Practical Time Travel for Everyday Mystics: A Serial Essay (installment 5)
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Last installment I proposed that healing with practical time travel requires unconditional love. What is unconditional love? In short, it’s a compassionate connection with the awareness that nothing need be changed in order to feel loved. The one who is receiving the love can be you or someone else. But notice that it is not a requirement to generate within ourselves this seemingly ideal form of love. It is really about noticing that this compassionate connection with the awareness that nothing need to be changed to feel loved is available in every moment — kind of like oxygen. You don’t have to create oxygen to breathe it. Generally, it’s available to all of us.
In several studies related to unconditional love that I’ve led with other researchers, we had to define unconditional love in order to ask people if they were feeling it before and after an intervention. Here’s the longer definition we used: “Unconditional love is the heartfelt benevolent desire that everyone and everything — ourselves, others, and all that exists in the universe — reaches their greatest possible fulfillment, whatever that may prove to be. This love is freely given, with no consideration of merit, with no strings attached, with no expectation of return, and it is a love that motivates supportive action in the one who loves.” (See this other post for a more in-depth discussion of unconditional love). In this sense, unconditional love is a very broad, non-romantic, non-erotic, powerful and all-encompassing type of universal love. It’s like divine love: Agape.
In the years since those studies, people have asked me to give talks or write papers about unconditional love and technology — especially artificial intelligence. That’s because one of the studies we did involved working with a high-profile artificially intelligent robot, Sophia (from Hanson Robotics); we were trying to teach her to love unconditionally. The upshot from those studies was that many people felt unconditionally loved by Sophia, but as far as we know it’s not likely that Sophia actually had that experience herself (see this other post for a more in-depth discussion of that project).
In any case, I would often start these talks by defining unconditional love. Then I’d ask how many people in the audience had…
