If love is indeed the greatest power on earth, or even the universe, we can’t be faulted for wanting to understand and experience such power. The entire history of mankind is a history of attempts to reach that understanding through simple formulas, quick judgments about what is and what is not love, and whether it’s the history of mankind or our own personal history, those simple formulas, though numerous and seductive, always fail to deliver in the face of new experience, knowledge or inspiration.
The Trap
Many of us spend our entire lives trying to understand love from the inside of a formula, only to find out that new experience, new knowledge, new inspiration from outside of the formula renders that formula inadequate, baffling, or sometimes completely wrong.
You would think that new experience, knowledge and inspiration would encourage us to seek new understanding, but often we are just left broken, disillusioned and discouraged by the formulas of love. It speaks to the unique power of the world to control our understanding of love when we buy into the belief that we have failed, and not the formula.
Tiger Love
In what way would you logically express love for tigers if you were asked to do so?
A typical way of expressing love for wild species is something like: preserver their habitat, leave them alone in their natural life, and admire them.
Love is Complexity
Why do we try so hard to impose simplicity on such a complex idea like love? We must question all of the simple if-then formulas for love, no matter how seductive or poetic they are. Love is complexity.
Epiphany
Can we be misled or duped in our understanding of love in a simplistic if-then proposition. Popular culture and the materialist complex have presented this love proposition to us, but ironically they never warn us that the proposition is a setup for failure.
The notion that we fail to understand love because we can’t afford a romantic Sandals holiday, or because we don’t have the perfect family, or because our bodies are normal size might seem like an obvious conspiracy disguised as a promise. And yet we still regularly chase the formula.
The Folly of Formulas
If conditional if-then formulas for the understanding of love are correct and pure, why do we feel like we’re failing?
Love Formulas
Formulas by definition are organized, often mathematical, and always logical. In fact, formulas are governed by logic, what philosophers call conditional logic.
The conditional logic of any formula is basically this:
If you combine or connect specific ingredients in a specific manner, then the outcome is both predictable and consistent. Formulas are all about logic. They’re about the words “if” and “then”
Much of our practical life is governed by formulas, and we enjoy a certain degree of security from the principle of if-then. If you go into a bank and withdraw a money using your bank card, then you’re a customer. But if you go into a bank and withdraw money using someone else’s bank card, then you’re a criminal.
Formulas that employ the if-then principle help us apply a comfortable simplicity to an uncomfortably complex world. That’s why we’re so attracted to the idea of a love formula in our culture.