Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Love: The Biological Directive

My friend Pat Black posted these words on my facebook page this morning. I have to share them with more people. I plan to return and comment later. After I shower. And tend to household chores.
Humberto Maturano is a biologist. I love this guy's mind and what he brings to the understanding of the living. He describes love as a biological directive. He describes love as separate entities charged with their own self maintenance and life as joining and tying their individual maintenance with that of anothers. He suggests that in the evolution of complex beings, anything that is more than one cell, that love is the force that joined them. One can not move forward in life without the other's well being and maintenance also moving forward. Our edges of self are no longer an intact barrier to other. So I now think of failed love affairs as ones that could not bring this third being into life. This place where they overlap and become one. This new place that brings sustenance and the maintenance of being to two instead of one.

Maturano views this as a physiological relationship. He is not viewing it through a emotional lens since it is basic to life not just mammals.

Thoughts? Responses? I welcome them!

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