What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Ask me a ques­tion. Any ques­tion. What­ever the ques­tion, the answer is Love.

For­give me if that sounds sim­plis­tic, or even down­right New Agey. Twenty years ago, if you’d asked me to say the answer to every­thing is love I’d have smiled semi-politely and rolled my eyes vig­or­ously in both direc­tions. My life’s jour­ney had taught me to be cyn­i­cal about love and I cer­tainly didn’t trust it. Well, not the roman­tic vari­ety at least. But I was young and naive and didn’t yet know the truth about love.

Granted, look­ing at ground zero of the world today, it cer­tainly doesn’t look like love is the answer. Love won’t make the mort­gage pay­ment or keep the bank from fore­clos­ing on your home. Love won’t make los­ing your job any eas­ier and the last time I checked, no mat­ter how much you might love your util­ity com­pany, it won’t keep the lights on and the house warm if you don’t pay the bill.

What’s love got to do with help­ing to keep you afloat if your life is crum­bling, or find another job if you’ve lost yours? Is love still rel­e­vant in today’s trou­bled world?

We’ll get back to this in a moment. But before we travel this road any fur­ther, what exactly are we talk­ing about when we talk about love? Or as the song says, “What is this crazy thing called love?”

Hav­ing asked this ques­tion of myself, I imme­di­ately con­sulted that great ora­cle of infor­ma­tion we won­der how we ever lived with­out: Google. Not much clar­ity there; only 1,420,000,000 pages (that’s 1 bil­lion 420 mil­lion pages) devoted to the sub­ject. No won­der we’re all so con­fused! So many opin­ions and points of view! So much cer­tainty; so much mys­tery. It seems none of us knows pre­cisely what love is. That leaves lots of room for us mere mor­tals to try to define the undefinable.

It’s taken me a life­time to come to my own under­stand­ing about this sub­ject. I grew up think­ing love was a spe­cial feel­ing that applied only to cer­tain spe­cial peo­ple and some very spe­cial things, like choco­late for exam­ple. Or hus­bands, wives, chil­dren, par­ents, friends and pets. You get the idea.

But love defined as a feel­ing doesn’t quite work for me. Some­times I don’t always feel the love for the things or peo­ple I love. And in those times, I don’t ques­tion its pres­ence, I accept it as a truth that needs no demonstration.

Still other times in my life, what­ever I thought was love at the time, no longer felt the same. My feel­ings changed and the expe­ri­ence of love was gone. That’s the nature feel­ings. They’re tran­sient. They come and go. So if love is a feel­ing, it’s way too fickle for me to trust it enough to put a stake in the ground and pro­claim it as truth. Feel­ings can change like the weather. Surely, if love is this great thing, wor­thy of over 1 bil­lion Google pages, it has to be more sub­stan­tial than clouds pass­ing through the sky.

Or does it? Maybe that’s exactly what love is … clouds pass­ing through the sky. Or the sky itself. Or the uni­verse that holds the sky. Or what holds the uni­verse in place. Now this is begin­ning to feel more like it. Love has got to be some­thing pretty damned spec­tac­u­lar to be the inspi­ra­tion of bil­lions of songs and poems and the pri­mary sub­ject of the world’s old­est and great­est teachings.

As I approach another birth­day next week, with the num­bers mount­ing up and begin­ning to look down­right scary, I won­der what I’ve learned about love up until now. Surely some­one who’s lived as long as I have must have a more mature per­spec­tive about love than what we read on a Hall­mark card or see on The Bach­e­lor. (May I digress for one sen­tence and just ask: is this not the lamest Bach­e­lor sea­son ever? Talk about an imma­ture idea of what love is! OK, that was two sentences.)

Here’s what I’ve come with up so far. I’d love to hear your thoughts and insights too.

Love is more than some­thing we feel or some­thing we do. Love is what we are. Love is who we are. Cap­i­tal “L” Love does not come and go. It is a con­stant. It is eter­nal. It is the stuff of what we and the rest of the uni­verse are made.

Love doesn’t turn its back on us, it is we who do the turn­ing away. Love never ques­tions us. It is we who doubt love. We think we seek love, but it is Love that is seek­ing us. Love needs and uses us to be its expres­sion, although sleep­ing babies, pup­pies, flow­ers and water­falls can get the job done pretty well too.

The oppo­site of love is not hate; it is fear. So the next time you feel afraid, ask your­self “What would Love do now?” Seri­ously! Try it and see how your out­look changes. That ques­tion alone has got­ten me through some pretty chal­leng­ing moments.

Dr. David Hawkins, MD, Ph.D., researcher and psy­chi­a­trist, author of Power Vs. Force: An Anatomy of Con­scious­ness, devel­oped a method to quan­tify states of con­scious­ness and mea­sure the vibra­tion of each state. Dr. Hawkins defines Love as a state of con­scious­ness that on a cal­i­bra­tion scale of 1–1000, vibrates at a 500 level. Accord­ing to Hawkin’s research in this area, the aver­age vibra­tion of the col­lec­tive at this moment in our his­tory is 207, the level where integrity is just begin­ning to advance. Only four per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion vibrates at a 500. Must be those sleep­ing babies, since the rest of us seem con­sid­er­ably “off” in this regard.

So what’s love got to do with it? Noth­ing less than every­thing. If only four per­cent of the world is vibrat­ing at a 500 level, it seems the great­est gift any of us could give is to ele­vate our­selves beyond the influ­ence that dom­i­nates the lower vibra­tions of shame, guilt, blame, anger, and fear and to become the purring cat and the dog with the wag­ging tail.

To all lovers every­where; lovers of life and all it embod­ies, cel­e­brate Love this Valentine’s day and beyond, and know Love is who you are. Go ahead and wag your tail and purr a bit louder. You might just infect the peo­ple around you and we’ll all end up look­ing like the Na’vi peo­ple of Pan­dora. Now wouldn’t be so bad, would it? I think they were on to something …

Does Love need you as much as you might think you need it? Drop by the com­ment sec­tion and let us know what you think about love. We might even add a few more Google pages!

Tagged as: author, David Hawkins, Google Inc., Human Interest, love, Power Vs. Force, psychiatrist author, Radha Soami, relationships, researcher and psychiatrist, Valentine's day