Is love the fabric of the universe?
Love as the ultimate cosmic fact, the root cause of much of our suffering & my (dramatic) reaction to Everything Everywhere All At Once
Two weeks ago, I went to the theaters to see Everything All At Once at the urging of a TikToker I trust.
What followed as I returned home that night might as well have been one of the most profound spiritual experiences I’ve had to date—that is not involving any substances.
The Sci-Fi comedy-drama follows the storyline of a woman who is unexpectedly woken up to the interdimensional nature of the universe. In the multiverse, there’s an infinite number of realities all at once because every choice made by every individual creates a new reality. The movie is bizarre, absurd, and at times grotesque, with an overly dramatic conclusion.
Yet, by the time I had settled into my car, I could no longer deny how deeply it had moved me.
A few minutes into my drive home, a little lump began to form at the center of my throat. It soon morphed into tears that were eventually streaming down my perplexed face. I had no clue what was going on, but I rolled with it. I put on a dramatic song, one that I always return to when I want to be deeply moved.
By the time I reached home, I fully surrendered to whatever was going on. As soon as I turned off the engine, an unspeakably overwhelming tornado overcame my being. I felt what I can only describe as the culmination of all the pain that exists in the world moving through my body. I’d only felt this sensation once during an Ayahuasca ceremony. My heart burned as it connected with the reality of all those fellow humans that were living from a place of fear, pain, and desperation. A place that was all too familiar for me for so many years.
Most of the time, the reality of unity consciousness is beautiful and heart-opening, but on that particular Friday night, it was outright brutal.
After a few minutes of what felt like an unbearable emotional attack from the universe, my state shifted. The tears subsided and my heart opened and expanded to the only force able to counter the pain — love.
There I was sitting in my car parked in my garage, feeling the universal love buzzing through my inner world in a magnitude that, to that day, I’d only encountered in dialogues with Ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms.
Love as the “primary and fundamental cosmic fact”
In a letter to Humphry Osman, Aldous Huxley once wrote:
“What came through the closed door was the realization, not the knowledge, for this wasn't verbal or abstract but the direct total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact."
This is a common part of the psychedelic experience. There’s a reason that the hippies of the 60s protested war and claimed that love was the answer. Many of them had been woken up to love as the universal force, many of them had been woken up by LSD.
The first time I recognized love as the “primary and fundamental cosmic fact” was during an Ayahuasca ceremony a few years ago.
After a night of crying in pain as I was reliving a traumatic memory of childhood abuse, I was gifted with the most mystical minute of my life.
Following the guidance from my shaman, I had asked the medicine to help me forgive. As soon as I voiced this desire, the wind turned me around. I was lying on my mattress outside, where helpers had kindly placed me so that my violent crying wouldn’t further disrupt other participants. For the first time in hours, the uncontrollable weeping stopped as I stared up at the sky.
The stars had never looked more beautiful. I was exhausted. I took in a deep, long breath. With that one breath, it felt as if I was breathing in love straight from the stars, aka the universe, into my own heart, until it was overflowing.
What followed was the realization that this love was unlimited, abundant — as its origins, the universe, were infinite and mysteriously expanding.
A few moments later, I got up and slowly made my way back into the maloka. I was in a trance. I could barely walk. Moving my body felt as if I had never moved it before. As if I just cracked out of an egg. I’d been reborn.
I knew things would never be the same.
I went home, opened the notes app on my phone, and wrote down one sentence:
Love is the fabric of the universe.
What Happens in the Absence of (Self-)Love
On a universal level, experiences like this have taught me over and over again that there is no question about the nature of our universe. Love is the underlying, unifying force of all existence. The love that mushrooms teach is the same love that Ayahuasca teaches. It’s the same love that I assume parents teach. Partners. Family. Friends.
Once you’ve been enveloped in unconditional love by psychedelic medicine, there’s no possibility to deny your newfound understanding.
“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
Love explains everything. Love cannot be doubted. Once you’ve viscerally experienced love as the unifying force, intellectual endeavors to make sense or argue are inconsequential.
Of course, you don’t need to drink Ayahuasca to come to the realization that love is the only thing that matters. It’s at the core of many spiritual teachings and religions.
I began awakening to love quite some time before I met Ayahuasca. But it was only when I sat with the medicine that I realized how much my lack of (self)love was at the root of all of my suffering. It was only when I met Ayahuasca that the void that had permeated every fiber of my being was filled with that one long, generous breath.
A Course in Miracles teaches:
“Everything we do is either love or a call for love.”
Every time we harm ourselves or others, it’s because we’re crying out for love.
On a personal level, the deepest fraction — the inability to love ourselves — is what causes most of the pain, violence, and neglect on this planet.
The inability to love myself was what caused me to starve, abuse, ignore, isolate and hurt myself.
When we forget the deep inner knowing that love is all that we are, disconnection raptures our lives. We become vulnerable to outside influences.
Systematic abuse, materialism, and generational trauma have put us into a coma. We’re convinced that in order to be worthy of love, we need to say, be or do something. We need to be skinny, successful, flawless, funny, interesting, special.
The only way to wake up is to recognize our inherent worth and loving nature.
Psychedelic medicines help us wake up from the coma. Psychedelics teach that love is the ultimate reality of the universe, and that we’re a singular expression of the entirety of the universe. Hence, we are love.
We wake up to the reality that not only have we, in fact, been deeply loveable all along but that we also are on this planet for no other reason but to love.
If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be writing something like this, I would’ve rolled my eyes. Yet, here I am, never more convinced of anything, yet never struggling more to articulate it.
As mathematician John Nash says in “A Beautiful Mind”:
“It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found.”
It doesn’t make any sense, and at the same time, it makes perfect sense.
Earnest Hemingways says that when you don’t know what you’re trying to say, all you have to do is write one true sentence, “write the truest sentence that you know.”
Here’s what I know to be true: Love is the fabric of the universe.
Shall I spend the rest of my life unraveling this truth.
Dig Deeper
A Return to Love, the book that put me on my spiritual path, based on the extensive teachings of A Course in Miracles.
This song that usually activates every loving fiber of my body:
This article on “Love: The Nature of the True Self” from a guide at Johns Hopkins University working with psilocybin mushroom therapy.
I had an experience over 4 decades ago. I had been searching for an answer for quite some time.....I called it 'the answer to every question'. The question could not be fully verbalized but it involved...why are we here. On this particular night I thought about inhumanity, heartlessness, and the pain and suffering in the world. I got to a point where I just gave up on finding the answer. (In retrospect it seems similar to trying to remember a name or a word and wracking your brain and then giving up and at that point of giving up the name or word pops into your head.) I cried and cried and at the moment that I gave up a white light fluttered in my head, like a butterfly unfolding it's wings.
Love was everywhere. All around me. Nothing else existed. All of the problems of the world stemmed from the lack of recognition of this Love. It was as if I was swimming in a large lake searching for water when it was all around me and I had no existence separate from the water. There was much more than I could take.
I was never the same after that. The following day I contacted many people. Some I gave a small gift to. I told all that I loved them.
https://youtu.be/2zc3idF_IZ0
thank you for a particularly moving essay today :-) the part about the full spectrum of the suffering AND love of humanity reminds a bit of Chris Bache's experience in "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" - mindblowing for all psychonauts.