What qualia and love have in common is that they both pull us into relationships. In fact, love is a form of qualia, just like color, or smell, or texture, or pattern. Like all qualia, we only know it because we sense it; neither love nor color really exists except that we have evolved to “see” them.
Love is an idea which has evolved over time as we humans have ritualed with it. You might say, the idea of love began to manifest itself in reality as men and women began to live it…and here we are, today, with romantic love, platonic love, and all the rest of love’s complexities.
I like to think that they all become one in the Beatles’ anthem All You Need Is Love. Today there is a vague sense, a pervasive intuition of some universal love which animates the universe. It is a beautiful thought, a beautiful piece of qualia which is only slightly more imaginable to our limited powers of visualization than the theory of relativity, or the fourth dimension. Such concepts – such qualia – are beyond our ability to sense, but so was the color red, too, before we began to ritual with it. However, out of such ritualing and the qualiadelic relationships that follow from it have come eyes attuned to color and hearts and minds attuned to love.
It was always a theory of mine that tall buildings were always ornate so that they would lift our eyes upward and keep them focused above the fray of humanity. Similarly, abstract qualia such as universal love or the theory of relativity cultivate “ways of seeing” that lift up our thoughts so that we can transcend the human problem. There is ordinary qualia to look at, and there is extraordinary qualia to look at; there is routine and there is change; there is sex and there is love; there is matter and there is qualia. It is up to each of us to choose that with which we ought to consciously ritual. (Currently, of course, we need to ritual with qualia in order to counterbalance our hyper-materialistic, addictive human economy.)