The Brain On Love

Personally, I believe the meaning of life is very simple.  I have no proof and it is nothing more than my personal belief, but I suspect we are placed on this earth to learn how to love and to be loved.  How much love for humanity or our living planet do you see in corporate boardrooms or in politics today?  Well, except for Goldman Sachs who is doing God’s work.  Oh, and all politicians who can’t wait to tell us how God, and by inference, morality and virtue, drives their life.  Obviously, so they can get elected for reasons of selfish greed, power and control.  

The Brain On Love. Loving relationships alter the brain most significantly.  I’m surprised at how the world often defines love.  Generally, our definition is anything but.  Especially how we define romantic love.  Love is acceptance and respect without judgement or condition.   It is selflessness.   If I am the manifested self, then what is selflessness?  It is a manifestation of our own divinity.  You may choose to call it God or our higher power or our own divinity or whatever you are comfortable with.  But, given the human condition, oftentimes, we must employ emotional boundaries to protect the divinity or love we have for ourselves and for others.  There is an endless supply of people who have no appreciation for healthy emotional boundaries and would like nothing better than to outsource their own emotional healthiness and responsibilities onto others in forms of dysfunction, destructiveness and negative energy.  Love is also not that special feeling you get in your britches that attracts you to another person.  It is not “chemistry” which is very often just the ego’s narcissism manifested through another person’s successful mirroring or validation of who we are.  Hey, drug addicts are great at mirroring or validating each other.  Because many traits of who we are, as part of the universal human condition, most assuredly  shouldn’t be validated.