In preparation for our upcoming webinar “What is Love and Why it’s Essential to Understanding the Universe” with Thomas Jay Oord, we are inviting you to ponder the following questions and offer your own insights and reflections.
– What does “love” mean to you?
– How does it relate to “knowing” the universe?
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“Can we really “know” love or just experience it? Does truly knowing anything about the Universe include experiencing ourselves as part of the whole… not above it or in control of it?”
–Mary Beth Duffy
“The history of life is a narrative of meeting and relationship. Atoms meet together in molecular systems, cells meet together in organic system, species meet and make together a complex and wonderful eco-system, every human being try to meet each other wether in a biological or spiritual way. These relationships are always challenging, but not always fruitful, healthy or constructive. Often they are, instead, sterile, harmful or devastating.Through the human beings, the biosphere reached to know itself (Teilhard’s noosphere) and we know our responsibility in maintaining the whole life o Earth-system. In this critical moment, love, as the only mandate of God, could lead us in the right way for this task: taking care of the neighbor and the planet.”
–Juan V. Fernandez de la Gala.
“It’s all energy in the Cosmos, the love of God – God who IS Love – flaring forth (self giving as creation, incarnate in creation, in evolutionary processes) from the beginning of time and space, the Cosmos being in God and God being in, but also greater than or transcendent from, the Cosmos?”
–M Clare Pierson
Read more in the Comments section below.
Love? The felt-sense of knowing and being known in a caring context, greatest between and among entities where the I/Thou, subject/object barrier dissolves, creating a shared experience of identity and union at their naked innermost. In spirituality, such also captures the inner meaning of “holy communion.”
Love is intimate relatio, a covenantal weaving together of self giving that survives all that stands against it, despite fraying/distancing/severing. It is as undestroyable and undeniable as Truth/pure Energy/Beauty.
It is impossible, at this point, in the ongoing evolution of human participation in the ever transforming noosphere, for humans to maintain more than an imperfect version of Divine Love.
We are just, as the human species, on the cusp of becoming aware of It, and we strive for the wholeness of at-onement with It, fully aware that while It is wholly other than us, we are in It with the Cosmos, and It is in us and the whole Cosmos.
Our human loving accordingly pales because we cannot be what we cannot experience, too much human psyche garbage (which is the angst of the metanoia/transforming in which we are currently imbedded, IMHO) stands in the way of “ek stasis” with the entire Cosmos and the Trinity.
At this moment in time, our best icon is that of human “ek stasis”, the fullest measure of total self giving of self to the other in the orgasmic flash of lovemaking. To think of that moment being the perpetual awe and wonder of at-onement with the Trinity and the Cosmos is beyond our current capacity to understand and experience; and yet it tantalizingly delights.
Love is not an emotion, but a state of being and relating to the world. David Hawkins
Love is the energy at the heart of the Cosmos. It is the origin and driving force of all matter. The living being can be motivated by the experience of being in love with the Cosmos, with the Christ, with an embodiment of love in another living being. The challenge is being able to communicate that to all other living beings.