Can we love each other as dogs love their owners?
Question from the Internet:
“How close is the love of a dog to humans to the love that humans experience?”
Honestly I don’t know how dogs experience love. But how experts describe it — that the dog loves unconditionally, ready to sacrifice its life for its owner without any doubts, hesitations — this is a love Humans are not capable of by default.
We are “programmed" for 100% self-love, meaning all our thoughts, desires, calculations are only for ourselves. When we seniority care, think, calculate about others, we do that only to that extent that it relates to us, to the extent our inherently self-serving, self-protecting “pleasure/pain" calculations take others into consideration.
This is neither evil nor is it sinful. Evolution programmed us this way in order to give us a chance to be more evolved, to become qualitatively higher creatures than dogs for example.
We can purposefully, methodically develop true love — a completely selfless, unconditional service of others without any spark of selfish, subjective intentions, calculations — above and against the instinctive self-love.
Then through the contrast between instinctive self-love and the consciously, methodically acquired “love of others" we will know, sense exactly what true love is, by that becoming similar, adapted to Nature’s perfect, unconditionally living system.