The Capacity to Love

The capacity to love is, for Universal Mechanics, the most important human capacity — and the one whose development most clearly marks the direction of evolution. It is also the capacity that most clearly distinguishes the human from the merely animal.

Animals have attachments — to their offspring, to their mates, to their territory. But human love is capable of something animals cannot achieve: transcending the circle of immediate familiarity to embrace the stranger, the enemy, the other. This expansion of love is not natural — it is a cultural and spiritual achievement, won painfully against the resistance of our animal inheritance.

As humanity evolves, its amplitude of love expands — from family to tribe, from tribe to nation, from nation to humanity, from humanity to all living beings, from all living beings to the cosmos itself. The mystics who love all beings equally are not aberrations — they are the direction towards which all of us are slowly moving.