Love is an evolutionary process
Passion, attachment, limerence and desire
I. The expression of one and the same fundamental energy
Love β in all its manifestations, from obsessive passion to the most stripped-down mystical ecstasy β is the expression of one and the same fundamental energy. This is the hypothesis I defend in this essay. A position both simple and radical: an energy that cannot be reduced to sexuality, even if sexuality is its source. An energy that is not confined to the individual, even if it inhabits them. An energy that is evolutionary β meaning it works upon the human species as a whole, pulling it toward something it has not yet become.
To defend this hypothesis, we must first map the territory as it has been charted until now β by the Greeks, by contemporary psychology, by neurobiology β before showing why these maps, valuable as they are, remain incomplete. And why the intuition of Gopi Krishna, a Kashmiri yogi of the twentieth century, perhaps offers the missing keystone.
II. Mapping the territory β what we know
The Greeks and the plurality of loves
The Greeks were the first to understand that the word "love" conceals several heterogeneous realities. They distinguished at least six principal forms: eros, passionate and desiring love; philia, the love of friendship and chosen reciprocity between equals; storgΓ©, familial and natural love; agapΓ©, unconditional and selfless love; pragma, mature love built over time; and ludus, love as play and lightness.
This taxonomy has a considerable virtue: it shatters the illusion that love is a homogeneous experience. What a parent feels for their newborn child, what a lover feels for the object of their desire, and what a saint feels for suffering humanity are phenomenologically distinct experiences. Naming them differently allows us to think them differently.
But the Greek taxonomy has an equally considerable limitation: it treats these forms as fixed types, conceptual boxes, without accounting for their porosity, their mutual transformations, their sometimes simultaneous coexistence within a single relationship. It photographs, where reality is film.
Contemporary psychology β toward a geometry of love
Robert Sternberg, in 1986, took a decisive step by proposing not a taxonomy but a geometry. His triangular theory of love β intimacy, passion, commitment β transforms fixed types into continuous dimensions, into variable sliders. Love is no longer a box but a point in a three-dimensional space. And that point moves over time.
This approach is more faithful to lived experience. It accounts for the fact that a love can be rich in intimacy but poor in passion, or intense in desire but without commitment β and that these proportions vary over time within a single relationship. It is a geometry, no longer a taxonomy. But Sternberg works with declarative psychological variables β what the subject feels and reports about themselves. He depends on introspection, with all its imperfections.
Neurobiology β the substrates of love
Helen Fisher brought a new dimension: measurable biological substrates. She identified three distinct neurobiological systems, each with its own hormonal signature.
The first is desire β governed by testosterone and estrogens, it orients the individual toward the search for a sexual partner without necessarily focusing them on a precise individual. The second is romantic attraction β dominated by dopamine and noradrenaline, it constitutes that obsessive focalization on a particular individual, that experience of electing the other as irreplaceable. It is the system that most closely resembles the limerence we will examine shortly. The third is attachment β sustained by oxytocin and vasopressin, it builds the lasting bond, security, trust β what might be called companionate love.
What Fisher showed with troubling clarity is that these three systems can function independently. One can desire without being attached. One can be deeply attached without desiring any longer. One can feel intense romantic attraction toward someone to whom one is not attached and whom one does not physically desire. This dissociation explains a great deal of human suffering in matters of love.
Limerence β a revealing anomaly
It is in this context that the work of Dorothy Tennov takes on its full value. In 1979, in Love and Limerence, she named and described with clinical precision a state that millions of people had lived without being able to identify it: limerence.
Limerence is characterized by intrusive and uncontrollable thoughts about the limerent object, total dependence of mood on signals of reciprocity or rejection emitted by that object, intense idealization, and β crucially β the driving role of uncertainty. Limerence thrives in ambiguity. It extinguishes itself in the presence of a reciprocity that is too certain and too stable.
What Tennov demonstrated, against common intuition, is that the object of limerent desire is not the other as such, nor physical intimacy, but emotional reciprocity. What the limerent wants is to be chosen, to be seen, to be elected. A legitimate critique can be formulated: by anchoring her definition in sexual potentiality, Tennov perhaps described the most frequent form of limerence rather than its essence. Childhood loves, asexual persons, access it equally. What she isolated is perhaps more fundamental: the need to be reciprocated, to be recognized as irreplaceable by someone one has oneself elected as such.
III. What the models fail to capture β the temporal dimension
Love as trajectory
None of the models evoked fully accounts for a reality that experience nonetheless imposes with evidence: love is temporal. It transforms itself. It traces a trajectory in the multidimensional space we have described, and that trajectory has a direction.
The most common trajectory in a lasting love relationship follows a recognizable arc. At the outset, romantic attraction is dominant β high in dopamine, intense, focusing, sometimes limerent. The body is mobilized. Thoughts are invasive. The other is irreplaceable, unique, aureolated with a perfection that owes as much to projection as to reality.
With time, and under the effect of familiarity, growing certainty, and hormonal aging, romantic attraction tends to decline biologically. Fisher estimated its natural duration at between eighteen months and three years β the time, perhaps, that nature judges sufficient to initiate a relationship capable of leading to reproduction. This decline is often experienced as a loss, a betrayal of the initial feeling. But it is an erroneous reading.
For this decline gives way to something else: a constructed attachment, an accumulated intimacy, a real knowledge of the other β no longer the idealized other of romantic attraction, but the other in their true singularity, with their limits, their contradictions, their history. What elderly couples who still love one another feel for each other is not an impoverished or residual love. It is a love made possible by the progressive fading of projection, one that sometimes reaches, in the best configurations, something purer β a love that no longer seeks to receive but gives itself.
The biological limit β and what it reveals
Menopause and andropause impose a progressive reduction in the hormonal substrate that fuels desire and romantic attraction. This reality is biologically inescapable. But it is philosophically instructive.
If love were reducible to its biological components, aging should mark its inexorable decline. Yet human experience contradicts this repeatedly. Couples united for decades report forms of love of a depth and richness that youthful loves do not know. This is not nostalgia. It is a distinct phenomenological reality.
What this suggests is important: there exist in love dimensions that do not depend on the hormonal substrate. Dimensions that are built with time, that mature precisely because the biological turbulences of romantic attraction have calmed. Mature love accesses something that nascent love cannot yet see β the other as they are, independently of what they make us feel.
This temporal dimension suggests that the multidimensional space of love is not only geometric but cinematic. It is not a fixed point but a dynamic curve. And some of these curves, traveled over decades, reach regions of space that nascent loves cannot yet inhabit.
IV. Evolutionary energy β Gopi Krishna and the keystone
An ordinary life, an extraordinary experience
Gopi Krishna was a married Kashmiri civil servant, a father, with no particular mystical training. In 1937, at the age of thirty-four, during a morning meditation, he reported having lived the sudden awakening of the kundalini β that energy which, in the yogic tradition, resides at the base of the spine and can, under certain conditions, rise to the crown of the skull, radically transforming consciousness.
What makes Gopi Krishna's testimony particularly precious is that he did not make of it a purely subjective or religious experience. He sought to understand it scientifically, to identify its biological mechanisms, to formulate a verifiable hypothesis. His major work, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (1967), is at once an autobiography, a phenomenological treatise, and a call for scientific research.
Evolutionary energy β what the concept contributes
Gopi Krishna's central thesis is as follows: there exists in the human body a biological mechanism β known in Indian traditions by the name of kundalini β that is responsible for creativity, genius, psychic abilities, religious and mystical experiences. This mechanism is not a metaphor. It is, according to him, a real physiological system, whose activation represents the next step in human evolution.
This concept of evolutionary energy is radically distinct from the Jungian libido, and this distinction is important to mark. Jung had expanded the Freudian concept of libido beyond sexuality to make of it a general psychic energy. But this energy remained essentially individual β it operated in the subject's psyche, manifested in their dreams, their complexes, their projections. The Jungian libido is an energy of the individual.
Gopi Krishna's evolutionary energy is of an entirely different nature. It is transpersonal. It works not only the individual but the species. The awakening of kundalini in an individual is, in this perspective, an advance guard of what humanity is called to become collectively. It is a teleological energy β oriented toward an end that surpasses the individual.
The love-evolutionary energy continuum
It is here that our hypothesis takes its fullest form. If we follow Gopi Krishna, sexual energy is not the whole of kundalini β it is its most elementary form, its most immediate manifestation. When simply lived as desire and satisfaction, it fulfills its biological function of reproduction. But it is susceptible of being transformed, amplified, sublimated β not repressed in the Freudian sense, but traversed and elevated toward higher forms of expression.
This continuum allows us to reconcile what our various models seemed to separate. Limerence β with its intensity, its invasive character, its total mobilization of the subject β can be understood as a powerful manifestation of this energy at a level still strongly individual and projective. The limerent is traversed by something that surpasses them, but does not yet recognize it as such: they project it onto the other, make of it the affair of a particular person.
Mature love represents a form in which this energy has been refined. It has freed itself from projection to find its real object: no longer the idealized other, but the other as other. Mystical love β whether it takes the form of Christian agapΓ©, Buddhist metta, or the divine love of the Sufis β represents a form in which this same energy has found a universal object. It no longer moves toward a particular individual but toward the whole of the living. It is the same energy, arrived at its broadest expression.
And awakened kundalini β as Gopi Krishna describes it β would be the form in which this energy operates directly at the level of the evolution of consciousness, making the individual the vector of a transformation that concerns the entire species.
Beyond Gopi Krishna β a revised hypothesis
Gopi Krishna's hypothesis, stimulating as it is, rests on an image that deserves to be nuanced: that of a sexual energy rising unilaterally from the base of the body toward the brain, as if the ascending direction were the only possible path toward awakening. Contemporary neurobiology invites a more accurate representation: the nervous system is not a one-way channel, but a dynamic redistribution network. The vagus nerve itself β that neural highway linking the brain to all the visceral organs β transmits 80% of its signals from the bottom up, from the organs to the brain. What the tantric traditions mapped as a rise of kundalini perhaps corresponds, more soberly, to an intensification of this ascending communication under particular conditions β those that meditation, breathing, and love have precisely the capacity to create.
These conditions are, at bottom, conditions of safety. Evolutionary biology teaches us that the organism redistributes its resources according to the demands of the moment: toward the muscles and the reptilian brain in situations of danger, toward the reproductive organs in situations of reproduction, toward the higher functions of the nervous system β prefrontal cortex, reflexive consciousness, contemplative capacity β in situations of profound security and bond. Love, in this reading, is not so much an energy seeking to rise as a fundamental biological signal indicating to the organism that it can cease defending itself and begin to unfold. Which would explain, without recourse to any metaphysics, why all human traditions have associated love with the widening of consciousness β and why this association is not a metaphor, but perhaps the most precise description of what is actually taking place in the body.
What if evolution were not blind? Darwinian biology has taught us to see in the living a process without direction, governed by the chance of mutations and the impersonal pressure of natural selection. But what our hypothesis suggests β tentatively, and without claiming demonstration β is perhaps more unsettling: there would exist in the living organism an internal vector, conditional but real, oriented toward a growing complexification of consciousness. A vector whose originary energy is sexual, whose path traverses the nervous system, and whose condition of deployment is neither competition nor domination, but something as simple and as demanding as safety β that is to say, in the final analysis, love.
V. What this hypothesis explains β and what it opens
The question of monotheisms revisited
If loving energy β in all its forms β is a unique evolutionary energy, then the systematic repression of sexuality by the monotheistic religions is not merely an institutional bias or a mechanism of social control. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of this energy.
The Christian, Sufi, and Jewish mystics who used the language of eros to describe mystical union β Teresa of Γvila, Rumi, the Song of Songs β did so not by accidental metaphor but because they recognized intuitively that it was the same energy. Their institution sought to dissuade them, to allegorize their texts, to neutralize their reach. But the raw text resists. This resistance suggests that mystical wisdom β when authentic β often precedes institutional conceptualization.
The universality of limerence reconsidered
The critique we have directed at Tennov β her anchoring in adult sexuality, which excluded childhood loves and asexual persons β finds its resolution in this hypothesis. If limerence is a manifestation of the fundamental evolutionary energy, and not of sexuality in particular, then it can express itself independently of the sexual hormonal substrate.
The childhood love that grieves its absence of reciprocity, the asexual person who aspires to be chosen by a precise someone, the mystic who burns for union with the divine β all are traversed by the same fundamental aspiration: to be reciprocated in their election of the other. This is limerence in its essence, stripped of its contingent expressions.
An ethics of love
This hypothesis is not without ethical implications. If love is an evolutionary energy working upon the species, then the manner in which individuals inhabit their loving experiences has a reach that surpasses their personal lives.
This does not mean that all forms of love are morally equivalent. Non-reciprocated limerence can produce suffering and sometimes violence. Attachment can become dependency. Even mystical love can be narcissistically diverted. What matters is the direction in which this energy orients itself β toward the widening or narrowing of consciousness, toward the recognition of the other or toward their reduction to an object of projection.
Recognizing sexuality for what it is constitutes perhaps the first act of an honest ethics of love. Not tolerating it, not sanctifying it conditionally within the enclosure of marriage or reproduction, but recognizing it in its proper nature: the most immediate, most embodied expression of this fundamental evolutionary energy that runs through every form of love. Reducing it to its sole reproductive function β as most monotheistic traditions have done, with remarkable consistency β is to confuse the river with one of its banks. It is to amputate a reality of its depth by retaining only its utility. For an energy is not a function. It is a movement, a dynamic, an oriented power. And sexuality, when lived fully and consciously, is not limited to procreation β it is already, in itself, a form of knowledge of the other, an access to their irreducible singularity, at times even a path toward what the tantric traditions have always known: that the body, far from being an obstacle to awakening, is one of its most direct paths. To repress this energy or condemn it to silence is therefore not an act of spiritual elevation β it is a mutilation of consciousness, a voluntary closing off from one of the most powerful expressions of what connects us to the living and, through it, to what the species is in the process of becoming.
An ethics of love, in this perspective, would be an ethics of direction: not to repress the energy, but to allow it to accomplish its natural movement β from the individual toward the universal, from projection toward recognition, from desire toward gift.
Conclusion β The hypothesis as opening
We have traversed a vast territory: from Tennov's clinical work to Fisher's neurobiology, from the Greek categories to Sternberg's geometry, from tantrism to Gopi Krishna's kundalini. This traversal is not an encyclopedic survey. It is the progressive construction of a hypothesis.
That hypothesis is as follows: what human cultures have called love β in all its manifestations, from the most embodied to the most dematerialized β is the expression of a single fundamental energy. This energy is not reducible to sexuality, even if it can inhabit it. It is not confined to the individual, even if it expresses itself through them. It is, in Gopi Krishna's sense, evolutionary β meaning it orients the human species toward something it has not yet become.
If this hypothesis contained a share of truth, it would silently invert several of our certainties. Love would no longer be an epiphenomenon of reproductive biology β it would be its deepest evolutionary motor. Expanded consciousness would no longer be the privilege of a few mystics β it would be the natural destination of an organism sufficiently at peace to cease defending itself. And violence, war, chronic precarity would no longer be merely moral tragedies β they would be biological blockages, forced interruptions of an evolutionary process the species carries within itself without yet knowing, fully, how to let it be accomplished. There remains then a question β not rhetorical, but genuinely open: what if learning to love were, in the most literally physiological sense of the term, learning to evolve?
All is love. But this love is a journey, not a state.
The idea is human. The writing is shared. The exact proportion remains deliberately unspecified.
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