Love cosӨ

There is much to be learned in love and the art of loving. Always so much. 

The study and understanding of love is perhaps an unending process. The possibilities of loving in spite of and because of all that we endure in love astound me. Here are some things that in my experience stand out. Yes, I like physics.

  

Love is a living thing

Love is a living throbbing thing. A thunderstorm that rips lives in a second is alive and so are the bacteria in the soil that give the monsoon its mesmerizing scent. Love is alive inasmuch as we are alive in it and through it. It is in flux just like life. Wherever it stagnates, things start to ‘go bad’. Like a river its sacred duty is to rush along, sometimes slow sometimes fast – but move it must. Damming rivers is costing the Earth its lifeblood; damming hearts is costing us ours. 

Putting a dam on a river to get material gain be it energy or water – is a disaster to all things around. The upstream land is flooded, causing hundreds of hectares of land, trees, forests and communities to be submerged. Thousands of plants rot and decay to give off greenhouse gases. Silt that could have been fertile builds up swiftly from places far away and the dam becomes shallower and shallower till it loses its purpose. 

Downstream all things are parched. Fish die and the people face drought. Those most in need of life giving water die of thirst only because we want to divert that water to one specific place. So also love that is locked away to be extracted for a specific goal, destroys. The lover’s heart is an upstream deathbed of choking life and stifled emotions. The silt of past mistakes – an otherwise fertile source of experience – builds up serving no purpose until it fills up the dam. The whole of the parched love-starved world lies downstream.

Love is light

Love is universal and fundamentally inclusive – it is the very embodiment of inclusiveness.

There are certain basic physical quantities in Nature that have a peculiar characteristic of spreading out. These things like pressure and heat and radiation have a tendency to travel until they reach equilibrium. Light from the sun for example spreads out in all directions for ever until it reaches almost the same temperature as the universe – almost. 

Two things can be said of this – 1 The Earth thrives with a fraction of this light and yet it is not jealous that more than 99% of the sun’s love just goes away into the cold dark universe. Nor does the sun expect anything back from the Earth. He not only loves her unconditionally but also loves the whole of existence unconditionally. One of these cannot be separated from the other. The pop culture myth of romantic love being the greatest kind of love and our obsession with it is doomed to fail in misery because we try to separate these two things. In true love there is no I love “You”. There is no You. 

One either loves or one doesn’t. The object doesn’t matter; the object isn’t there (pun intended). The nature of relationships may be different for each receiver. There is life only on one planet even if the light reaches all planets. Yes that relationship is precious, wonderful, unique and special. Yes it doesn’t work to force the same kind of relationship with other planets. But to try and give all our love in to one relationship is a blunder. It is physically impossible to have the whole of the sun’s energy concentrated on to one Earth. Even if we could do that without burning the Earth, the Second Law tells us that the fallout impacts of making such a machine and keeping it running will cost a lot more than it gives. Trying to vie for ALL of the love and attention of one person will inevitably have a similar fallout and end in tremendous misery.

The 2^nd thing is in that word, almost. When two bodies at different temperatures exchange heat, the cold body gets a little warmer and the hot one a little cooler. In case of a teeny tiny extremely hot body like the Sun at 5600K giving away heat to an immeasurably vast cold universe at 3K, the final temperature will not be the average of 5600 and 3, but will actually be unnoticeably greater than 3K. The Sun will be utterly spent in its light as it sets itself ablaze gloriously giving every last bit to everything without condition. The universe won’t get warmer by any appreciable amount, but the Sun doesn’t care. It doesn't even care if the universe cares. It is a true lover. 

Another peculiarity of these physical quantities is the lack of a negative side. Cold is only relatively less warm than warm. Temperature may be reduced right down to near absolute zero. Theoretically we may ascertain what that absolute zero is, as a number. But one thing that is impossible is to go below absolute zero. The same goes for pressure. A theoretical vacuum may be ascertained and reached, but no further. 

Taking from Prevost’s theory of heat exchange, Darkness also is a virtual concept – there is no such thing. Every object at all times gives out light – very little of which is visible to our eyes or our instruments. But it is there nonetheless. Darkness is the relative absence of visible light. In this sense darkness is in the eye of the beholder. The world is teeming with love unrecognized and unseen. It emanates out our every creature and fills the entire universe. But those not en-tuned will not see. Just like a bad or faulty instrument will not pick up a signal.

The sensitivity of any instrument is inversely related to its inertia. The easier it is to move, the more it will pick up. An accurate compass needle is light in weight – it moves swiftly to align with the magnetic field which then flows through it. A thermometer is filled with mercury, a substance that needs very little heat to raise its temperature – it doesn’t ask for too much heat to fill itself with before it starts conducting it onwards – in all directions. A sensitive person is likewise an excellent receptor and conductor of love. This can also be said of the ego, in case of meditation and conscious living. The smaller the ego, the more easily one’s will aligns with the will of the universe. And then magic happens.

The opposite of love

Consider love as a force. Perhaps like the one between two magnets. If one tries to pull two magnets apart, they resist quite strongly. So also they repel when one of them is flipped. Is this repulsion then the opposite of the former attraction? I think not. Repulsion - like attraction – is an interaction. It is an acknowledgement of the force or a communication coming from another entity. It is an induction of magnetic potential within one body in response to the magnetic field created by another.

Nickel alloy magnets can be extremely difficult and dangerous to take apart by hand. But there is a trick – to slide them apart rather than pulling them. Here we apply force in a direction perpendicular to that holding the magnets together.

The magnetic force will very strongly attract or repel in its direction. But in the perpendicular direction, it has no component. Thus love and hate go hand in hand as interactions along the same direction. Once we move away into the lifeless perpendicular of indifference however, this happens: 

Love•cosӨ = 0

Gravity

Love is like Gravity. Among the four(three) fundamental forces of Nature, gravity stands out in many respects. Three things especially. One – Gravity is the only force without a known negative side. Gravity does not repel. It only and only brings things together. Two – it is the only true long range force. That’s why gravity governs all motion at the scale of planets and stars and galaxies and galaxy clusters. 

The other forces like magnetic and nuclear forces, operate very strongly at smaller scales. At that scale they block out gravity and give us the false impression of being stronger than it. Yet this misconception is based on a false sense of the domain of these forces – not in space but in time.

When all is said and done, when all the lower levels of existence have sorted out their little attractions and repulsions that arise out of a temporary polarization of their orientations, gravity prevails. Likewise when we are done with our little separation of ideas and gender and relations and borders, love prevails – always bringing things together in the end (of a certain amount of space and time).

The wider our perspective in time and scale – the easier it is to live in love (not to mention in awe) and to avoid violence in thought and deed. Take our unsustainable practices for example. Once we think of the ambit of our short sighted actions both spatially as well as in time, choices become clear. Structural violence becomes suddenly as visible as torture in broad daylight. And we are filled compassion. It is only on the much smaller scale of thoughtless everyday living that we see differences.

Thirdly, Gravity is often considered not a separate force but a manifestation of the arrangement of mass in the universe. It underlines everything. A force most subtle and yet most powerful.