You may have heard this phrase before. It's not as common as phrases like "God is Love" or "As above, so below", but it is out there. When I first heard it, I was greatly perplexed and confused by the apparent sheer absurdity of the statement. However, I have begun thinking on it recently and I believe I may have stumbled upon a rough account of the matter which proves the statement to be finally and completely true.

I myself am not completely convinced of the rigorousness of the following ideas, but I found them sufficiently interesting to be worthy of sharing. Basically, the reasoning goes like this:

Consciousness consists of two parts: will and experience. However, "Will" really means "giving love" and "Experience" really means "receiving love". In short, every conscious being exists in a state of constantly giving and receiving love. "Free will" means the ability to love (or not!) as you choose, not subject to any external constraints or predetermined path.

Anyway, the obvious question here is "What about shitty wills and experiences? Are they love too?"

The answer is yes. Kinda. You see, there's something called "conditional love". When love is conquered or waylaid by fear, it ceases to be unconditional and becomes less than it once was. Warped and perverted. There is essentially no limit to how badly warped and perverted love can become this way, but it is never beyond hope. Love can never be fully and permanently conquered. Anyway, the important thing here is that fear is not a pure-existent-thing (that's what love is) but rather the absence of a thing. Fear is a nothing.

So the next question is, "Well, conditional love does sound kinda crappy, but why does it actually hurt?"

Well, apparently beings have internal structure. More than just blobs o' meat, we are essentially walking, talking galaxies of consciousness. Just as galaxies are made of stars and organisms are made of cells, our consciousness also has a similar internal structure. This structure includes the physical brain, but also much more. Anyway, in our case, the "cells" of our being are imperfect. Our ability to experience pain and fear (negative duality) arise from imperfection in our beings at a profound structure level.

When perfect beings experience conditional love, they only experience the positive. They experience something which is good but could be better. They still experience dichotomy in some sense, but the difference is softened from positive/negative to more/less. So, you can see where the unity/duality thing comes from. Unity means a state where it is apparent that only love exists, and therefore all experiences are (not only are, but must be) positive manifestations of love. There is no pain for them, but they want there to be as much love as possible.

Back to us. When we experience imperfect love, we don't have a negative experience of love, but a positive experience of pain. This experience of the negative creates "storms" of emotion: anger, hate, fear, despair, suffering, guilt, ingratitude, sorrow, etc. This explains our world of duality and tyranny. From our perspective, things like "pain" are real, and (practically) just as real as love. For us, fear is a self-perpetuating pattern. Fortunately, fear is temporary and not eternal—unlike love.

Moving on, we can understand the nature of evil by understanding the internal structure of consciousness. Consciousness is essentially a fractal, so evil beings are made of love that is warped by fear at a very deep level. At some point, they became defined by fear, and they have allowed that fear to seep into their being at a very deep level, with their (regrettable) choices being further solidified with every selfish fear-driven choice they have made.

If this theory is true, Evil beings are to be pitied to a truly extreme degree. Some of these beings have become so enslaved by fear that it will be millions of years before they can be freed and know the joys of love again. In the meantime, they are doomed to wallow in their self-constructed fear prisons, separated from God and the joys of love. How sad! What a terrible waste! The only silver lining for those beings is that in the depths of hell they will have a chance to create a hell-conquering love. Only those who have truly braved hell can ever do so.

Anyway, back to "Only Love is Real". The point is that when our beings are perfected, we will transcend duality and only experience the positive. Non-duality consciousness is God's greatest gift to us, because it means an eternity of joy without pain or fear or darkness. This is our highest aspiration, which we can achieve by loving others as courageously and wisely as possible. By doing so, we inculcate love into our beings, driving out the imperfections which make it difficult to love in the first place.

I forgot some of the ideas I was thinking of (channeling?) while writing this down, unfortunately, but these thoughts owe themselves to a surprisingly coherent worldview which is largely consistent with other religious or spiritual texts that I have read. What do you think?