Unconditional Love

By virtue of evolution, any cooperation among humans that is essential to species survival results in unconditional love, of which there are three kinds: A mother’s love for her child—which lasts for life; romantic love—which lasts long enough to ensure conception; and the love experienced by a group of people who are depending on one another to survive. That love lasts as long as the individual perceives him- or herself as being dependent on the group to survive. In the natural world, unconditional love was for life. In a world ruled by money and law, people can survive alone or in pairs, which has rendered the unconditional love of interdependent relationships obsolete.
Consequently, we moderns have to endure without the most essential love of all, the unconditional love of interdependent relationships. This is the love though which, not just two people become devoted to one another, as in the case of romance or motherly love, but through which every member of the family becomes devoted to every other.
Having to endure without the love of interdependent relationships, we moderns seek life’s meaning in truth, be it religious, philosophical, ideological, legal, or scientific. But, life’s essence can be grasped only through the intimacy of unconditional love, not through knowledge, thought, or reason. Trying to find life’s meaning in anything other than the intimacy of interdependent relationships has resulted, not only in our never-ending search for truth, but also in a feverishness of activity that now threatens to denature the environment.
Given access to basic material needs, if we have love, then nothing else really matters. And if we do not have love, then nothing else really matters anyhow. By that measure, except for a mother’s love for her children, and for the occasional romance that we encounter on our life’s journeys, there isn’t much happening on the planet that really matters—not among humans.