyone desires and swoons.

From the Chinese energetic view, our life-force is awakened through this courtship, the Yin-Yang attraction, and it seeks expression.

Interestingly, love-making from a Taoist point of view is not simply about sexual gratification and orgasm, though it can include these, but it focuses first and foremost on the woman’s pleasure. It includes the circulation of the chi that gets generated from arousal. The life-force emerging from sexual arousal circulates through the entire body. Its next stage is to connect one’s own very alive life-force with that of the Heavens.

From that point of view, sexual attraction, while fully enjoyed in the body, also acts as a vital link when directed to a higher, cosmic dimension. This is the basis of Taoist sex practices, which start with Eros and the depths of pleasure, and then evolve into a much larger, refined, spiritual expression and experience. In short, the micro- and macro-levels of life itself become intertwined, body with spirit.

The world’s literature twists and turns on Eros. The continuation of our species is grateful.

Philia

Philia is translated from Greek as “friendship”. Such a simple word, yet so replete with depth and multiplicity of meaning. Let’s take it first as goodwill and good cheer among people. Depth emerges through shared values, experience, and the shared enjoyment of play and humor. It is further expanded by expressions of goodness, being available to each other during times of joy and hardship. A sense of sturdy reliability and trust emerges. Virtue is its backbone.

Is there a relationship between Eros and Philia? You betcha! Eros without philia can begin to wither after sexual attraction begins to diminish. If romance dissipates, which it does not have to at all, Dr. Bruce Lipton³ reminds us in his excellent book “The Honeymoon Effect”, philia is there to ‘catch it’ or to further enhance Eros. Granted, it’s a different frequency of love, but it strengthens the bond between lovers.

Both Eros and Philia involve mutual benefit and the joy of companionship, reliability, and trust. These help to define the meaning of friendship with Eros present or not. When the relationship includes both a romantic-sexual quality, and Philia includes philosophy (“friend of wisdom”), the synergy here is what many would call an optimal form of friendship and romance.

Storge

Pronounced ["store-jay"], it is known as the love of family, between parents, children, and siblings. It is perhaps as close to unconditional as we humans get. It is the bedrock of society, the place of modeling good, healthy attitudes and behaviors, integrity, being compassionate, virtuous, and loving.

When a couple forms a family, they move from Eros to Philia to Storge, which includes the prior two—it’s a process of ripening and maturing.

Real friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs. They provide reflections to each other.

In effect, they are each other’s therapist, assisting each other in becoming the best of their potential.

Agape

Well-known as universal love. This includes love of life, love of Nature, love of God. In fact, it doesn’t exclude anything and is experienced as a deep appreciation and affinity for all Creation.

Out of this emerges compassion, service, philanthropy (“love-friend of man”), and altruism. This universal sense of love of all sentient beings, of life itself, confers an experience of enthusiasm in the original Greek sense of “inspired by the Gods” or later, inspired by “the God within”.

Those who embody this kind of love often feel elated by the very reality of life itself unfolding.

Ludus

Ludus is less well-known but no less important. Its Latin root means “sportive and playful”. While it may be a precursor to Eros, it remains on the lighter side of flirtation and the game of seduction. It allows for a free-wheeling, open quality to a relationship without necessarily deep commitment, though Philia may fully be present. One way to describe it in modern parlance is “friends with benefits”. It may seem extremely light touch (so to speak), but it can have the depth of any other kind of friendship, depending on the individuals involved.

Ludus relationships are casual, undemanding, and uncomplicated, and can be very long-lasting.

Ludus works best when both parties are mature and self-sufficient, in alignment with the nature of the relationship.

Pragma

The root of words such as “practical and pragmatism” can be associated with traditionally arranged marriages, or marriages for political or economic benefit, typically of the family. Its purpose isn’t Eros, though this can emerge, but rather emphasis on the practical needs at hand. This kind of love, if you will, is found more among the upper classes of society, which seeks to preserve wealth and prioritizes that above the joy of the other kinds of love.

Philautia

Finally, self-love. This doesn’t need to edge toward Narcissism though it can. Short of self-inflation, its healthy expression is simply respect and appreciation of oneself. Perhaps our world would be much better off if people truly valued themselves, their natural gifts, talents, and beauty that they are here to bring into the world.

Each person would take better care of themselves and their loved ones. In that case, the entire world would be taken care of by oneself and one’s family and community of friends (Philia). This is the way to create peace, health, happiness, and love across the world.

Unhealthy self-love is a form of excess in the direction of hubris. This leads to a false sense of self-importance and, not uncommonly, self-righteousness. Then, we’re in trouble. Crusades emerge from such distorted thinking. It’s not really love at all but a form of emptiness disguised as self-importance.

Unfortunately, many politicians and the captains of industry tend to suffer from this pathology (again, Greek: “suffering and the logic of disease”).

Telling the story of love

I would be remiss if I didn’t spell out the larger view that comes to us from our ancestors, from Greek to the Chinese, as I just did above. Jumping solely into the “juice of love” that we experience as intimate, romantic love, delicious as it is, would be absent the larger role love plays in our lives and in our Universe.

This article is but the first glimmer of love to be told. They blend inside us all to varying degrees to make us into the amazing human beings that we are.

The biology of love

It’s also true, much to our benefit, that the mind-body loves love. It responds by the release of oxytocin. It responds with the release of endorphins. It responds by deepening breath, increasing the circulation of blood and chi, leading to our healthy longevity. To love well is to increase not just one’s quantity of life, but the joy and quality of life.

It is as though love is the essence of life itself. The more we love, the healthier we get, the shorter our telomeres, and the longer our lives. For what, you may ask? Ah, to love even more.

The power of love

We live in a world where tension, conflict, war, destruction, and even famine amidst plenty of resources and food are rampant. Governments fight over land, oil, and people over religion. So little makes sense. Humanity has been lost by those who perpetrate these horrors.

However, at base, everyone wants and cherishes love. Everyone loves the joy of family and relationships. This has to mean something…

Could it not be that we apply the joy of love and the fact that we know that everyone at the level of heart and soul, wants love, that it could help to resolve and overcome the power of violence and war?

As Jimi Hendrix so wisely said: