Concept
Love
Read through
Viewing through Hawkins Map. Marked in the reading below.
What is this lens?
David R. Hawkins (1927–2012) was an American psychiatrist and spiritual writer. He proposed a Map of Consciousness: a scale that places emotional and spiritual states at different numerical levels, from shame and fear up through courage, love, and peace. The map is influential in some spiritual communities. It is his spiritual framework, not a laboratory instrument. Its numerical calibrations are not scientifically established measurements. A number Hawkins published is not the same as a later community claim about a person or a book.
What does it look for?
- Named states, not a scoreboard. The map gives names to contracted and open states—shame, fear, courage, love—so a life can be talked about as movement rather than as a contest.
- His claim, labeled as his. When this lens is on, you are reading Hawkins’s vocabulary beside the page—not a hidden ranking of the people or traditions here.
- The Map’s numerical calibrations are not scientifically established measurements.
- A calibration Hawkins published is not the same as a later community attribution.
- This lens does not turn awakening, love, or a teacher’s face into a score.
Love is not one thing. It can mean desire, friendship, mercy, devotion to God, or the steady will for another's good—even when feeling fades.
Romantic love, familial bond, compassion for a stranger, and mystical longing each use overlapping language. Counterfeits are real: jealousy called devotion, control called care, hunger for validation called intimacy. Naming those counterfeits helps later comparisons stay honest.
- control called careHawkins contrasted power with force: attraction versus coercion. That is his word for this felt difference—not a measurement of agape, karuna, or ishq, and not a ranking of loves.
Compassion—karuna in Buddhist vocabulary—wishes that suffering ease and stays present with pain. Christian agape wills the neighbor's good even at cost. Sufi poets such as Rumi speak of ishq, passionate longing that turns the heart toward God. The words rhyme; the full frameworks do not. Love of neighbor is not automatically love of God, and neither is identical to Buddhist compassion—though all three can be placed beside each other with care.
Words used here
Plain meanings for words on this page.
agape
A Greek word used in early Christian texts for self-giving love—charity, goodwill, willing another's good even at cost to oneself. It is not the same as romantic desire or warm feeling alone.
A little deeper
Agape names a quality of love praised in passages such as 1 Corinthians 13: patient, not envious, not self-seeking. Christian tradition often contrasts it with possessive or merely sentimental forms of love.
ishq
An Arabic and Persian word for passionate love—often used in Sufi poetry for the soul's longing for the divine. It can include human love, but in Rumi and many Sufi writers it points toward God as the Beloved.
compassion
The wish that suffering ease—in oneself or in another—joined with a willingness to stay present with pain rather than turn away from it. Buddhist traditions often use the word karuna for this quality of care.
Featured connections
Where Love meets other voices
Love1 Corinthians 13
shared concept
Agape described
This chapter is one of the clearest early Christian attempts to say what love is: patient, not envious, not self-seeking—and still there when spiritual display fades.
Continue from here
Open a related page.
1 Corinthians 13
Teaching
Jesus of Nazareth
Person
Compassion
Idea
Jalal al-Din Rumi
Person
Sources
What this reading rests on
1 Corinthians 13
primary text
Classic Christian description of agape as patient, self-giving love.
Masnavi-ye Ma'navi (Spiritual Couplets)
original work
Sufi poetic language of longing and the Beloved.