Why should we love one another person or animal? Why should we care? Why do we care? What is Love that causes us to care? What’s its source?

It is because the “other” is not ultimately separate from us.

They are a manifestation of our own deepest Self, the Self of the cosmos, the Divine, the panentheistic God, the Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being, the absolute Truth Body of existence itself. They are not divided from us in this deepest essence. We are made of the very same substance. We all participate in the very same being. We share the same Godhead. We are all “children” of this same Godhead, this Absolute, expressions of its Self, emanations of the cosmos, like rays from the sun.

We all came from the ground of this Earth, from the stars that generated its elements within their cores. The iron in our blood that carries the oxygen molecules to our body’s cells was formed, fused together, in a supernova explosion of such a star billions of years ago somewhere in this neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy. Our current star, the sun, gives us all the energy to live and breathe. It is what powers us and empowers us, endowing us with all power, energy, light.

We are all that Sun/Son, the “Light of the cosmos” (phos tou kosmou, Matt. 5:14), as well as that “Adam,” which in the Hebrew adamah means “ground” or “earth.” We are all that “Eve,” in the Hebrew chavah/chayah meaning “to breathe, live, or give life.” Only egos are divided from one another, or so they think in their minds, in the psychological constructs that emerge in their thought processes, developed in the ironically named “self-awareness” of childhood, which differentiate them as separate subjects, independent “selves,” objects distinctly apart from each other and the world. But at our core, beyond that ego, we are One with it all.

When we love another, when Love pulls us toward the “other,” it is our deepest Self that is seeking wholeness again within itself. Love draws us together, because Love is our deepest Essence. It is the Divine within each one of us, which is identical in each one of us, and which only desires to be One again. It desires its Self, to heal that which is broken, to reconcile the separation, to bring at-one-ment to the One once again, so that the two may be One, not only in essence, but also in substance. It desires to liberate the prisoners of ego, to set these oppressed free, that they may realize their true Self. All forms of Love are manifestations of this Divine attraction, it is the gravity which draws all things into union, into fusion, into wholeness.

The ego senses there is something wrong with its condition, and it is right about that. It is divided from its essence. When the ego centers of our mind are put offline, when the regions of the brain which correlate with our individual sense of self become deactivated, either through contemplative practices or other means, we (the soul) become vividly aware of this Oneness. We become aware of our divine Self, this neoplatonic One. All separation falls away, and we are One with all things, all beings, all others, all people, all creatures, the All in All, in infinite perfect Love. And this is not a pathological state, but actually a truer perspective of how things really are beyond the ego, when the ego-self of mind is transcended. It is Truth its Self.

The ego acts as a veil, and is the veil, obscuring our vision and knowledge of this Oneness, of this nonduality, of this at-one-ment. It is itself what constructs the duality in the first place, the subject-object split in our psyche, which divides “us” from all other things. It is our Fall. But when this Fall falls away from consciousness, then there is no more dualistic split. It is all seen as One Consciousness. I believe this is the state of consciousness in which the great sages, saints, gurus, prophets, swamis, mystics, and contemplatives of history arrived. They saw the truth of our deepest being, how it is One, and that Oneness is its divinity. I have seen it too, not my ego-self, but my soul has seen it. My soul is it, and it is yours too.

But we cannot live from that state. We must have a finite localized perspective from which to navigate the world in life. But once the soul has seen this oneness, the ego surrenders to that greater Whole, and it was the surrender of ego that allowed the soul to see it. The ego submits itself to the greater Reality that the soul witnesses, knows, and is. The ego has been overcome, and so it steps aside and becomes a servant of that One (John 16:33; Rev. 2:7, 17, 26; 3:21; 5:5; 6:2; 17:14).

Our souls know that we are ultimately One, and it is only our egos that make it appear that we are divided. It is an illusion of the ego-mind, the psychological “self,” a kind of mirage in the desert; the duality we see is not what we think it is. When the ego-self falls away from consciousness, there is no duality. It was the ego that causes that duality, that sense of brokenness, of “sin,” that apparent separation from the God of the cosmos. When it is absent, the One God is fully Present in consciousness.

Solidarity, comm-unity, comm-union, comm-unal, comm-unication, comm-une, comm (with, together), unus (oneness, union).

Together we are One. We are Love.

I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine.

-D&C 38:27