Love is the most important force in the universe – Michael Pollan 🏅🏅🏅
- More context
Everything is on the spectrum of love. Everything can be explained by identifying where it lies on the spectrum of love
There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things – via Overstory
See more here: Do things with love 🎨
Michael Pollan: It seemed so implausible to me that a single experience caused by a molecule, right, ingested in your body could transform your outlook on something as profound as death. That's-- that's kind of amazing.
Anderson Cooper: The kind of things that cancer patients were saying, like, "I touched the face of God." You were skeptical about when you hear phrases like that?
Michael Pollan: Yeah. Or, "Love is the most important thing in the universe." When someone tells me that I'm just like, "yeah, okay."
Anderson Cooper: So you don't go for some of the phrases that are used?
Michael Pollan: No. It gives me the willies as a writer. And I really struggled with that cause during one of my experiences I came to the earth-shattering conclusion that love is the most important thing in the universe. But it's, that's Hallmark card stuff, right? … And it's where you connect what happens in your life to the story of who you are.
Anderson Cooper: We all develop a story over time about what our past was like and who we are.
Michael Pollan: Right. Yeah, what kind of person we are. How we react. And the fact is that interesting things happen when the self goes quiet in the brain, including this rewiring that happens. ... I did have this experience of seeing my ego-- burst into-- a little cloud of Post-It notes. I know it sounds crazy. ... Maybe the ego is one character among many in your mind. And you don't necessarily have to listen to that voice that's chattering at you and criticizing you and telling you what to do. And that's very freeing.
via 60 minutes: Researchers experimenting with psychedelics to treat addiction, depression and anxiety
Summarizing excerpt:
Each longing, when followed to its source, reveals the same origin point: a yearning for intimate contact with reality itself. This isn't metaphorical. It's as literal as gravity. Consider what happens when you follow desire all the way down:
We think we want achievement, but we actually want to feel worthy. We think we want control, but we actually want to feel safe. We think we want enlightenment, but we actually want to feel at home in existence…
Everything is shot through with love. Everything is made of love. Everything arises from and returns to love. This isn't poetic license; it's the most literal truth available to us — the truth that's working us whether we recognize it or not, drawing us inexorably toward what we already are…
Complexity science identifies two primary attractors that shape the emergence of order: stability and chaos. These attractors create the conditions for complex adaptive systems to function, maintaining the "edge of chaos" where life and creativity happen.
But there's a third attractor that transcends and includes both stability and chaos — one that draws systems not just toward adaptation but toward profound coherence with reality itself. This third attractor is love…
Not love as sentiment or aspiration, but love as the fundamental attractor basin of reality itself. Love as the third attractor — beyond order and chaos, beyond the known and unknown, beyond the grasping and rejecting of the conditioned mind. Love as the ground from which everything emerges and to which everything returns…
It's what pulls frozen, traumatized systems back toward their natural intelligence and flow …
The way perception itself holds everything in awareness. The way the ground receives our weight without judgment. The way space makes room for all that arises within it. These aren't metaphors for love; they're direct expressions of it … holding everything that appears within a field of unconditional welcome… — the way all authentic desire, when freed from compensatory distortion, reveals itself as love seeking itself through us.
My idea of sacredness, divinity, and religion