Love is the greatest attribute. There is nothing greater, nobler, more worthwhile, or more precious than love. Love is the only thing worth living and dying for. Life has no meaning without love. The whole creation is the greatest panegyric of love. In creation everything emanates in processions from love; everything returns in assimilation to love. Only love is real; everything else is illusion. God is love; nothing else exists. Human yearns to be part of God even as human as part of creation co-creates with God. Love is the superglue that holds the whole creation and all human relationships together. While the physical gravitational forces hold the planetary systems and the galaxies in balance without collisions, love energies in the spheres of psyche and spirit keep this world in equilibrium and harmony developing, letting it bloom, and away from blowing apart.

             This topic is so important – to me the only topic worth writing about - that a few important references to major scriptures are in order. The Bible says that "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son to save the world" (John 3, 16). The lawyer asking the question as to what he needed to do to inherit eternal life answers correctly from the law at the request of Jesus: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10, 25-27). In his last discourse - his testament and will - before the crucifixion of Jesus whom Christians consider to be the incarnation of God in history gives the most important, powerful, and crucial commandment: "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." (John 15, 12). In fact I see three degrees of love: 1. Loving your neighbor (one another) as yourself (Luke 10, 27), 2. Loving one another as Jesus loved (John 15, 12), 3. Loving one another as the Father loved Jesus (John 15, 9). St. Paul, the most important Christian missionary says: "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13, 7). St. John says: "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him ……. Perfect love casts out fear…. If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen" (1 John 4, 16-21). Bhagavad Gita says: "Still your mind in me, still yourself in me, and without a doubt you shall be united with me, Lord of Love, dwelling in your heart". "He who perceives all beings in the Self alone, and the Self in all beings, does not entertain any hatred (is full of love) on account of that perception" (Isavasya Upanishad). "For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love – this is an old rule" (Dhammapada).

             It is good to remember a few great persons on love. "One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love" (Sophocles). "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet (Plato). "Love conquers all" (Virgil). "The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love" (Victor Hugo). "Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination" (Voltaire). "Love: The irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired" (Robert Frost). "Not loving is but a long dying" (Wu Ti). "Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies" (John Donne). "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished (Goethe). Mahatma Gandhi who gave up his life in love and ahimsa: "Non-violence is perfect love". "I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever" (Rabindranath Tagore). "If you judge people, you have no time to love them" (Mother Teresa). "Where there is love, there is God also…. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love"(Leo Tolstoy). All the scriptures and great humans tell us that without love nothing else in life matters. Sigmund Freud, perhaps the greatest psychologist of the modern era who revolutionized psychology injecting life into it considered the two most important signs of a mentally healthy person to be: work and love. The quality of life in our world depends on our capacity to love. It is good to be reminded by what Henry Miller said: "The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love". While it is high time for all the kings and queens to relinquish their positions voluntarily we cannot overlook the outstanding example of King-Emperor Edward VIII abdicating his throne for the woman he loved. We have no choice but to love in order to survive as well as flourish as a civilization, and to reach our destiny. I end this segment with these quotes whose authors are unknown: "Love is hard work; and hard work sometimes hurts". "Love is like heaven, but it can hurt like hell".