It is important to distinguish Love, which has no opposite, from love, as it manifests in human relationships. For, as the Sufi poet Rumi beautifully put it, “Love is the sea of not-being and there intellect drowns.” So, as many say today, perhaps more cognitively than experientially, Love is the Divine Essence we all share.

John had some feeling for this Gnostic sense of Love, when he wrote in his first epistle in the Bible, “God is Love; and he that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God, and God in him,” where he used Greek agapē to denote the ‘Love of God’.

However, there is much confusion here because of the Christian belief that God is other and that only Jesus of Nazareth could be agape, ‘seen as spiritual and selfless and a model for humanity’. In the words of The Strongest Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, agapē is “The active love of God for his Son and his people, and the active love of his people are to have for God, each other, and even enemies.”

The cultural schism between humanity and Divinity shows how difficult it is to realize Love in practice, despite such a blissful realization being our greatest desire. Here we need to distinguish worldly desire from its spiritual counterpart, for the former can lead to suffering (duḥkha), as Shakyamuni Buddha pointed with his his three marks of Being.

We can thus only fulfil our desire for Love by recognizing that our True Nature is Anatman ‘no-self’ and that all compound structures, including our bodies, are impermanent (anitya). It is in this way that Love conquers the fear of death, including that for the near-term extinction of our species.