Love is the Spiritual Arena for Human Growth | Science is a Source of Spirituality
Part four of a four-part series on Big Love
Jennifer Finch, LPC, NCC, SEP
February 28, 2023
Why do we need Big Love in our lives? Hopefully over this four-part mini-series of Big Love, I have presented a clear case. My aim in this final article is to denote two significant aspects of the importance of Big Love.
1. We all were loved. Even though it might have been horizontal, animalistic love. We are all born co-dependent into human lives. We needed to rely on others to get our needs met. For many of us our love was distorted, confusing, overbearing, and inconsistent, which set in a blueprint of how we felt loved, but fortunately, we no longer need to traverse the horizontal landscape to feel love, find love, or give love. If we break free from this universally limited ideology, generations can quite literally be saved from this meaningless worldview that love is out there and separate from us. The paradigm can shift if we can open to a new possibility of feeling love vertically, on our own. A modality of self-soothing vs. co-dependence. A maturing process. Big Love is a love that is us, it is not something separate from us, and to feel loved we no longer need to rely on external relationships with all their expectations, and confusing conditions.
2. Big Love is scientifically spiritual work. In the words of Carl Sagan, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” We need to put the work of compassion and love back into the larger realm of the Universe and our complex human experiences. Science is cool, but when we science the shit out of love and compassion we take out the meaning and our divine sense of purpose. We feel granularly severed from our own deep connection with ourselves and with something bigger. Our life experiences have been reduced to a predictable, repeatable formula that gets packaged in an insurance code. We need to quit funneling everything through our left brain, and open back up to a right brained body experience. A full life is richly experienced, not thought about, and not fully understood. Knowing that our experience is occurring in our right anterior insular cortex is not helpful or productive if it occludes us from having our actual experience.
Let’s tackle the chief principle that we were all loved first. Despite our salient beliefs that we were not loved. We were.
If you weren’t loved, you wouldn’t have survived. At all. A premature and untimely and unnecessary death would have awaited you before you took your first step. A little over 30 years ago something terrible happened. In Romania thousands of babies were deprived of human contact. In an orphanage, abandoned infants due to deformities, illnesses, polio, etc. were tossed, discarded and left. Without proper care the babies’ muscles wasted and became so deficient, mentally disorganized, malnourished, and infection and injury prone. There was no hope for them to thrive in the unspeakable conditions. This has been a highly documented and researched (read Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby) episode in our history, up there with Auschwitz, capturing the undoubted outcomes of the solitary, abandoned and unloved, lives of too many. One is too many. Child psychologists and social workers dug deep into how to repair, and institute love and care in many of these Romanian children, but despite their efforts something stirred beneath the surface. Even when taken out of the orphanage, the children couldn’t survive. Their will to live had been severed from their tiny souls.
This egregious event should characterize, even in some small way, that each one of us has been loved to some degree. The love we received might have been limited, distorted, overbearing and inconsistent, but we were loved in some way, somehow, and some of the time. The question is: If we were loved, why don’t we see that?
Why don’t we see how we were loved? Why can’t we perceive that we were loved? This lack of perception shows us how we block ourselves from receiving love. How we occlude and obscure love even when it is there. Our hearts are blanketed with a veil that covers and clouds the feeling of being loved.
For many of us, as we learned in part three of this four-part series, it is more difficult to let love in, than it is to love someone else. Even when love is there, we don’t want it. We fear things like: I will be suffocated, or they just want something from me, what do they want? What will their love cost? Love is gross, don’t be so mushy and emotional and touchy. Love is overwhelming and if I let in my mother’s love, it will eat me up, I will be engulfed, and never separate from her. If you had an overbearing, loud, busy-bodied, mother or caretaker, as a tiny infant no one would blame you if you would want to push away that intrusive bombastic energy. Mosh pits at a 7 Seconds concert are fun, but only because they are short-lived. Give me some peace and quiet, some space and rest, so I can settle. And stop shoving your Le Leche League breast in my face, I’m not hungry.
These are a few of the ways that we reject and push away love. Even the most loving and well-intentioned parents can’t get it exactly right because they too came from a narrow, limited, framework of love. Love had various expectations attached with hidden strings. Sit still. Don’t be so smart. Don’t be so sensitive. Get perfect grades and go to a name brand college full of prestige. We are grotesquely dazzled by prestige. Don’t cry. Toughen up. A whole supermarket spread of conditions, transactions, hidden expectations, etc, were delivered to us.
So, we abandoned love. How complex and hard and confusing it seemed. Yet, interestingly, today, as adults our first instinct is to say we were abandoned. Perhaps. But we also put up a veil. Blocking our hearts wasn’t our fault as a child, it was survival, but as adults we need to learn how to self-soothe and stop replaying out our old archetypal patterns. There are many ways we don’t see love when it is standing right in front of us. We misinterpret it, believing it is something other than love. We rage quit relationships when one human flaw or inadequacy is exposed. We convince ourselves it is manipulating, crushing or will just end in betrayal or pain. In erecting these veils, we are blocking ourselves from feeling love.
In our adult lives, the specific ways in which we refuse love, not seeing it and not experiencing it, largely depend on our experience of love in our early childhood. If our nest was loving, kind, somatically and emotionally attuned, compassionate, warm, soft, strong, gentle, flexible, consistent, and abundant from the beginning, it would be easy for us to see it, accept it, appreciate it, and embody it. But if a large part of our experience was of love being limited or distorted, enmeshed or overwhelming one way or another, then it is difficult to experience love when it is here. If love was confusing, or demanding, or conditioned; if love was distorted or filled with expectations to complete mom or dad and make her/him feel whole, these limitations transpire and lead to further limitations in our perception of and receptivity to love now. We limit the openness in our heart to the love that is there for us. Human to human love is an imperfect effort. Until we repair and awaken our own hearts and know that we are loved, and always have been.
We need to get to work. Rending the veils of our own hearts is an action of love. Big Love has zero limitations. It holds us exactly how we already are. Smart, sensitive, bold, precocious, spontaneous, wild, carefree, barefoot, and muddy. It is us. It is not something separate from us. Big Love is Universal Love, it is the expression of love, beauty, goodness, and truth, through us onto the big screen of our lives. We are actors on the Universal stage, and we can nail our lead part if we learn to open our concealed hearts and experience love that is already there and available to all of us.
Finally, I would like to close, by opening the door of science back up to a larger laboratory of spirituality. I am a self-proclaimed bloated spiritual seeker with a scientific bent. I like to fit everything under the umbrella of Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein. And of course, when we are within the confines of the Universe, there is quite literally room for all of it. When we examine love with a bird’s eye view from the cosmos, the granularity of knowing the neuroscience of manufactured lab love, seems a bit silly and preposterous. I believe there is room for all of it but telling a story of love and compassion only through secularized science, fMRI machines, and research-based programs paints a sordid picture. Understanding love, how it chemically acts out in our body theater, and proving love in measured empirical data, is not feeling love. Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan thought that science and spirituality were compatible. As do I.
Big Love lies in that rigorous intersection. It is so much bigger than all of us, and it is the distance of the “Infinity Hotel” to scientifically studied love.
Maturing and psychological healing requires us doing the work in that spiritual arena. Big Love is the spiritual arena for human growth. If we envision a better future, if we want to realize meaning and transcendent purpose, then the Universe needs our help. We must begin by pulling on a thread and developing a capacity to be curious about ourselves. We must take responsibility for everything we think, do, say, and act out. If you want to change something in your life, or something about yourself, you must begin taking the first steps and get to work. To quote Mark Watney, the character played by Matt Damon in the movie, The Martian:
“If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the hab breaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death…..
At some point, everything's gonna go south on you...everything's going to go south and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem...and you solve the next one...and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”
That is it. Not easy, but simple. Begin.
If we keep going in the direction we are going, without accessing Big Love, I fear that we will just keep getting more of what we are already getting. Everything is going south, but not for warmer weather and ample sunshine. We have lost contact with what it means to be human. We have lost all sense of what it feels like to be in a body. We have lost access to our human qualities of power, sexuality, voice, intelligence, and love. We have lost our ability to experience our lives openly. We are afraid to feel. And we just seem content to live in our monopolized, instant gratification seeking, fear of uncertainty, ruminating, heads. Our nation’s cognitive dissonance is ignorance of epic proportions. This level of ignorance may have extended the threshold of where it is possible to turn things around. We should be alarmed. We are disembodied, and we’ve lost our ability to think for ourselves. And we aren’t questioning who is thinking for us.
The universe is not meaningless. The universe is not angry or projecting fear, anger, and scarcity. These are our projections through our human distortion, limited mindsets, and confusion. Our lives have become politicized and parentified. We cannot feel love when we have this level of ignorance and righteousness. Our ego has a tight grip on us, and our ego only deals with certainties. It doesn’t bet against the House. It thinks it has become the House. It doesn’t allow for experience, because experience is by default, unknown and uncertain. But the universe is the literal House we live in. If our left brain continues to dictate our lives, we will continue constricting ourselves from feeling love, loved and lovable. We need to open our hard science, (left brain) back up to a soft spirituality (right brain/body).
Big Love can (in the words of my teacher, Dr. Judith Blackstone) “help people access a dimension of themselves that has never been injured, that is deeper and more subtle than even the most strongly held negative beliefs, depression and anxiety.” Big Love “also helps us develop sensory and emotional resilience, grounding, self-possession, and self-acceptance.” When we know how love really feels, without a context or cognitive storyline, then we can live more comfortably in the world. When we attune to ourselves and to the Universe, forged and unified in the quality of Big Love, it gets much easier to recognize and release emotional wounds, early attachment wounding, and trauma-based constrictions from the body. We can repair our own broken hearts. And hence forth, we can meet the world and our relational partners out of a sense of openness. It also gets much harder for us to stay in negative thought patterns and disbeliefs of self-loathing and self-hate, when we know we are made of the quality of love.
Big Love is an immanent entity of the universe. Without it things get dark and scary. The universe is self-aware, but it can only consciously dramatize what its agents portray in awareness. Essentially, we are the dreamer dreaming the dream. So, if our representation and enactment of life is through a very constricted, blocked off, limited, and screwed up portrayal of love, you can see clearly how we got here. We arrived exactly where we were heading. We played out our lives through scarcity, fear, anger, made up rules, threats of abandonment and needing love perfectly. It wouldn’t be a stretch to deduce that this is a predetermined outcome of living with veiled hearts defiling love.
But the good news is we can in an instant turn things around. Gently remove those cognitive dissonance goggles with love. The Universe can exhibit conscious thought, and the quality of love with our assistance. Humble mortals can make a difference. We can learn to unveil our hearts and open back up to our inherent human quality of Big Love. Imagine what the world could be like if we worked together and awakened our hearts.
So, this is a call to arms to assist in changing our worldview and our future. To be open to spiritual ideology guided by science, aided by technology but rooted in our actual human spiritual experience. Our life is the lab. In my opinion, we cannot wait for science to define Big Love, we must begin doing the work, awakening our hearts, and let science catch up to us. I have no doubt that it will, as quantum mechanics has already given us the tools and points us in the right direction.
As we learn to open to Big Love, we get inspired. It brings us a bit of biological hope. Big Love can bring forth a higher level of awareness and emotional stability. Attunement to love, it is what we are here for. Opening to the quality of mature Big Love just might give you your life back and reveal the exquisite beauty within all of us.
Thank you for reading my Big Love series. If you are interested, please get on the waitlist to express your interest in my upcoming training certification program: Sitting In Love Together (SILT). You can complete a quick form to get on the VIP list: https://www.beherenowmindfulness.com/silt-training
