Love comes in several flavors. Knowing that there are more types of love to cultivate means we can reframe more relationships as types of love — and therefore experience love more often.
All types of love are the cooperative overlapping of perspectives. Not exactly that two become one — more like we retain our individual identities while simultaneously tapping into a shared perspective.
This book maps those perspectives. It is a field guide, not a manual. Take what resonates; build your own model if you prefer. The ocean doesn't mind.
Chapter One
What Is This Thing, Called Love?
The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity, phasing within all beings.
— Schrödinger
To start with, I define all types of love as the cooperative overlapping of perspectives — when you and I share we-identity. Not exactly that two become one; more like we retain our individual identities while simultaneously tapping into a shared perspective.
If we became fully one, we would no longer be individuals who could co-relate. If we remained purely as individuals, there would be no transcendent experience of union.
To put a finer point on it, we should probably say reunion — because we aren't so much joining together anew as returning to an underlying condition of prior union.
Matter as we experience it is an illusory construct, with great utility. But in reality, there are no things — the universe is a singular verb which refracts with internal verb relationships. It is this inter-relationality of verbs which produces the appearance of nouns.
Love is what happens when two apparent nouns remember they are verbs.
To come back down to earth: I like to map the types of love onto the image of a sailboat. This is just a model, so take it with a little salt, or build your own if you prefer. Conveniently, this sailboat image resonates rather well with the psychological model OCEAN — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. A map of the psyche that happens to share its name with the sea.
The Model
Come Sail Away
A sailboat of a certain size has a certain momentum. If we want more momentum, more attraction — we're going to need a bigger boat. Here are the parts of ours.
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The Hull — Self-Love
The stable base without which no mast can stand. Without a strong hull of self-love, how can we erect a mast? This isn't selfishness — think of the airline principle: put your own mask on first. Like a hull that needs regular maintenance, self-love requires consistent attention. It corresponds to emotional stability in OCEAN: when we're stable, we can weather storms without taking on water.
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First Mast — Maternal & Paternal
The parental loves. Maternal love shields the defenseless infant against predation by externality; paternal love encourages the young to grow strong by expanding into externality. Ideally both are manifest in both parents. This mast aligns with Conscientiousness in OCEAN — our sense of duty and commitment to those closest to us. The deeper the keel, the more stable the vessel.
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Second Mast — Fraternal & Social
Brotherly and sisterly love between kin, extending outward to any inclusive social structure with a like-minded goal — fraternities of learners, teams, industries, religions. Morality, justice, and politics are all extended versions of the fraternal urge to tame the tribal instinct. Choose fraternity over tribalism within as many social structures as you are able. Maps with Agreeableness in OCEAN.
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Third Mast — Eros
Sensual love between sexual partners. Eros blurs the lines between self and partner, in body and in mind. It has to do with desire, sensuality, arousal, touching, completion, coming home, union of bodies, union of hearts. Tracks with Openness to new experience in OCEAN. I'll confess I've had erotic experiences with inanimate objects — the spice cabinet, a particularly inspired Starbucks order. Eros is expansive.
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The Prow Sails — Amoré & Agapé
When all three masts combine, their sum — like RGB light — is white. Amoré is focused full-spectrum love, a singular beam of affection steered toward a partner, like a jib. Some ships carry multiple jibs: monogamy, monogamish, paramour, polyamory. Agapé is the spinnaker — unstructured, unfocused, its focus the entire universe. When agapé is in full bloom, it powerfully drags the rest of you along behind it like a ragdoll.
Chapter Five
The Prow Sails: Amoré and Agapé
Nothing can be; everything can only inter-be.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
If we imagine the three types of love as the RGB primary colours of light, then their sum is white. When we activate this blend of all three — parental, fraternal, erotic — the resultant full spectrum has the strength to take us beyond ourselves.
Agapé is an unfocused full-spectrum love. Love without an object. Love for its own sake, without the need for reciprocity. Psychologically this maps with enthusiasm — en theos, in spirit, radiant, non-localized.
Amoré is focused full-spectrum love. A rich, intense beam of affection, usually focused on a life partner — though sometimes on a religious, heroic, or aspirational figure. Amoré maps with assertion: we project and assert our love toward its object.
Back to the sailboat: amoré and agapé are like the jib and the spinnaker. Located far forward from the center of mass, the jib has the most leverage to steer the ship. The spinnaker is different — huge, billowing, catching everything.
Agapé is an unstructured, unfocused love — or you could say its focus is the entire universe. When agapé is in full bloom, the heart chakra is wide open, and like a spinnaker it powerfully drags the rest of you along behind it like a ragdoll.
Ecstatic love revivifies the appearance of locality — from static to ex-stasis; from noun to verb; matter to spirit. Agapé is the experience of balanced flow between beatific pressure and ecstatic release, between potential and manifestation, between source and Gaia.
Chapter Seven
Collaborative Equilibrium
It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. There are quicksands all about you, trying to suck you down into fear, self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly — no luggage, completely unencumbered.
— Aldous Huxley
I call a certain type of person Brighteyes — their inner light makes it easy to cross the self-other barrier and swim in their depths. Occasionally, when I encounter a Brighteyes who is fully standing in their power, I call them Clearheart. This is the person who is energetically exuberant, spiritually overabundant, habitually in a state of hyper-neuroplasticity.
Usually it takes a lot of inner work to reach this condition. It is necessary to radically clean out the supply-side valve — the heart chakra — and intelligently modulate the demand side.
When two Clearhearts meet, the energy is like two flashlights approaching each other. Our waveforms become additive and laser-pure.
The first time I met my favorite postal worker, we immediately fell into resonance at first sight. At each encounter, we glow with instinctive affection and spontaneous joy. When she's on the sorting floor, she'll pop out front with a grin, saying "I heard your voice." It reminds me of a little prayer.
Our energy is complex. There is a base of innocent puppy infatuation, but floating just below the surface is a smouldering layer of erotic potential. We finish each other's sentences when one of us can't find a word. Our conversations circumvent the zero-sum problem.
In game theory, zero-sum refers to games where for each point won by one player, there is a corresponding loss by the other — arm wrestling, war. People commonly treat social interactions this way. But conversations don't have to be zero-sum. All you have to do is play for the good of the game instead of for yourself. Now when either of us makes a point, it credits both our fun ledgers, and the game's. Win-win-win.
And so we flirt for our co-amusement. Because it is a shared game, we both win. Because we both evolve in our interaction, the game also evolves.
My heart chakra opens as wide as in any religious experience I've ever had. And I've spent a large portion of my life practicing a variety of paths.
Sometimes it is even easier to find agapé, and collaborative equilibrium with others, when we find the right erotic and energetic match. Now we use each other as an excuse to incandesce. We relax into union-at-a-distance, and our energies become covalent.
Covalent means that two atoms are sharing an electron back and forth between their valences — each wins an electron point, plus both win by the creation of a new shared identity. A softened self-other dichotomy, replaced by a non-dual co-identity. Again, win-win-win.
