Unlimited Love

Book excerpt: What if we could prove that love heals mental illness and is vital to successful therapeutic outcomes in all areas of health care? What if we could prove that people who live more for others than for self have greater psychological well-being? Professor Stephen G. Post, who heads the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, is developing a new positive scientific program that integrates practice with high-level empirical research and religious-ethical ideas in order to explore these questions. The goal is to understand how our complex brains, unique imaginations, communicative abilities, reasoning powers, moral sense, and spiritual promptings give rise to the remarkable practice of unselfish love for our neighbors--or for those we do not even know. In Unlimited Love, Post examines the question of what we mean by unlimited love; his focus is not on falling into love, which is altogether natural, easy, and delusional. Rather, he focuses on the difficult learned ascent that begins with insight into the need for tolerance of ubiquitous imperfection, and matures into unselfish concern, gratitude, and compassion. He considers social scientific and evolutionary perspectives on human altruistic motivations, and he analyzes these perspectives in a wide interdisciplinary context at the interface of science, ethics, and religion. Teilhard de Chardin commented that the scientific understanding of the power of unselfish love would be as significant in human history as the discovery of fire. In Unlimited Love, Stephen Post presents an argument for the creation of a new interdisciplinary field for the study of love and unlimited love, engaging great minds and hoping to shape the human futureaway from endless acrimony, hatred, and violence.