Taken from this tweet on 9.9.26:
I’ve been thinking of forces of “glue,” processes or units that seem to bind together nodes into becoming a unified, coordinated thing. These ‘shared compression channels’ compress and decompress information as to carry invariant variables that matter for the system’s adaptation. I believe we can think of “love” as one of these binding forces that takes fragmentation and heals its core wound.
Fragmentation of the psyche, separating the whole into parts that can no longer reach each other due to incoherence, is a core generator function of suffering. We constantly push and pull because these parts want to fight for what they want. This commonly results in tanha, the process of becoming fused to what a part thinks it should have or not have. Of course, once a separated part gets what it wants, another part will just fight that one. This is one instance of dukkha: as parts becomes fragmented they believe what they want will make the whole satisfied, while the rest of the parts remain in hiding, remaining wounded.
In a way, these parts of ourselves are not bounded together; they are hanging on to our psyche like children do with their parents when they’re hurt. There needs to be a way for these parts to cohere together, a force that allows them to coexist and slide neatly into slots that fit together.
And just as parts of our psyche can remain separated, so to can parts of perceived reality remain fragmented. We think certain things do not matter or are not connected to ourselves. We don’t consider the karma of one being or another, passing them up like another pebble on the road. This too is a generator function of suffering, thinking what we know as reality is somehow not cohesive. What would it mean for a thing to be separated from its history, from its creators. How can the ground know of itself without considering the Big Bang? How can you consider anything at all without being amazed at the totalizing history that encapsulates it? You, as you are right now, is a cohesive product of ~everything~ that has ever happened.
To consider this is to understand and feel the forces at play. Love is a felt sense, a thing put to words we think match. But, it’s also something more for our soul. Love binds selves into a whole that neither could be alone. Love compresses totality into a thing you can hold, and decompresses back out through awe and beauty and connection. You are not moved by the tree or others by themselves in isolation, because what is implicit in that experience is the totalizing bounded forces at play, made cohesive by love. What binds fragmented parts of the pscyhe is this force, a felt sense of this act of pulling together “unsymmetrical” nodes into a coherent and beautiful whole that is in communion with another being. living or not.
To understand love as a ‘shared compression channel’ is to see and feel how it transmits information. We can compress past experiences into it, making it a reflection of ourselves. A shared word between two people bound by love carries little information on its own, but is decompressed by the other through embodiment. Love binds separate selves, two people, two parts, into a coordinated thing that can suffer together, a coherent felt whole. And, through love, information can be carried through context like the way we pay attention, a letter sent to someone, or shared silence. What matters is that in those moments we’re fused to the experience, decompressing what it means for love to live between mediums of knowledge.
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.