Big Love Sci-Fi Part VIII Unconditional Love and Science Fiction - c

This is the third part, part c,  of "Unconditional Love and Science Fiction" which is part of the Big Love Sci-Fi series of posts I've been doing. This one is #8 in the Big Love Sci-Fi series.

Here's the list of links to the previous posts in this Big Love Sci-Fi series:

Here's the first post in this series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/06/big-love-sci-fi-part-i-sex-without.html

And here's Part II in this series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/06/big-love-sci-fi-part-2-drama-of-illness.html

Part III in this series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-love-sci-fi-part-iii-how-big-can.html

Part IV in the series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-love-sci-fi-part-iv-mystery.html 

Part V in the series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-love-sci-fi-part-v-modesty.html

Part VI in the series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-love-sci-fi-part-vi-unconditional.html

Part VII
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/big-love-sci-fi-part-vii-unconditional.html

Today is Tisha B'av, a day that has lived in infamy for thousands of years. Many severe calamities that have befallen the Jewish People have happened on this date (by the Lunar Calendar -- by odd coincidence this year the Ninth of Av falls on the 9th of August!). Some great sages have thought that the Messiah will come on this day, and G-d's Love will become instantly evident to all the nations. It's a day for settling up scores, for taking consequences. 

So today is a great day to study Kaballah, Jewish mysticism, and see what we can learn about Love.

This time consider a famous work by a man known as The Rebbe, titled Tanya.
http://www.lessonsintanya.com/lit/

In Tanya, Chapter 33, The Rebbe wrote about happiness, about joy.

Two quotes from that chapter are in the list of 12 short sayings or paragraphs (The 12 Pesukim) that The Rebbe recommended every child should memorize (they've been made into little songs you can hear them all over the web if you google 12 Pesukim).

#10 of the twelve is the quote from Rabbi Akiva "To love your fellow as yourself, "is a great basic principle of the Torah. Rabbi Akiva taught (he had thousands of students) that we should love our fellow just like ourselves. So every good thing you do, share it with your friends, and help them do it too! This is an important part of keeping the Torah.

#11 of the twelve is a quote from The Rebbe's book on Kaballah, Tanya, Chapter 33. "The purpose of the creation of every Jew and of all the worlds is to make a dwelling place for G-d in this world." (the "worlds" referred to are the worlds of the Kaballah.)

The principle message I get from #11 is that each and every person is unique, created for a unique purpose, just like each level of reality is created for a unique purpose, and that purpose is to make this whole world into a dwelling place for G-d, just as the Holy Temple in Jerusalem was built to be a dwelling place for G-d, a place where humans could get close to the divine.

And that individual uniqueness is the bedrock principle behind the concept of Unconditional Love.

Each individual human being is unique. And each human has a unique purpose in this pattern we call "reality."

If you can't grasp that concept of uniqueness, there will always be something a person can do to become undeserving of your love, thus your love is not unconditional.

Because each individual is unique, there's no way to compare one person to another, or one person's achievements or behaviors to another's.

This is the essence of the concept "Soul Mate" -- you are unique, and your irregular edges fit exactly into the irregular edges of 1 other person. No other person is going to fit into your edges that exact way.

So when you find that one, unique, person that person is irreplaceable. You each help the other to fulfill the individual unique purpose for which you were created.

That awareness of the special precision in the way you "fit" into each other eliminates all thought of divorce, and there simply is nothing that can ever tempt either party to stray.

Nobody else is attractive once that unique bond is in place. That unique bond is your happiness, and it is a happiness which celebrates your Creator. Through that celebration you spread Joy into the world. That bond, that Love, truly can conquer all, and have a blast doing it, too!

If you haven't met your soul mate, and don't know anyone who has met one, and if you also have no confidence in the concept of a Creator who makes Souls, there's no way the idea of Happily Ever After can make any sense to you. It's fantasy, not reality. Happily For Now is the best you can hope for, and even that is probably an illusion.

That kind of perfect marriage and perfect family has always been rare, but it seems to me only recently has the very idea of the possibility been scoffed and scorned out of existence. It's still possible to re-ignite the vision, and with that to bring examples and role models to general attention. There is a lot of real-life material out there to work with, it's just that a lot of people don't believe it's real.

So the Science Fiction Romance writer's job becomes to re-create the icons of Unconditional Love based on the concept of unique individuals.

Remember the post I did here on this new icon of Romance.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html

Scroll down that piece and look at the two images which are iconic.

Let's now ponder how the Creator of Souls, who leaves some of us without a Soul Mate in this life, can command us to Love.

This comes under the heading of Worldbuilding. There are a lot of different postulates that could form the foundation of a vision of Reality as Created by a Creator. Some of those visions might be brought to Earth by non-Humans from "out-there." For such non-humans to be a useful ingredient in an SFR novel, their notion of Reality needs to have some basis in our common assumptions.

So let's blend Kaballah with Quantum Mechanics.

What if the Creator of Souls doesn't stop creating? What if all of our Reality (all the galaxies like grains of sand) is actually re-created from scratch every nano-second?

That's actually a notion from Kaballah. But physics has found how, at ultra-small particle size, our universe is actually discontinuous. That's at the level of the particle/wave argument -- are electrons particles or waves? The answer is probably.

An electron doesn't "orbit" a nucleus, as once taught in the Bohr Atom model. An electron in an "orbital" is here and then sometimes probably there, and the zones of highest probability form a cloud around the nucleus.

This concept is the basis of Star Trek's transporter, or matter transmitter, which is now an actual laboratory toy that can transport an electron (sometimes.)

So if we visualize "reality" as a porous froth of probability being recreated in pulses, we can describe the fabric of "reality" as pure energy that appears crystalized from our point of view, but is really sizzling.

Or put another way, we can conceptualize the truth of Reality as a Song the Creator is singing -- all of reality is just energy vibrating, and isn't that what Music is?

So what is this energy of which matter is formed? We could postulate that the basic energy that forms all Reality is Love, the Creator's Love, Unconditional Love.

Our Free Will, harmonized with the Creator's Love, would then definitely conquer all.

How do we harmonize with the song of creation? By loving the Creator with all our heart, as Commanded.

If you love the Creator, then you love the creation -- all those unique humans, each with some problematic traits and deeds to their credit, are nevertheless miracles. The very existence of reality is a miracle.

So the "Icon" of Unconditional Love could be musical or based on color tones which are also vibrations.

So if the Action Genre has reached its peak of popularity through the Superhero (Superman first appearing in conjunction with World War II and today the Superhero is 3-D big screen fare) -- then perhaps the Superhero of the SFR genre will be someone who is capable of Big Love?

This new Icon would probably be a couple, Soul Mates who become role models of Love and Acceptance among those who can't conceptualize the Unique Human.

This Supercouple might be, say, be a human/non-human pair would have to deal with people involved in horrendously terrible things, and that would be the source of "conflict" for their story -- not conflict between them, but conflict among those they deal with.

But they would succeed (not without difficulty) in igniting unconditional love in those whose Souls had become dark and ashen.

Where they walk, miracles follow, because their love is Big Love Sci-Fi.

OK, you don't like using Kaballah, pick another mysticism -- Hinduism, Sufi, Zen, whatever provides you with a way to show readers that the Happily Ever After ending is real and possible, even if rare.  Do this exercise over with as many philosophies as you can. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com