[Added February 21, 2011]

What is Love?

That question — What is love? — has captured the human imagination since … Well, it’s been a long time.

It’s been said that all great literature is about two topics: love and death. One can easily fathom why. They are the two great mysteries of life.

The greatest minds of all the past ages have taken a stab at defining love — from the Biblical prophets to Shakespeare to the comics we see in newspapers across the country every day. What have they discovered?

They’ve found that we really don’t know.

The best that can be said about the definition of love is strangely similar to what Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography in 1962.

I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of materials I understand to be embraced … but I know it when I see it.

In other words, while we can’t define love exactly, we know it when it happens to us. And even if we say to someone that we’re in love (or that we love something), we all understand.

We just can’t define it exactly, like we can with the tangible things in our lives or even other emotions that we have.

So where does that leave us?

Well, we “know” what love is to one degree or another. We’ve felt it (hopefully!) and we fell it for others (once again, hopefully!). We even understand the “shades” of love that we experience — our love for something like ice cream as opposed to the love we feel for our children. We understand the difference between romantic love and love in a friendship.

We got those things.

Now, what does Mr. Haanel say about love?

Charles F. Haanel and Love

Love plays an important part in Haanel’s philosophy, The Master Key System. According to him, it is essential that we feel it because it is, in one sense, the be-all-end-all. In Week Fifteen, Haanel wrote

11. It is love which imparts vitality to thought and thus enables it to germinate. The law of attraction, or the law of love — for they are one and the same — will bring to it the necessary material for its growth and maturity.

In those two sentences, we discover two very important things.

First, we see that love is what makes our thoughts grow. Without love, our thoughts would stagnate. They would have no “push.”

The second thing we find is that the law of attraction is the law of love. They are one and the same!

That’s huge!

Think about it for the moment. What Haanel is saying is that as we feel for something and thirst for its attainment, we will “attract” what we need to make it happen.

Love equals attraction.

In Week Twelve, Haanel wrote this.

19. We find this truth emphasized wherever the power of thought is understood. The Universal Mind is not only Intelligence, but it is substance, and this substance is the attractive force which brings electrons together by the law of attraction so that they form atoms; the atoms in turn are brought together by the same law and form molecules; molecules take objective forms; and so we find that the law of love is the creative force behind every manifestation, not only of atoms, but of worlds, of the Universe, of everything of which the imagination can form any conception.

Yes, love makes the world — and perhaps even the Universe! — go ’round.

Let’s Be Clear About This Love

I think I should make absolutely clear that this love is not the warm, fuzzy, gushing, saccharin love that some think it is.