As I have explained elsewhere, love is not a feeling, but a behavior. It is the act of placing another’s needs above your own; an act of self-sacrifice.

We all recognize this love instinctively. The parents who sacrifice their comfort to give their children better lives, the children who sacrifice their own wants to care for aging parents, the lover who risks all to save their beloved: all are engaging in the act of loving.

Thus, to love without exhausting oneself, one must have enough of a surplus to be able to give it away. Without this surplus, one cannot love.

Children do not love

This is difficult for many to accept, but true. Children need. That is the nature of childhood. To make parents feel better, some have called this “need love”, but that’s a verbal deceit. It reveals our contempt for the needy.

But need is natural and we all need.

The human does not emerge from the womb fully grown. Gestation is only the beginning of a long journey. To create a kind, loving, and secure adult requires many years of patient teaching and nourishing. It requires a healthy diet, plenty of exercise of both mind and body, a safe space, trust, love, teachers, and role models.

When the infant first arrives in the world it is a tiny bundle of need. There is no room for love. What can the infant sacrifice for another? Nothing.

There is nothing wrong with this. How could it be otherwise? Infants are helpless. It takes years of patient work before they are even remotely capable of caring for themselves, let alone others.

This does not mean that small children cannot achieve moments of true love. As we grow and mature, we begin to accumulate surplus. At least some of the time and in some ways, we can take care of ourselves, and that leaves time to devote to others.

And for children to learn properly and to grow into adults, they must be taught to use that surplus for loving rather than for fulfilling selfish impulses. That is the nature of maturing: overcoming selfish, childish impulses.

Maturing is also about overcoming the self, recognizing and internalizing that there are others out there who are of equal importance and value. It takes a long time and careful encouragement to inculcate such values.

The seasons of life

And so it is that, done well, life has two seasons. The first is the season of needing and taking. We are all born into this season. We begin as nothing but need.

And as we grow and mature, we become less needy and more capable of giving. It is not black and white, taking or giving, all or nothing. The need gradually diminishes as the ability to give gradually increases.

If we are doing it right, and if we have the right nourishment and guidance, then we give more and more, and need less and less.

At some point in life — and earlier is better — we cross the threshold and begin giving more than we take, loving more than we need.

And this brings us to the second season of life: the season of loving and giving.

Our foremost goal in life should be to reach the season of loving and giving as soon as possible, and to remain in it as long as possible.

Life is circular

But life is circular. Often, in our later years, our surplus dwindles as we become worn and even frail. We begin to need more, and we have less to give.

There may come a time when we return to the season of needing and taking. And there is nothing wrong with this evolution either. It is the natural course of things: the nature of the universe is returning.

What is most important to understand is that we must embrace both seasons fully. When in the season of needing, be not afraid to take what is offered. There is no shame so long as it is not taken for selfish purposes.

When in the season of giving, give as much as you can.

Most of all, understand that just as those in the season of taking need to receive, those in the season of loving need to give.

The worst thing you can do to someone in the season of giving is to refuse their gift. To do so is to negate the value of their life. Those who fully embrace the seasons of life give because they must give. It is their nature. It is their time to do so.

Too often, those in need are afraid to take what is offered. The result is that both taker and giver suffer: the taker because their needs remain unfulfilled; the giver because their gifts have gone to waste.

The seasons are meant for each other

One of the most senseless mistakes we make in our modern culture is segregation by age and maturity. The young and immature spend all their time with similarly young and immature friends. The older and wiser are left to seek solace among themselves.

We have limited the association of the needy and the giving to the parental relationship. And woe unto those for whom that relationship fails or does not exist. They are often left with nothing.

A smart society ensures that young and old, sophomoric and sagacious, needy and loving spend plenty of time together, and that the needy are encouraged to seek out the giving (and vice versa) so that both are fulfilled.

This goes for parent and child, teacher and student, mentor and protégé, and, yes, for lovers, too. Youth with youth is the blind leading the blind. Adult with adult may be pleasant, but what a waste of wisdom!

Our current exploitative and misguided consumer culture feasts on foolish and infantile minds. The coerced separation of the “generations” acts to prevent the infantile from maturing into wise adults and careful consumers, as does the ageism it engenders.

The obsession with youth and infantile behavior is a disease, perhaps the modern disease.

The most important quality that we can teach to the young is humility. The most profitable action we can take for humanity is to find those few true adults — the ones who matured despite the obstacles — and employ them to inspire the immature to seek and embrace maturity.

For it is only as a mature species that we will survive the coming cataclysm.

And we often try to restrict membership in our “culture” on the basis of some irrelevant characteristic, such as skin color, sex, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc.

But that’s all nonsense.

Cultures are defined by a set of characteristics—of beliefs and behaviors—common to that culture. Anyone, then, who meets those criteria is a member of that culture. Skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference—these are not cultures, although the majority of those practicing a culture might have similar characteristics.

By defining cultures in terms of irrelevant characteristics, such as sexual preference, we can both allow members of that culture to violate cultural norms at will while remaining part of the culture, and we can deny others entry into the culture despite that they may be a better fit than we are.

In this way culture is used as a weapon to determine who is worthy and who is not, who is protected and who is not, who is privileged and who is exploited.

As many as there are people

The truth is that all cultures are imaginary. Each of us is unique. We never entirely fit into any group culture.

Simultaneously, all cultures are poorly defined, with plenty of contradicting or paradoxical features, and they are all continually in flux. What is considered a key part of the “culture” today may be apostasy tomorrow.

These sorts of cultures are often controlled and manipulated by the “alphas” in a group—by the “Brahmin” class—for their own benefit. In modern society, these self-appointed arbiters are everywhere you look, sternly instructing us as to which beliefs and behaviors are “approved” and which are not.

The truth is that each of us is our own culture. We are syncretic, eclectic. We take from the various “group cultures” those beliefs and behaviors that resonate with us and leave the rest.

When called upon to perform for the group, we may exhibit behaviors with which we don’t truly agree or consider part of our culture so that we may avoid censure, but left to our own devices we revert to our preferred culture.

Hence culture isn’t really about who we are or what we believe and what we do so much as it is a means of social control, of coercion, as all forms of “identity” are. It’s a sort of prison that prevents us from going where the tribe does not want us to go.

True cultures

True cultures are different. They are collections of beliefs and behaviors that work to create specific outcomes. They are not simply badges of tribal membership.

There are many such cultures, but the most important for the survival of humanity are the cultures of scarcity and abundance. As with other cultures, they are models of reality—ways of looking at the world.

The culture of scarcity

The culture of scarcity is predicated on the belief that resources are scarce, and that if we don’t act quickly to secure them, we will suffer and perhaps die.

Not enough oxygen? We die. Not enough hydration? We die. Not enough nutrition? We die. Not enough rest? We die. Not enough love? We die.

At various times throughout history, and at various times for most individual humans, some or all of these resources have been scarce. Often, we have fought over them. Often we have failed to secure enough for ourselves, and consequently died.

In modern times, we have blown the culture of scarcity up to epic proportions, like an enormous balloon. And with that comes fear. Fear of lack. Fear of suffering. Fear of death.

The culture of scarcity is the culture of fear. Fear of not having enough. Fear of exclusion. Fear of suffering. Sound familiar? We are in a pandemic of fear.

Not having enough prestige. Not having enough recognition. Not having the right job, the right house, the right car, the right clothes—or the right kids, or parents, or friends.

And this fear is malignant. It is cancerous.

And rather than spur us to cooperation and sharing, it spurs us to competition and hoarding. It’s a dog eat dog world, right? Except dogs don’t really behave that way. But humans do.

Fear itself

But look around. Is anything truly scarce?

There is more than enough food to feed everyone. There is more than enough room to house and clothe everyone. If we work together, we can provide more than enough education, healthcare, rewarding work so that people are healthy, happy, and fulfilled.

But far from doing so, we do the opposite. We deliberately maldistribute resources. We heap them on our “alphas” (to whom we turn for protection). We are not impressed by careful and efficient use of resources. We are impressed by wanton wastefulness and extravagance.

When extreme and ostentatious hoarders of resources—you know their names—direct enough resources toward the construction and maintenance of garish and exorbitant mega-yachts and luxurious private jets to feed a small city while billions go hungry and tens of thousands of young children die needlessly every day for lack of basic resources, we do not shun the hoarders or reclaim those resources.

We celebrate the hoarders! We sing their praises! We wish that we could be like them!

And the suffering masses? The children dying of hunger and thirst? The poor? The homeless? The mentally ill?

We despise them. The remind us of our own worthlessness and precarity, and that intensifies our fear.

So it is that often the poorest neighborhoods, instead of banding together for the betterment of all, are riddled with crime and drug abuse, all of it self-destructive.

So it is, too, that we continue to feed our fear long after the reason for its existence has vanished. Not just feed it, but nourish it, enlarge it. The fear does not diminish—it grows.

The more we have, the more we want. And the more we fear loss of what we have, even though we could lose almost all of it and still be happy and secure.

We all know this, and yet we stubbornly persist in making things worse, both for ourselves and for all life on our planet.

The culture of abundance

The culture of abundance says that everything we truly need is here in abundance. We don’t need to hoard. We don’t need to possess. We don’t need to “own”, which is really just a word for denying others the use of a resource.

The Earth is plentiful and has been so since long before the first hominins walked its surface six million years ago. All scarcity—all of it—is created by us, by our deliberate maldistribution of resources.

If each of us takes only what we need, and gives back accordingly, then we can all live happy, healthy, and fulfilling lives.

If we work together, then we can create a surplus that, when shared, can improve life for everyone, those improvements accumulating and compounding with each new generation.

And for most of our history as a species, this is precisely how we lived. We shared everything, including the work and the product of that work. Individuals possessed what they were using, but owned nothing.

We stayed together in small groups—we are a social species. There was no maldistribution of resources because there was no possibility of it.

When we began to live in larger groups, then the efficiencies of scale meant that there was a much greater surplus, and the increase in numbers beyond the Dunbar number meant that we were surrounded by others who neither knew us or cared about us, nor we about them.

That surplus became a temptation, something to possess, to hoard, and a source of power. Soon the least social and most ruthless among us began creating artificial scarcities to enhance their own power and standing, and hoarding became the rule.

And with this came suffering on a scale never before imagined by human beings. This, then, was the true fall from grace, and the beginning of the end to the human experiment.

Our eternal fall

The further we fall, the more desperately we do the very things that accelerate our fall.

Resources seem scarce? Hoard harder. Result: greater scarcity. Better hoard harder still.

Round and round we go, not in an infinite loop, but a downward spiral.

And the most astonishing truth of this is that every one of us knows this to be true, and yet we only double down on our behavior.

What the fuck is wrong with us?

The only way we survive as a species is to reverse this behavior. We must embrace the culture of abundance. And the first step to this is to recognize viscerally that we all have far more than we will ever really need.

Those who do not are not in a position to read this essay. If you’re reading this, you’re living in abundance whether you admit it or not.

We could give away almost everything we have, and still be happy and healthy and fulfilled. People do it all the time, if not always voluntarily.

I have done this myself, living for years out of a couple of suitcases while couch surfing or living in serviced apartments, taking work as it came along, sharing with others who in turn took care of me during lean times.

Taking only what you need and giving back at least as much as you took—living the culture of abundance—does more than just eliminate fear and guilt in your own life.

It also helps to redistribute resources, and when people feel secure, we have fewer children. That solves the population problem and reduces the load on the Earth.

And if we use only what we absolutely need, then that, too, eliminates most or all of the deficit resource use, which makes ours existence sustainable. It stops the egregious waste of resources that fuels climate change as well and is driving the extinction of humanity.

So what are we waiting for? If we don’t embrace the culture of abundance ourselves, then how can we ever expect anyone else to do so?

Of course, there are plenty who believe that the problem is that we’re not “systeming” properly or hard enough. These are usually ideologues who are heavily invested in the current system. They don’t want to change it; they want more of it, as if we can fix the window with the same brick we used to break it.

But all this is nonsense. The problem is not, and never has been, the “system”, although the system can certainly make our problems worse. Often, that’s why we build them.

Infantile is as infantile does

Before we can address the real problem, we need to define our terms. The terms are “infant” and “adult”, and I use them in very specific ways.

When I speak of infants, I do not mean very small children. I mean humans who think and act in infantile ways. And what are these ways?

Infants are impulse driven. They don’t think before they act; they act before they think, if they think at all.

Infants don’t reason before the fact; they rationalize after the fact. They are masters of the excuse.

Infants are ego-centric. Everything revolves around them. They are the center of the universe and nothing matters but their needs and wants.

Infants are impatient and reactive. They throw tantrums when they can’t get their way. Violence is their first resort and often their only resort.

Infants become indignant when they are told no. The more they are told that they cannot have or do something, the more desperately they want to have or do it.

Infants are amoral. It’s not that they are trying to be bad—most aren’t. It’s that good and bad simply don’t enter into it. For infants, other people aren’t really real. They are just venues by which the infant may get what it wants, or obstacles getting in their way.

Infants cannot stand accountability and demand impunity. Others deserve punishment, but never the infant. Their case is always the exception.

The vast majority of us are infants almost all the time. We may behave a little like adults when we fear reproach or punishment, but the moment no one is looking—or we believe ourselves exempt—we do whatever we please.

We cheat. We lie. We steal. We break all our promises. We defraud. We abuse. We rape and kill.

This is universal.

And the more power we have to avoid punishment for our actions, the more openly we offend.

Look around. The world is full of infants. The world is “led” by infants. How do governments behave? How do big corporations behave? How does any mob of humans behave?

Parenting needed; enquire within

None of this is even controversial, although we, as a species, are in deep denial about it. In perfect accord with the above, we all believe that “they” are the problem—those infants over there—while rationalizing our own infantile behavior and refusing to accept responsibility for our actions.

And absolutely no accountability, of course.

We have known for the better part of a century that we are destroying the ability of the Earth to support life—including our own. For several decades we’ve known that we are in free fall, ever accelerating toward a messy demise.

And yet we’ve done less than nothing. We’re making it worse every day. And all of us look around pointing the finger at someone else as if we weren’t every bit as guilty.

Schadenfreude, cruelty, brutality, and violence are everywhere, all the time. We rob and rape and torture and murder and enslave and oppress each other everywhere. We are as violent and sociopathic as ever.

We pretend that we have progressed, but where is the evidence of it?

We have at best a few decades left to save ourselves. But we’re not going to do a damn thing to prevent our auto-genocide.

It must be someone else’s job, right?

To the infant, adulthood is death

The problem, and the reason that we’re totally fucked, is that infants desperately want to remain infants. They correctly observe that the birth of the adult is the death of the infant. Just as the butterfly is the death of the caterpillar.

So infants, absent some external force driving them to maturity, never mature. Quite the reverse: they resist, resist, resist. They will kill themselves out of spite rather than “grow up”—and many do.

When all of our “role models” are infants, too, then we are well and truly irredeemable. We need adults to show us the way.

I’m with stupid

We don’t just avoid adulthood. We celebrate our infantile behavior. I have noticed this for decades. Just consider the popularity of posters, signs, t-shirts, and now memes all sporting statements celebrating infantile behavior. I’m with stupid. Right? They are multitudinous.

But the infant, never having experienced maturity, has an utterly twisted idea of what maturity entails.

To the infant, being an adult means not getting your way. It means having no fun. It means onerous responsibilities. It means being accountable—the worst fate imaginable. And, of course, it requires a constant and exhausting exercise of will to resist those infantile impulses.

The urge to give in to them is overwhelming.

A world of adults is imaginable

If infants have the concept of maturity all backward—and they most assuredly do—then what is the true definition of an adult?

There are many ways in which one may be an adult. The most obvious of these is biologically. We all begin the transition to biological maturity at puberty, with a peak somewhere in our mid-twenties.

But that happens on its own—barring toxic pollution in our environment.

The maturity of which I speak is intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and moral maturity.

There was a time, and their were cultures, in which some or many humans reached some sort of maturity other than biological. A few even reached peak maturity. You’ve heard their names: Lao Tse, Siddhārtha Gautama (AKA Buddha), Jesus of Nazareth, etc.

They wrote excellent tutorials for future students of maturity. Sadly, no one took them seriously. Which is to say that the infants, being infants, interpreted those scriptures in infantile ways.

They missed the point. Deliberately.

The religions founded on those teachings almost universally get them backwards. But then they have to because those teachings were all, at heart, anti-religion. Which is to say that they all encouraged maturity, and maturity is about thinking for oneself and making one’s own decisions rather than blindly following a set of rules.

Maturity is about knowing what to do without having to consult a book or a “holy” man. Or woman. And you can’t learn that from a book. You have to practice it.

Always do the right thing

What, then, are the characteristics of an adult?

In truth, it is simple and obvious:

An adult is a person who always does the right thing.

Every time and without fail. And not because the adult is exerting will or discipline to overcome infantile impulses. If will is required, then the infant has not really left the building, has it?

No, the adult does the right thing because the adult understands that doing the right thing is pure joy. More than that: it is power. It is connection with the entire universe. Everything is easy when one does the right thing.

To an adult, doing the wrong thing is literally inconceivable. It just doesn’t even come up.

When you sit down to dinner, do you have to exert discipline to keep yourself from picking up the fork (or chopstick) and stabbing yourself in the eye with it? If so, please seek professional help immediately.

But to nearly all of us, it never even occurs to us to stab ourselves in the eye with a fork. We don’t need any willpower at all to avoid it because we know it will hurt, and probably maim us. It just doesn’t even come up.

The infant believes that the adult must exert exhausting effort 24/7 to resist impulses, but this is because the infant cannot imagine a world without infantile urges.

As most of us never reach maturity or even approach it, our need to be “grown ups” is indeed painful and onerous. We are bombarded by negative impulses: to lie, to cheat, to steal, to avoid accountability. And resisting those urges is exhausting.

But this is because we’ve never really “grown up” at all: we are overgrown infants. Our jobs, our families, our societies demand that we behave as if we were mature—occasionally—but we are not. And this conflict makes us miserable and regularly boils over into destructive and especially self-destructive behavior.

And all destructive behavior is really self-destructive behavior.

How to grow the fuck up

The infant begins life with no sense of self. In the womb, the infant is the universe: there is nothing else. All needs are met instantly.

Upon birth, the infant quickly notices that needs are no longer being met without effort. Crying brings relief in the form of attention from a parent. If not, the infant soon dies.

The infant begins to recognize that there is something that is “not-infant” and something that is. Hence: not-self and self.

This is the beginning of the development of consciousness, of self. It is a crucial phase in the development of the human animal. But it is the caterpillar phase. Throughout childhood—done right—the human learns to become an individual with a strong sense of self.

The process of maturing begins when that self is complete. It is the process of emptying out the self. Now that the human is stable and self-sufficient, it no longer needs to focus entirely on meeting its own needs.

It has a surplus. And with this surplus it can act to change the world.

This is the task of the adult: to find ways to change the world for the betterment of all life rather than hoarding resources in a futile attempt to assuage the fear of scarcity and loss.

The infant seeks to get as much as possible. Remind you of any “wealthy” people? Infants all.

The adult seeks to give as much as possible. You’ve never met many adults because they are too busy giving selflessly to draw attention to themselves.

The way of emptiness is a tool for maturing. It seeks the emptying out of self. In its simplest form it is rendered thus: Get over yourself.

Infants sometimes help others as well, but virtually always while making all the decisions. They push their help on others rather than waiting to be asked for it. And they want recognition for it. Credit. Gratitude. It is all about self-glorification, as anyone can see if they open their eyes.

We have all known people like that.

Most people are too fearful of loss to give much of themselves. And yet, if you are reading this, then all your essential needs are already well met. What are these unmet needs really? Aren’t they only fears?

As Kahlil Gibran put it so elegantly:

And what is fear of need but fear itself?
Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?

Look around. Unquenchable thirsts as far as the eye can see.

All systems infantilize

All systems infantilize because all systems are created to restrain the infants.

Because adults do the right thing without fail and without conscious effort or will, they have no need of a “system”. They do what needs to be done, and they consult and collaborate with others when needed to ensure that the right things get done.

They communicate and cooperate rather than command and obey.

Our systems were designed to keep the infants in line, but in doing so, they infantilize. They perpetuate and worsen the problem.

We can only mature by being inspired to mature.

The good parent does not provide a set of rules and punishments. The good parent provides a dialogue on actions and consequences and a safe space in which the child may experiment to learn about consequences.

When others do our thinking and choosing for us, controlling us with rewards and punishments, demanding obedience, then there is no impetus to mature. Quite the reverse: we beget resistance and resentment.

The way of emptiness

So how to become an adult? I will discuss this in detail in coming essays, but the first step is to let go of the system. All systems. You will need to be aware of the dangers, obviously, because others will cling to the system and persecute any who appear to stray from it.

But to the extent possible, just do the right thing and don’t worry about what the system demands.

The system is, after all, an illusion. It does not exist. It’s not like it arrived here from outer space or has an existence of its own. We created the system. We re-create it every moment of every day. Don’t like the system? Then stop re-creating it.

We cannot change by doing the same thing today that we did yesterday and the day before. That’s the opposite of change. It is stasis.

So the simple trick is this: do something different—something better—every day. Ask yourself at the end of each day, What did I do differently today? Did it work or did it fail? What should I do differently tomorrow?

If you do that continually throughout your life, then you will rapidly mature, and if enough of us do so, then there is a small but measurable chance that we may yet survive as a species.

The universe itself is devoid of meaning. If it were not, humanity would not have been able to project so many mutually exclusive meanings onto it. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that these meanings have come from us, not from some external source.

We invent our gods, not the other way ‘round.

Almost everything in the world is meaningless to us. If it’s not affecting us personally, we probably put no importance on it. We can read during our morning coffee or tea that 40,000 children die needlessly every day because of our indifference, and we shrug. Sad, perhaps, but not our problem.

But some things—and some other beings—have enormous meaning to us. It might be a partner, our children, our pets, an ideal, an organization we helped build, a religion or a specific religious group. Whatever it is, to each of us as an individual, there is something or someone of great importance.

Because this importance varies from person to person, it cannot be something intrinsic to the object or being. If my cat had intrinsic meaning, then she would be as meaningful to you as she is to me. That she is not means that the meaning must be coming from somewhere else, not from the cat herself.

Where does meaning come from?

On the most basic level, things have meaning to us because we need them. But this is entirely a matter of immediate need.

For example, I need good air to breathe. If my air supply were cut off, I would probably give almost anything to get it back. That’s pretty damned important, right? But is that the same as meaning?

In this moment, there is more than enough air for me to breathe. Truly, I have a surplus. So I do not sit around thinking about how meaningful air is to me.

This is true for most of our basic needs—the ones at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. Once they are filled sufficiently, we generally stop thinking about them.

But then what? Is that enough?

For most humans it is not, which is why Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, created the psychotherapy technique called logotherapy and wrote a book about it called Man’s Search for Meaning.

In it he made clear that having meaning in one’s life is as essential as having food, water, shelter, air, or sleep.

How do we invest meaning in the world?

If we need meaning—and we do—but the universe has no intrinsic meaning, then how are we to find meaning in the world?

The answer is that we create it ourselves by making things important, and we make things (or beings) important by investing ourselves in them.

We sacrifice our own needs for theirs.

The more we sacrifice for another, the more we pour ourself into that being, the more important that being becomes to us, and the more meaningful.

Of course, it is not enough simply to sacrifice for another. We must do it for the right reasons, voluntarily, and with the right attitude. If we fail in any of those, we are more likely to create anger and resentment than meaning.

Love is an action

Love is an action, not a feeling. There is a range of feelings associated with love, but these are not love itself. They are products of love.

These same feelings can be generated in other ways, too. When someone shows us true love, we often begin to feel love for that person out of reciprocity, a strong human trait.

Another way in which we can get the feeling of love is infatuation. Infatuation occurs because of the collapse of the ego boundaries, which is a fancy way of saying that we and the object of our affection feel like the same person.

If investing part of ourselves in others creates meaning, and that brings forth the feeling of love, then how much more will it do so when we believe that we have merged with the other?

And yet, the infatuation invariably wears off as the ego boundaries reassert themselves and the illusion of oneness dissipates. But if during this period of infatuation we made sacrifices with the right attitude for the beloved, then the infatuation may segue into a real, lasting love.

This, the way of emptiness states, is the purpose of infatuation: to lead people to enact love, and in doing so to find true love.

A mother is triggered biologically by birth to feel love for her infant. And this strong feeling will usually cause her to sacrifice for the child, which may, we hope, lead to real love as the biological imperative wears off.

But if she does not act out the love through sacrifice, sometimes the biologically-produced feeling of love wears off and there is nothing there to replace it—or worse, resentment is aroused. Such situations typically lead to ugly, even fatal, consequences for the unloved children.

We have all seen this happen, unfortunately.

The Trinity of Love

How, then, does love work?

The way of emptiness views love as a trinity. Love has a mechanism, an input, and an output. Or we could say a behavior, a price, and a reward.

The mechanism of love is self-sacrifice

As I stated above, the mechanism of love is sacrifice for the beloved. We put the needs of the beloved above our own immediate needs. The more we do this—with the right intent and attitude—the stronger our love will be.

The reward of love is wisdom

The reward for love is wisdom and maturity. In order to truly serve the beloved, we must see through our beloved’s eyes, feel our beloved’s needs. When we do this, we expand our awareness of the world. It widens, broadens, deepens. We become able to see it from outside our own selfish needs, and we can see ourselves more clearly as well.

True wisdom requires more than love, but without love there is no wisdom. Wisdom is just a word for knowing the right thing to do, and we cannot know the right thing unless we can see clearly from multiple perspectives and from outside of our own selfish needs.

So it is the getting outside of ourselves (or getting over ourselves) that love requires that brings with it wisdom.

And wisdom is power. It is power most of all over the self. It is the state of maturity, of adulthood. The acquisition of wisdom is, at least in this philosophy, the true objective of humanity: a world of adults.

The price of love is devotion

When we sacrifice for another, whether that other is a lover, our children, our parents, a friend, a comrade, or just someone we met, we may bring forth in them a dependency upon us.

We become responsible, then, for filling that dependency until we are no longer needed by the beloved. In short, we cannot release ourselves. Only the beloved can release us.

This commitment to another is devotion. It’s a part of the sacrifice, and it is what strengthens the love and causes it to persist—as long as we don’t fall back into selfishness and resentment. Right approach is key.

The secret of the fox

The best description of the trinity of love that I’ve found is in a book ostensibly (but not really) for children: Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

In it, the Little Prince has traveled from his home asteroid and had a series of adventures on Earth, among them a chance meeting with a fox.

The fox convinces the Little Prince to “tame” him, by which he means to show him love. In doing so, the Little Prince causes the fox to develop an emotional dependency on the Little Prince. Thus, when the Little Prince announces that he must return to his asteroid, the fox is very sad.

Earlier in his adventures the Little Prince had come across a rose garden and been crushed by the realization that the single rose on his asteroid, which he loves and believes to be unique in all the universe, is but a common flower.

But the fox tells the Little Prince to go back and see the roses again, and then to return and the fox will tell him a secret.

The Little Prince returns to the rose garden. This time he sees clearly:

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

The Little Prince now understands that it is the mechanism of love—the “taming” of the fox—that have given the fox meaning to him and made the fox unique.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you—the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer explanation than that of the mechanism of love and how it invests meaning in another. It is through the sacrifices the Little Prince made for his rose that his rose becomes unique and important: invested with value which brings meaning to his life.

The Little Prince returns to the fox, who tells him his secret, and that secret is precisely the trinity of love:

"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

Is this not wisdom, love’s reward? It is only through the heart (love) that one can see clearly (be wise).

And then:

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

Here is the mechanism of love: self-sacrifice. It is the time you have wasted—that you did not spend in selfish pursuits—that invests the beloved with value and meaning.

Finally:

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose..."

And here is the price of love: devotion. We become responsible forever—until released by the beloved—for those we have loved. Not loved in the petty sense of desired, wanted, or needed. Loved in the truest sense: sacrificed for.

Poured ourselves into. Made dependent upon us. Created a true connection with that cannot be broken without causing the beloved to suffer.

That’s a bit frightening. Many of us are commitment shy. But in his book, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran gives perhaps the best description of the price we pay when we refuse to love:

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

The way of emptiness is the way of love, and we shall laugh all of our laughter and weep all of our tears.

In my view, it is not about being at all.

I mentioned how I had independently come to a similar conclusion (though such things are never really concluded). I call my philosophy the way of emptiness, and the idea behind it is simple: get over yourself. It is about the emptying out of self until nothing remains but a point of pure consciousness.

Just let go

An important piece of this emptying out is the recognition of our own insignificance. More importantly, it is the recognition that our insignificance is our greatest superpower.

Most of us live our lives in mirrored rooms. Everywhere we look, we see only ourselves. Everything we think and feel revolves around our tiny little insignificant lives. In our minds, these lives take on enormous meaning, and that distorts everything we do.

But let’s smash the mirrors and look out through the vast reaches of space to see what’s really out there. Let go of this obsession with self.

The universe is enormous. We cannot even truly conceive of the distance to the next town, let alone the distance to the next planet, star system, galaxy.

Life is everywhere

By some estimates, the universe contains at least 100,000,000,000 planets with life on them. Space just seems empty because the distances are so vast. Even if that number is two orders of magnitude too large, that’s still a billion planets with life on them.

If the life on one of those billions of planets is extinguished, would the universe even notice?

And we are not just lost in space, but in time as well. The universe is billions of years old and has billions of years yet to go. And yet we homo sapiens have been around for much less than a million years.

Remember that a billion is a thousand millions (unless you’re British).

In the scope of time, our existence as a species is less than the blink of an eye. The lifespan of a single human? Effectively zero.

And how do I fit into all this? I am not even a species, let alone a planet. I am a particular instance of a single species with a lifespan too short even to measure in universal terms.

Viewed from the universal point of view, the difference between me and an amoeba is nothing at all.

I am utterly insignificant. And so are you. Sorry, but it’s true.

We are insignificant members of an insignificant species on an insignificant planet in an insignificant star system in an insignificant corner of an insignificant galaxy.

We are all, together and individually, effectively zero. Zilch. Zip. Get over it.

The unbearable lightness of unbeing

For some reason, this bothers most people immensely. The infant in the womb is, as far as its experience goes, the entire universe. The birth of consciousness, of awareness of “other”, occurs when that infant is removed from the womb and forced to recognize that it is not, in truth, the universe. Not even close.

Our infantile selves desperately seek a return to that “infinite” state. So we spend our lives continually exaggerating our own importance. As long as we remain infantile—and most of us remain infantile our entire lives—we refuse to consider or accept our own insignificance.

But this constant self-aggrandizement is self-defeating. Our insignificance is inescapable. And so we spend our lives in quiet desperation, our actions shouting, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”

Look around. You’ll see this behavior everywhere. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Ironically, another characteristic of the infantile mind is a furious need to avoid accountability for our actions. These two drives—to make ourselves the center of the universe and yet not to be held accountable for anything we do—are continually at war within us.

Beware the Sword of Damocles

We fear the Sword of Damocles, hanging by a thin thread over our heads.

We humans desperately seek meaning in life. Viktor Frankl made this search for meaning central to his “logotherapy”. But as Uncle Ben regularly reminds Peter: with great power comes great responsibility.

We want the former; we loathe the latter.

The universe is meaningless. We invent meaning and then attempt to project it outward into the universe, to pretend that it comes from somewhere, anywhere but ourselves. Why? Perhaps because if it comes from outside of us, then we are off the hook. The devil made us do it. God commands us.

But is that really the case?

In the scope of infinity, we are all insignificant, meaningless. That much is certain. But we are not meaningless to each other.

Let’s shrink the scope down to something human-sized. We are the creators of meaning in the universe. It is not something imposed from without. It is something we create inside ourselves.

What matter if the universe is meaningless so long as our own lives are filled with meaning? Think locally, act globally.

The mechanism by which we create this meaning is love, which is the action of placing the needs of another above one’s own. It is, literally, the emptying out of the self. It is living for something bigger than ourselves.

The way of emptiness, then, is the way of love. But love is so utterly misunderstood that we’ll need to discuss it in much more depth.

Love is Kierkegaard’s First Immediacy from his masterwork, Fear and Trembling. Love is the secret the fox gives to the Little Prince. Love is the core of all the great religions and philosophies. As John says more than once, God is love. Which means love is God.

Insignificance is our salvation

In truth, our insignificance is utterly freeing. It means simply that we just can’t fuck up too badly. Destroy all life on Earth? Meh. There are 99,999,999,999 more experiments out there. Not all will succeed.

Waste your life? In a few generations (or fewer), no one will remember or care.

To many people, this is reason to give up, to surrender and do nothing. Or to feel sorry for themselves in a sad and infinite loop.

But to me, it is a calling. The universe may not care if we fail, but I do. The universe may have no intrinsic meaning, but I find meaning everywhere I look. History may not care if I waste my life, but what a loss to me and to the people whose lives I might have made better and more meaningful.

To go out with a whimper may not matter to others, but to me it is utterly humiliating. If aliens ever did show up, I’d die of embarrassment.

The way of emptiness says stop trying to fill yourself with significance. Instead, empty yourself out. Recognize that you are utterly insignificant, and that it does not matter.

Then use the powers that you do have, insignificant though they may be, to fill others with significance. Create the meaning you want to see in the world.

True significance outside ourselves is possible. We just have to put it there.

I first heard the term “self-actualization” in high school. It is the peak of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. A teacher described it to me thus:

Self-actualization is when one’s rewards come internally; when external rewards are no longer sought or needed.

In truth, that is not self-actualization as envisioned by Maslow, but I took that to be the definition, so that was what I decided to pursue.

It is not surprising that I would choose such a goal. In my childhood, I was considerably brighter than almost everyone I knew. If this is not your experience, then there is something about it that you most likely do not know.

No one really likes smart people. They just say they do.

Humans need humans

As a child, I wanted and needed emotional support and approval — who doesn’t? — but I was never really to get it. Instead, I was taunted mercilessly, never allowed to play in any reindeer games.

Even my family either pushed me up onto a pedestal and bragged about me, or kicked me to the curb and shit on me. Usually in that order. There was no middle ground.

My grandmother slapped me more than once while yelling, “Don’t be precocious!” after I made some honest observation. It was a decade or more before I learned that precocious is not a derogatory term. It certainly was in her mouth.

Through most of my school years I played the fool in hopes of getting my schoolmates and others to like me. I was the class clown. It didn’t work. Oh, we got along alright, but I remained the outsider.

When I went to university, I finally found a group of peers: people as smart or smarter than I. But by then the damage was done, and I remained the outsider. Clown habits are hard to break. Worse, I was numbed up and often abrasive without realizing it.

And so it was that I learned to reward myself. I had little choice. It was that or surrender to the continual abuse and disdain of others.

To be clear: this abuse was rarely physical or even apparent. No, it was much more devious and devastating than that. It came regularly, most often when my guard was down, in the form of betrayal, often from those who I had trusted the most. It came every time I discovered that someone I loved was not really my friend, did not love me.

We all have such experiences, but for me they were continual. And unbearable.

There is no obvious moment when I first achieved self-actualization. Neither does it come all at once as a kind of satori, but fitfully, bit by bit.

One day I simply recognized that I had stopped seeking approval from others some time before. I still had friends and lovers. But I was secure: no longer driven by my needs and fears to seek their approval. I could, finally, walk away when necessary.

And if I discovered that someone I trusted was not my friend after all, well, that made me sad. But it did not make me question my own worth. Quite the reverse: it made me wonder what kind of person betrays the trust of others?

That was a wonderful experience: a sense of utter freedom. No more a slave!

Self-actualization is the visceral realization that one is complete. End of story.

Except, it is not, as it turns out, the end of the story. Rather, it is only the beginning.

Self-actualization is the end of infancy

Over time I have come to realize that self-actualization is to our emotional, psychological, intellectual, and moral selves what puberty is to our biological and physiological selves: the end of childhood.

As puberty is a time of transformation, rather than a single moment marked by menarche or one’s first ejaculation, so also is self-actualization a period of transition: a gradual dawning of understanding.

I am whole. I can meet my own needs, and those needs are far fewer than I once believed. How wonderful!

Now what?

Black belts also mark the end of infancy

I am reminded of something a martial arts expert once told me. He said, a black belt is not the mark of an expert. The black belt symbolizes mastery of the basics. It’s like completing pre-school. It is only then that true learning begins.

So it is with self-actualization. It is not the end state, but an essential first step on the road to that state.

What then is that end state? Where is this all leading?

Maslow didn’t stop at self-actualization

A few years ago I was discussing self-actualization with a friend and I realized that I’d never really gotten around to reading up on it. What exactly did Maslow mean by it?

I was shocked to discover that Maslow had based his ideas for self-actualization on men like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. He practically worshipped the idea of the “self-made” man. He was after power and wealth, not enlightenment.

What a disappointment! I’m very glad I didn’t find this out much earlier or I might have never achieved true self-actualization.

But I also learned something else quite shocking—to me, anyway. Later in life, Maslow realized that something existed beyond self-actualization. At this point I’d been thinking a similar thing for years, and had been acting on it, but had no awareness of Maslow’s views.

My goal was the emptying out of self. Or, as I often put it, Get over yourself! I called this effort the “way of emptiness”, in part because I got a kick out of saying that I was pursuing the “woe”.

In my personal experience, the realization that comes once the thrill of self-actualization wears off is this: so what? Yeah, I’m complete. Yeah, I don’t need the approval of others. Yeah, I can do whatever I want to do within my own limitations.

What do I do now?

The goal is to transcend the self

It was at this moment that I realized that I had transcended infancy and with it my obsession with self. To the infant, self is all that exists. The infant’s every effort is a desperate attempt to internalize the external: to bring the world into the self. For the infant, everything is me, me, ME.

But I was done with that now. What interested me was no longer “who am I?” After all, who cares? What I wanted to know is, “how can I help?” How can I use all these skills I’ve accumulated not to engage in some masturbatory fantasy of self-aggrandizement as I hoarded and wasted more resources than I could ever want or need, but to help others to actualize themselves, and in so doing, perhaps, to create some true connections?

How can I help to create a world of adults?

Because connections are what we all truly crave, and they can only be made between adults. One must be able to see outside oneself before one can see others.

To the infant, there is only self. Others do not exist.

To the adult, the self is irrelevant. Everything interesting is out there.

So it was with astonishment that I discovered that Maslow had, in his later years, posited a state beyond self-actualization. And in perfect keeping with my own discoveries, he called it self-transcendence.