The Power of Love

In the 1960s the Beatles told us that love was all we needed.

A decade later the British glam band Sweet compared love to oxygen: “You get too much, you get too high / Not enough and you’re gonna die.”

By the 1980s, Howard Jones was already asking the more skeptical question: "What is love anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?"

But perhaps it was composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster who said it best back in 1955, as sung by Andy Williams: "Love is a many splendoured thing. It’s the April rose that only grows in the early spring… the golden crown that makes a man a king."

Admittedly, looking for guidance on the meaning of love in pop music may seem strange, but together the songs testify to love’s eternally puzzling and multi-faceted nature. Romantic love is beautiful, intoxicating, and transformative. Spiritual love is defiant, transcendent, and awesome.

Poet Dylan Thomas assured us that love endures even beyond mortality:

"Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion."

Even the pop refrains point us in the same direction. Huey Lewis & the News declared in 1985 that love is a power beyond explanation: "Make-a one man weep, make another man sing… And with a little help from above, you feel the power of love." Even here, love is not just a fleeting emotion. It requires “help from above,” suggesting something eternal and transcendent.

And love has long been recognized as the cornerstone of Western morality. Leviticus 19:18 commands us: “Love thy fellow as thyself” - ve’ahavta l’re’echa kamocha. One of Judaism's greatest sages, Rabbi Akiva, called this a klal gadol, a great principle of the Torah.

This insight is shared in the East as well. In the non-dualist teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, love is not selective but boundless — not an emotion directed toward one individual, but the very connective tissue of existence. When the ego dissolves, desire and fear give way to an inexhaustible energy of giving. “You are neither the husband nor the wife,” he taught. “You are the love between the two.” True love is not confined to bodies or personalities; it is the space of shared consciousness.

Seen this way, the journey of love is really the elevation of consciousness — the realization that beneath our separateness we share the same being, the same life. This is the universalism behind "love thy fellow as thyself": love as recognition, not preference. Or as Nisargadatta put it: “Love says: I am everything.”

From the Beatles to Dylan Thomas, from Huey Lewis to the Torah, the message converges: love is both mystery and power, both intimate and universal. But the essence of love is actually as simple as it is transcendent: act with kindness and compassion. The rest, as they say, is commentary.