Light Peace Love

I wasn’t raised in a home where the sciences were (in any way imaginable) equitable to a meal’s worth of intellectual discussion, so it was simply impossible for me to have fallen in love with science at such a very young age. But as I grew up there came a point when I had to spend a few years in a science high school; a few years enough for me to acquire a sophisticated taste for logic, science and the seemingly inevitable obsession to explain everything in concrete and logical terms.

But since everything falls in a love-hate relationship of sorts, numbers and formulas were never enough for me. So I turned to literature and the vast bloom-fields of “quotation books” (the books where everything is quotable because there are nothing else but quotes) which astonishingly explained everything else that science can’t.

It goes without saying that one aspect of knowledge never sufficed; in fact in retrospect, I never adored a pure scientist or a pure philosopher. Of all the thinkers I have ever encountered in my life, I adored somebody who was both a scientist and a philosopher: Albert Einstein.

Setting the groovy hairstyle aside, Einstein was the watermark of his generation. He was, in my opinion, the best philosopher of science (which makes him a philosopher of everything else) ever to grace the stage of the world. In fact if only he was given a few more years of life, he would have solved all the mysteries of this world exhaustively and still have enough time to come up with a few mysteries of his own.

Take for instance the General Theory of Relativity which is, to date, the best theory we have to explain gravitation. In turn, the theory also explains falling apples, falling leaves, falling stars, and falling for someone else – and no, the last example wasn’t really a kind of a joke.

Love has its own characteristics of relativity. Einstein discovered his own concept of gravitation through his studies with light, and in the language of physics, light (like love) is a many splendid thing.

Light is eternal, unbounded and unlimited. Shoot it out towards the eternity of outer space and light will travel unceasingly, even in the darkness of nothingness. Shoot it towards an object and only one of the two things can ever happen: light bounces off and continues to travel elsewhere, or it is absorbed and transformed into some kind of energy.

Love, in its true philosophical form, is just like light – spiritual, eternal, without bounds, and consistent all throughout. Like light, love knows no bounds and sees no limits; it is a feeling that defies all tangible (even intangible) hurdles and it cannot be stopped, only diverted. Shoot towards an object of affection and only one of the two things can ever happen: it bounces off and becomes diverted to somebody else, or it is absorbed and transformed into some kind of energy.

The thing is however, in relativity we can only compare love to light, and so it doesn’t really explain love. It only provides a framework in which everything can be explained in terms of – like light, love is, life is, and everything else is, like light.

So it would be a challenge to really explain and not just liken love in terms of physics and philosophy combined, in which case Einstein was already a half-foot ahead.

Quantum Entanglement; take two particles which were initially together as one, and separate them. As one moves, the other moves in conjunction to it so that even if you separate the two particles even by three universes apart, one will move in conjunction to the other. “Jiggle” the particle in this world, and you also “jiggle” the particle situated three universes away. It sounds like Carl Jung’s universal unconscious, only that this one has some science to back it up.

Or we can look at it this way; take two lives separated by distance. As one continues to live on, the other lives in conjunction with the other, so that you cannot explain one life without touching the other. You cannot give meaning to an embodied soul without giving meaning to the other.

At some point even the ancient Greeks saw this bit of reality romantic:

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with 4 arms, 4 legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”

Quantum Entanglement seems to provide as an invisible way to link two objects separated in the time-space fabric of the universe. It seems to cross the hurdles which break bonds between similarities and differences, or of nearness and distance.

It even transcends the concept of love and attraction, as it is oneness and separateness at the same time; oneness because two objects are in a juxtaposition for eternity’s sake, separateness because they need not assume a single entity to be one.

If we are to take this further into the realms of physics, we are all entangled with everything in this universe, only separated in the motions of the big bang. This gives us three valuable realizations among many others.

First, as everything is entangled with each other, love indeed knows no bounds. In the infinity of space love can occur between two souls. Beyond every experience is a deeper spring of meaning, of which we cannot entirely explain, but we can always depend and trust on to keep love burning even in the midst of quantum uncertainties.

Second, as we all came from one singular matter on separated by the big bang and the ebbs and flows of generations, we have the capacity to love everything in the same degree, no matter the kind of love involved. Storge, Eros, Philia and Agape are all the same – perhaps only differentiated by semantics – the same energy that “jiggles” my life in conjunction with the lives of others.

And in the deepest sense of realizing that we are all entangled intangibly but nonetheless with meaning and depth, there is no way that we cannot attain the purest sense of harmony.

If space cannot provide a hurdle for interaction great enough to stop it from happening, then space, after all, may just be an illusion. Everything is still within the reach of each other so that when you send a ripple outwards, you get caught in the ripple yourself; so that when you love somebody, you also inevitably love yourself as well.

Buddha said it best: “If you see yourself in others, then whom can you harm?”

And who then can you not love?