EXPERIENCE A UNIVERSE OF LOVE
When we celebrate Valentine's Day, we often just think about love for a significant other, or close members of our family.
But what if love is actually part of the fabric of the universe, much vaster and more pervasive than we imagined?
In The Universe is a Green Dragon, Brian Swimme, the cosmologist, writes about love as the cosmic principle of allurement. Allurement, known scientifically as gravity, is the impulse that causes one thing to be drawn to another. It is what holds the universe together. And yet, even now, the gravitational field, this “attracting activity” as Swimme describes it, is a “stupendous and mysterious fact of existence.”
We still don't what it is. And we are all part of it.
What would it be like to expand our concept of love to take in wider circle of attractions, that are particularly and meaningfully our own?
Protons are only attracted to certain particles, oxygen atoms have their set of allurements. The love affair of sun and Earth birthed chlorophyll, out of which the great greening of the planet began. We too, have a set of attractions, our lives shaped by a magnetic pull towards certain ways of being and people and professions. We can’t say why we are drawn; it’s just so. Like gravity itself, our own field of attraction is mysterious. It simply is.
And yet, the more we can follow our allurements, as Swimme puts it, the more we “help bind the universe together.” What his simple message poses is dazzling—that by pursuing what we love, we unite the world.
Stepping into this vast and cosmic love affair, we access a deep time and deep space perspective on love––one that transcends the sense of otherness at the heart of tribalism. One that moves us beyond ego and the narrow narcissistic love that can trap us in limiting beliefs. In understanding the cosmic origins of love, we are swept up in a profound knowing--- the pursuit of our individual fascinations mirrors the forming of our galaxies and our planet.
Putting up walls, blaming one fragment of a political party, or one kind of people, is the antithesis of the cosmic principle of gravity. It tears us apart. Instead, what if we surrendered to the pull of what and whom we love? What if we entered a wild love affair with life itself?
Just the other day, scientists announced the discovery of something extraordinary. By focusing on a distant space object, Arrokoth, also known as the “snowman” because it has what looks like a round head and body, a cosmic myth was dispelled. Our solar system, it now appears, wasn’t formed by massive, violent collisions of particles, pebbles, and boulders. In fact, the opposite.
When they looked at Arrokoth up close, they could see the two parts of it (head and body) were unscathed. They hadn’t merged with violence, but rather gently and slowly. In other words, these scientists discovered that our planet was formed by love of the tenderest kind, one pebble at a time gently merging with the other.
What if we could form our future out of such a love?
