I experience something like universal love for all beings, in that I feel empathy for everything from electrons to thermostats to plants to dogs to people to corporations to the whole universe.
If I had to explain what this is like, I’d say it’s something like taking your definition of love, “to care about someone such that their life story is part of your life story”, and modifying it to something like “to care about every being because their life story is also mine and mine is theirs”.
So when I think about someone like Hitler, I don’t think “damn, I care about Hitler, I sure hope/wish his desires are fulfilled”, and instead think “man, I can imagine how Hitler became who he was, why he did the things he did, and how pained the world is by events having had to have conspired to cause him to be who he was”. I also think, as a follow up, “what could we do so that there never has to be another Hitler-like-being again”. But I don’t think “how could I have helped Hitler” because that’s a counterfactual that never can be, and is only interesting insofar as it’s a training scenario for dealing with future would-be Hitlers.
Sorry that this is a probably confusing comment. I’ve not spent a lot of time thinking about how to explain all this. I have a real sense that people who do terrible things are fundamentally just like you, me, and all of us, only things played out poorly for them such that they did terrible things. (Some obvious assumptions are being smuggled in here, like that there’s no free will and that the universe is deterministic, which both contradict the intuitive model of the world we all normally use to talk about things.)
I think this is coherent and I think probably actually more like what most people who say “universal love” mean by it. (But, not what most people who say “love” probably mean by it)
I’m not sure whether I’m moved to define it that way, for myself. I think I feel a sort of aesthetic appeal, but it also seems like this flavor of love is pretty different from what most people in day-to-day relationships mean by love (which I think usually have more to do with some kind of commitment)
In your mind, is the way you experience universal love the same as the way you love your family/romantic-partner/etc, or is it a different type? Has your thinking on that evolved over time?
Hmm, it’s sort of different, but mostly in its expression. If I’m really dialed in to the feeling of universal love, I have to actively restrain myself from expressing it so that I don’t wander around hugging random strangers, petting dogs that would bite me, etc. (I do let it out with inanimate objects, like bowing with a tree or hugging a rock in my hands because I know I can safely offer such an expression). The love I feel towards my family, my wife, and my close friends is very much like universal love, but I trust that it will be reciprocated.
But I think the feeling of universal love is actually something like a generalization of the simple, uncomplicated love a toddler has for their parents, siblings, toys, etc. As we grow up we get cynical and forget how to access this kind of love or box it up and only let it out in narrow circumstances. Getting back to it requires an active process of clearing away the delusions that lead us to forget how to feel it.
There is something a bit different going on with romantic love as it has this extra component (sex) that isn’t present in other types of love, but I do think romantic love is still built atop the same love substrate, just with an additional aspect of connection built on sex and connected to reproduction (even if one does not have children).
As that last couple paragraph hints, my thinking on this has changed over time. A few years ago I don’t think I really had a sense of universal love as a real thing other than as either an abstract idea or as something fuzzy headed hippies got into after doing too many drugs. The thing that changed my mind was meditating a bunch, slowly peeling back the layers of ontology that stood between me and reality, and then seeing myself as not separate from others, at which point universal love was just sort of obvious in a really boring way.
Hmm. I think the uncomplicated-toddler-love isn’t really mediated by “we don’t have separate selves” though. It seems like the thing going on there is structurally different from the sort of thing feeling empathy with electrons and corporations and hitlers.
(I’m sympathetic to both “there is something uncomplicatedly wholesome about toddler love that is good to find your way back to” and to “caring about every being because their life story is also mine and mine is theirs”, but I think the latter just requires a degree of reflective awareness that the toddlers don’t have)
While ‘love’ isn’t of course well defined, it seems a central component for most usages is one of prioritisation (of time, money, emotional bandwidth etc.) in the face of constrained supply.
So in romantic love, priority of (usually) a single person is a necessary component. Loving a romantic partner is providing a guarantee to yourself that you will prioritize their needs over competing demands (which will therefore reduce in priority). Sex is often one of those needs, but not necessarily. It’s the guarantee of priority that matters, not specifically what is prioritised.
The love a toddler has for their toys has this same necessary component. You can’t play with all the toys in the world; you have finite time to play, your parents have finite ability to provide toys, so you have to prioritise. The toys you prioritise are the toys you love.
So ‘universal love’ is not love at all. Your resources are finite. Prioritisation is zero sum. It’s making the choice in a world of limited resources (both your internal world, and in the world outside) that makes it love.
I don’t have a detailed model of why, but this strongly conflicts with my intuition of what love is. From my perspective this is zeroing in on one aspect of some types of relationships that reflects something adjacent to but not part of love.
Can you think of examples of mainstream use of the word ‘love’ for which prioritization isn’t an essential component? It seems to me that prioritization is the key thing that binds together what would otherwise be disparate uses of the word, not just in the relationship context. (e.g. the ‘love’ in “I love reading” and “I love my wife” mean very different things, but are both effectively statements of prioritization)
Sure! Christians are pretty mainstream, and they regularly talk about God’s love for them, but in Christian theology, God’s love is for everyone, and so God is not prioritizing anyone.
I admit that’s not a very central example, though, so here’s something more mundane:
I think someone saying “I love cats” is not necessarily a statement of prioritization. Sure, I love cats, but I’m not going out of my way to prioritize cats in general over other things. Although I do prioritize some specific cats, I also love cats in general, and this carries no real burden of prioritization, as I don’t have to love other things less, and my feeling of love for cats doesn’t really go away when I’m thinking about my love for other things.
I think that when you say “I love cats”, you mean more than you prioritize specific cats. At some points, those cats will no longer be with you, and if you are like most cat lovers, likely you will then go on to own and prioritize different cats. So while the cats you prioritize at any moment in time may be specific, if you are like most cat owners, over the course of your life you will generally prioritize cats. (“I choose to eat cake every day above other desserts, but I don’t in general love cake, just the cakes I eat on a given day” sounds like more like someone who loves cake but also loves splitting hairs over word usage, than someone who doesn’t in general love cake.)
I think that, if you ask most people what they actually do in practice as a result of their stated love for cats, you will inevitably get back things that necessarily involve prioritization (mostly of time and/or money), e.g. they have pet cats, they volunteer at an animal shelter, they put food out in their garden for stray cats, and/or so forth. If someone said “I love cats, and I have no real interest in prioritising spending my time, money, energy etc. on owning or thinking about or interacting with cats above other things”, I would find that incongruous and question whether they really do love cats.
I can’t really disagree here, and yet I still feel like you’re leaving out some important component of what love means by just focusing on prioritization. It’s like there’s multiple things going on, and prioritization often gets bundled with love in everyday use, but you can love without prioritization, that’s just not what most people do.
“to care about every being because their life story is also mine and mine is theirs”.
I’m curious if this is… a crux. Like, imagine if you changed your mind about the latter thing, would you stop experiencing universal love for all beings, or would it change in quality somehow?
I guess it’s a crux? That seems like a weird way to phrase it to me, though, because the words are not so much a logical claim as a way of pointing at the experience of realizing that my sense of a separate self is an ontological illusion and then knowing that “me” and “you” and “it” are not really separate things because of the interconnectedness of reality.
But I can imagine not experiencing universal love for all beings because I didn’t used to, or at least not in the same way. Like, if I think about it, I don’t know if I could have endorsed the statement “their life story is also mine and mine is theirs” prior to having some insights during meditation.
I can imagine there’s more nuance to it than how I experience universal love now. I don’t know what this looks like, but there being more nuance would fit the general pattern of most meditation insights: you get part of the picture and then there’s still more that will change how you think about things but not invalidate the current experience, although it might show that it was missing important things.
First, let me make a couple claims:
I experience something like universal love for all beings, in that I feel empathy for everything from electrons to thermostats to plants to dogs to people to corporations to the whole universe.
If I had to explain what this is like, I’d say it’s something like taking your definition of love, “to care about someone such that their life story is part of your life story”, and modifying it to something like “to care about every being because their life story is also mine and mine is theirs”.
So when I think about someone like Hitler, I don’t think “damn, I care about Hitler, I sure hope/wish his desires are fulfilled”, and instead think “man, I can imagine how Hitler became who he was, why he did the things he did, and how pained the world is by events having had to have conspired to cause him to be who he was”. I also think, as a follow up, “what could we do so that there never has to be another Hitler-like-being again”. But I don’t think “how could I have helped Hitler” because that’s a counterfactual that never can be, and is only interesting insofar as it’s a training scenario for dealing with future would-be Hitlers.
Sorry that this is a probably confusing comment. I’ve not spent a lot of time thinking about how to explain all this. I have a real sense that people who do terrible things are fundamentally just like you, me, and all of us, only things played out poorly for them such that they did terrible things. (Some obvious assumptions are being smuggled in here, like that there’s no free will and that the universe is deterministic, which both contradict the intuitive model of the world we all normally use to talk about things.)
I think this is coherent and I think probably actually more like what most people who say “universal love” mean by it. (But, not what most people who say “love” probably mean by it)
I’m not sure whether I’m moved to define it that way, for myself. I think I feel a sort of aesthetic appeal, but it also seems like this flavor of love is pretty different from what most people in day-to-day relationships mean by love (which I think usually have more to do with some kind of commitment)
In your mind, is the way you experience universal love the same as the way you love your family/romantic-partner/etc, or is it a different type? Has your thinking on that evolved over time?
Hmm, it’s sort of different, but mostly in its expression. If I’m really dialed in to the feeling of universal love, I have to actively restrain myself from expressing it so that I don’t wander around hugging random strangers, petting dogs that would bite me, etc. (I do let it out with inanimate objects, like bowing with a tree or hugging a rock in my hands because I know I can safely offer such an expression). The love I feel towards my family, my wife, and my close friends is very much like universal love, but I trust that it will be reciprocated.
But I think the feeling of universal love is actually something like a generalization of the simple, uncomplicated love a toddler has for their parents, siblings, toys, etc. As we grow up we get cynical and forget how to access this kind of love or box it up and only let it out in narrow circumstances. Getting back to it requires an active process of clearing away the delusions that lead us to forget how to feel it.
There is something a bit different going on with romantic love as it has this extra component (sex) that isn’t present in other types of love, but I do think romantic love is still built atop the same love substrate, just with an additional aspect of connection built on sex and connected to reproduction (even if one does not have children).
As that last couple paragraph hints, my thinking on this has changed over time. A few years ago I don’t think I really had a sense of universal love as a real thing other than as either an abstract idea or as something fuzzy headed hippies got into after doing too many drugs. The thing that changed my mind was meditating a bunch, slowly peeling back the layers of ontology that stood between me and reality, and then seeing myself as not separate from others, at which point universal love was just sort of obvious in a really boring way.
Hmm. I think the uncomplicated-toddler-love isn’t really mediated by “we don’t have separate selves” though. It seems like the thing going on there is structurally different from the sort of thing feeling empathy with electrons and corporations and hitlers.
(I’m sympathetic to both “there is something uncomplicatedly wholesome about toddler love that is good to find your way back to” and to “caring about every being because their life story is also mine and mine is theirs”, but I think the latter just requires a degree of reflective awareness that the toddlers don’t have)
While ‘love’ isn’t of course well defined, it seems a central component for most usages is one of prioritisation (of time, money, emotional bandwidth etc.) in the face of constrained supply.
So in romantic love, priority of (usually) a single person is a necessary component. Loving a romantic partner is providing a guarantee to yourself that you will prioritize their needs over competing demands (which will therefore reduce in priority). Sex is often one of those needs, but not necessarily. It’s the guarantee of priority that matters, not specifically what is prioritised.
The love a toddler has for their toys has this same necessary component. You can’t play with all the toys in the world; you have finite time to play, your parents have finite ability to provide toys, so you have to prioritise. The toys you prioritise are the toys you love.
So ‘universal love’ is not love at all. Your resources are finite. Prioritisation is zero sum. It’s making the choice in a world of limited resources (both your internal world, and in the world outside) that makes it love.
I don’t have a detailed model of why, but this strongly conflicts with my intuition of what love is. From my perspective this is zeroing in on one aspect of some types of relationships that reflects something adjacent to but not part of love.
Can you think of examples of mainstream use of the word ‘love’ for which prioritization isn’t an essential component? It seems to me that prioritization is the key thing that binds together what would otherwise be disparate uses of the word, not just in the relationship context. (e.g. the ‘love’ in “I love reading” and “I love my wife” mean very different things, but are both effectively statements of prioritization)
Sure! Christians are pretty mainstream, and they regularly talk about God’s love for them, but in Christian theology, God’s love is for everyone, and so God is not prioritizing anyone.
I admit that’s not a very central example, though, so here’s something more mundane:
I think someone saying “I love cats” is not necessarily a statement of prioritization. Sure, I love cats, but I’m not going out of my way to prioritize cats in general over other things. Although I do prioritize some specific cats, I also love cats in general, and this carries no real burden of prioritization, as I don’t have to love other things less, and my feeling of love for cats doesn’t really go away when I’m thinking about my love for other things.
I think that when you say “I love cats”, you mean more than you prioritize specific cats. At some points, those cats will no longer be with you, and if you are like most cat lovers, likely you will then go on to own and prioritize different cats. So while the cats you prioritize at any moment in time may be specific, if you are like most cat owners, over the course of your life you will generally prioritize cats. (“I choose to eat cake every day above other desserts, but I don’t in general love cake, just the cakes I eat on a given day” sounds like more like someone who loves cake but also loves splitting hairs over word usage, than someone who doesn’t in general love cake.)
I think that, if you ask most people what they actually do in practice as a result of their stated love for cats, you will inevitably get back things that necessarily involve prioritization (mostly of time and/or money), e.g. they have pet cats, they volunteer at an animal shelter, they put food out in their garden for stray cats, and/or so forth. If someone said “I love cats, and I have no real interest in prioritising spending my time, money, energy etc. on owning or thinking about or interacting with cats above other things”, I would find that incongruous and question whether they really do love cats.
I can’t really disagree here, and yet I still feel like you’re leaving out some important component of what love means by just focusing on prioritization. It’s like there’s multiple things going on, and prioritization often gets bundled with love in everyday use, but you can love without prioritization, that’s just not what most people do.
I’m curious if this is… a crux. Like, imagine if you changed your mind about the latter thing, would you stop experiencing universal love for all beings, or would it change in quality somehow?
I guess it’s a crux? That seems like a weird way to phrase it to me, though, because the words are not so much a logical claim as a way of pointing at the experience of realizing that my sense of a separate self is an ontological illusion and then knowing that “me” and “you” and “it” are not really separate things because of the interconnectedness of reality.
But I can imagine not experiencing universal love for all beings because I didn’t used to, or at least not in the same way. Like, if I think about it, I don’t know if I could have endorsed the statement “their life story is also mine and mine is theirs” prior to having some insights during meditation.
I can imagine there’s more nuance to it than how I experience universal love now. I don’t know what this looks like, but there being more nuance would fit the general pattern of most meditation insights: you get part of the picture and then there’s still more that will change how you think about things but not invalidate the current experience, although it might show that it was missing important things.