What is happening in the world today?  Our Spirit appears to be lost and our love relationships are continually changing.  Long ago and far away from some now unknown and no longer recalled source, the word ‘spiritual’ was an idealistic concept that was described as a:

1)      Special relationship with self,

2)      Satisfying relationship with other human beings,

3)      Superior relationship with God or some other form of Infinite Intelligence.

The understanding of these three aspects of spirituality was required to graduate from the University of Planet Earth.  All worldly cultures and classes of people at one time appeared to maintain the belief of one or all of these basic human conditions.  It was a slow, oftentimes comforting process to encompass all three at the same time.  What happened?

C. Dennett in his book, Consciousness Explained, (1991:23) suggests that when we entered the 21st century that a special phenomenon dominated our social world culture.  He believes that a dramatic shift in the way humans think about love and life has occurred because we became more sophisticated as a society.  He wrote that people used to talk and think about love in ways that are now practically unavailable – except to children, and to those who can somehow manage to suppress their adult knowledge regarding love – and that was that we use to love to tell those we love that we loved them and to hear from them that we are loved in return. 

When we were children, love was a purely simple unconditional and fairly reliable thing.  Are we now better or worse as adults?  Are we are not quite as sure anymore if we know what love means as we once did?  Has there been a truly dramatic and possibly traumatic shift in love consciousness in this day and age?

Dennett suggested that love is not completely socially uniform anymore for everyone.  As a whole, he propounded, our culture has become more sophisticated.  It is his contention that even if we think of love like those in a romantic novel best seller, we know better than to express these imagined feelings to anyone including ourselves. 

He wrote that we think that it wouldn’t be the manly or womanly thing to do today. Obviously, in Dennett’s opinion, love does appear to be a “control device” in our current society. Admitting to passionate love is admitting to being weak…and as simple as a naive child who doesn’t know any better. Is this really true in this day and new age?  Do we really think of love as a “control device?”