The Law of Love

from D.Suzuki's The Sacred Balance:

It is not economics that creates community but love, compassion and cooperation. These qualities exist in individuals and are expressed between people. And they cannot be fully expressed in isolation, without context, cut off from their place in time and space, their source in the natural world.

Economies were once created to serve people and their communities. Today, economic rationalists contend that people must sacrifice and give up social services for the economy.

The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not ... a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work great wonders ... The men who discovered for us the law of love were greater scientists than any of our modern scientists ... The more I work at this law, the more I feel the delight in life, the delight in the scheme of this universe. It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.
- Mahatma Gandhi, quoted in P.Crean and P.Kohn, eds., Peace, A Dream Unfolding.

The evolutionary context of human history makes it plausible that the human genome--the DNA blueprint that makes us what we are---has over time acquired a genetically programmed need to be in the company of other species. Edward O. Wilson has coined the term 'biophilia' (based on the Greek words for 'life' and 'love') for this need. He defines biophilia as "the innate tendency to focus on life and life-like processes." It leads to an "emotional affiliation of human beings to other living things ... Multiple strands of emotional response are woven into symbols composing a large part of culture."

Elders, poets and philosophers in all cultures, including our own, have expressed a similar sense of brotherhood or sisterhood, of mutual compassion and common interest with the rest of the living world--a relationship that can only be described as love. Its source is 'fellow-feeling': the knowledge that we are, like all other forms of life, children of the Earth, members of the same family. It is not an accident, Wilson says, that more people visit zoos than attend all major sports events combined.

The truth is that we have never conquered the world, never understood it; we only think we have control. We do not even know why we respond in a certain way to other organisms and need them in diverse ways so deeply.
- Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia

and the time will come when you see we're all one
and life flows on within you and without you

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