The Cosmic Consciousness Illusion
The feeling of being connected to a larger interconnectedness, a vastness, combined with a sense of love, is a common emotional experience across cultures. We explore this in some detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality when exploring the emotional subset of “love.” We suspect the feeling experienced when contemplating concepts like the vastness of the universe or the interconnectedness of man is a product of the “love” system misfiring.
More specifically, a common refrain of the Guide to Sexuality is that “evolution is a cheap programmer” and will often just use pre-existing “code” for some new task. In the case of love, an emotional subset that first evolved to get you to care for your kids was hijacked by evolution to facilitate long-term bonds between mating pairs (evolution will almost never create a totally new system if it can hijack an existing one; that is why our system for recognizing and performing dominance displays uses our arousal system).
The love system is not actually triggered through sexual contact with your mating partner (though having sex with someone will lower the threshold for falling in love—especially in sexually inexperienced women). Instead, the love system kicks in with people about whom you think deeply and extensively and around whom you feel safe and connected.
Imagine an engineer trying to design a system to measure the amount of water in a bag. While he could design an algorithm that checks the dimensions of the bag and calculates the volume, this would be very difficult. It would be much easier to just weigh the bag. The catch is that such a system is very easy to spoof were someone to, say, fill the bag with rocks. This is what is happening to the love system when you fill your head with ideas about some trusted thing around which you feel safe.
When you think about anything sufficiently vast, confusing, and safe (whether it’s the universe, the interconnectedness of humankind, or the nature of the Trinity), you are likely to trigger the love emotion. You can also instigate the experience by using certain drugs that dramatically lower the threshold for those kinds of thoughts. It is possible, even common, for something to generate a feeling of profundity and love without actually being profound or caring about you.
To understand the mechanism that causes the love emotion is not to make it any less special. That said, anyone who wants to convert people to a particular way of thinking and understands the above system can use it like a magic trick to their advantage.