What is love?

That question has captured the human imagination since the first caveman laid his eyes on the first cavewoman.

It’s been said that all great literature is about two topics: love and death. One can easily fathom why as they are the two great mysteries of life.

The greatest minds of all the past ages have taken a stab at defining love — from the Biblical prophets to Shakespeare to the comics we see in newspapers across the country every day.

What have they discovered?

They’ve found that we really don’t know what love is.

The best that can be said about the definition of love is strangely similar to what Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography in 1962.

I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of materials I understand to be embraced … but I know it when I see it.

In other words, while we can’t define love exactly, we know it when it happens to us.

So where does that leave us?

Well, we “know” what love is to one degree or another. We’ve felt it (hopefully!) and we feel it for others (once again, hopefully!). We even understand the “shades” of love that we experience — our love for something like ice cream as compared to the love we feel for our children. We understand the difference between romantic love and love in a friendship.

We understand that.

What does Charles F. Haanel say about love that can help us?

Love plays an important part in Mr. Haanel’s philosophy, The Master Key System. According to him, it is essential that we feel it because it is, in one sense, the be-all-end-all. In Week Fifteen, he wrote in Point #11:

It is love which imparts vitality to thought and thus enables it to germinate. The law of attraction, or the law of love — for they are one and the same — will bring to it the necessary material for its growth and maturity.

In those two sentences, we discover two very important things.

First, we see that love is what makes our thoughts grow. Without love, our thoughts would stagnate. They would have no “push.”

The second thing we find is that the law of attraction is the law of love. They are one and the same!

Think about it for the moment. What Mr. Haanel is implying is that as we feel for something and thirst for its attainment, we will attract what we need to make it happen.

Love equals attraction.

In Week Twelve, Mr. Haanel wrote this.

19. We find this truth emphasized wherever the power of thought is understood. The Universal Mind is not only Intelligence, but it is substance, and this substance is the attractive force which brings electrons together by the law of attraction so that they form atoms; the atoms in turn are brought together by the same law and form molecules; molecules take objective forms; and so we find that the law of love is the creative force behind every manifestation, not only of atoms, but of worlds, of the Universe, of everything of which the imagination can form any conception.

Yes, love makes the world — and perhaps even the Universe! — go ’round.

It should be noted that this love is not the warm, fuzzy, gushing, saccharin love that some think it is.

It’s not loving “unconditionally”…

… it’s not hugging trees or blessing every little insect that crosses your path …

… it’s not putting on shows of concern and caring wherever you go.

What Mr. Haanel means is that love is life …

… and life is love.

It’s the will — and the enjoyment and the thrill — to live!

It’s feeling you get when you want to do something.

It’s the feeling you used to get (and hopefully still get) on Christmas morning.

It’s the feeling of seeing possibilities instead of fears and dangers.

It’s the thrill of moving forward and knowing that each step is taking you on an adventure.

That’s living.

That’s life.

That’s love.

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You’re going to love these books because books are a form of love.