The Meaning of True Love

The Meaning of True Love

“Life flourishes when its systems communicate, cooperate, and remain in balance.
Love is the name we give to that state of coherence.”

Gary Null PhD

Have you ever had one of those moments when everything feels slightly off? Nothing dramatic—just enough friction to make the day heavy. A relationship isn’t going the way you hoped. Work feels constraining. Your mood is clouded, and you can’t quite explain why. Then, without warning, you feel a presence. A pair of eyes meets yours—clear, attentive, unguarded. There is no judgment there. No demand. Only recognition.

That presence belongs to an animal.

A dog. A cat. A horse. A bird. A creature whose entire reason for being, in that moment, is simply to love you as you are. Not as you perform. Not as you succeed. Not as you explain yourself. Just as you are.

That is unconditional love.

Since 1971, I have rescued and helped care for over 7,500 animals—many of them exotics: zebras, camels, elk, long-haired cattle, buffalo, Scottish Highland cattle, pygmy goats, dogs and cats of every description. Some arrived abused. Some abandoned. Some terrified. Others simply forgotten.

And across all of them—without exception—I have witnessed the same truth: love heals faster and more completely than fear ever can.

I remember a feral cat—skinny, malnourished, frightened of every sound. For weeks, it waited outside the barn door until the lights went out, then crept inside to eat a little kibble before disappearing again into the cold night. No warmth. No comfort. No safety. Yet each night it returned, and each night its eyes grew a little softer.

One evening, it didn’t run. It looked up instead, as if asking a question: Is it safe now? All it wanted was a touch—a small caress, a moment of connection. That was love in its purest form. In time, that feral cat became a devoted companion, affectionate and trusting. Love had done what force never could.

Those animals went on to love every other animal around them, and they were loved in return. I watched a 160-pound Great Pyrenees lie peacefully while two ten-pound miniature dachshunds climbed over him, and perched atop them all was Ash—the once-feral cat—completely at ease, completely accepted. No hierarchy. No fear. Only belonging.

I watched another feral kitten arrive—tiny, discarded, unsure whether it would survive. It approached the larger cats cautiously, rubbing against them, then rolling onto its back with its paws in the air, exposing its belly in the universal language of vulnerability. I’m small. I’ve been abandoned. I just want love.

And love answered.

Time and again, I’ve witnessed what unconditional love can accomplish across boundaries we insist are fixed. I saw a young camel—abused, isolated, unsure of its place—wander into the barn. The other animals kept their distance. An hour later, a pygmy goat, no larger than five pounds, walked up and simply stood beside it. The camel lowered its long neck, and they touched noses. From that moment on, they were inseparable—eating together, sleeping together, moving as one. Where one went, the other followed.

I’ve seen cheetahs bond with dogs. I’ve seen animals form friendships that defy every category we impose. There is a video circulating of a female miniature dachshund who adopted lion and tiger cubs, nursing them, disciplining them, protecting them. As adults—massive, powerful predators—they still submit to her. She inspects their mouths each morning, cleans them, kisses them, and when they play too roughly, she barks once and they separate. A ten-pound dog correcting six-hundred-pound cats.

That is unconditional love. Authority without force. Leadership without fear.

Once, while walking near a lake in Texas, where my home was at the time, I noticed movement in the brush. A pair of swans—mates for life—were grazing nearby. Instinct told me a predator was close. The male swan immediately spread his wings wide while the female moved toward the water. Without hesitation, the male charged into the brush.

There was a bobcat.

The swan had no defense. No teeth. No claws. If the bobcat attacked, it would be over in seconds. Yet the swan did not hesitate. He knew the risk. And still he moved forward.

I ran toward them, startling the bobcat, which backed away and disappeared. But what stayed with me was the clarity of that moment. The male swan was willing to die to protect his mate.

That is love stripped of abstraction.

How many parents would do the same for their child? How many people would give their life for someone they love? We know this instinctively. And yet, as human beings, we are rarely taught to honor it, cultivate it, or live by it. We are taught responsibility, productivity, obedience—but not the uncompromising integrity of love.

Animals remember what we forget. They live by it.

And if we paid attention—truly paid attention—they might remind us who we were meant to be.

From Instinct to Choice

Animals do not debate love. They do not negotiate it, ration it, or postpone it. They respond. When another being is in distress, something ancient and intelligent moves through them. There is no ideology involved. No calculation. No need to decide whether love is deserved.

Human beings, however, are different. We are capable of love—but we are also capable of avoiding it.

Somewhere along the way, we learned to complicate what animals understand instinctively. We learned to ask questions before we act: Is this my responsibility? Will this inconvenience me? What if I’m taken advantage of? We learned to look away, to justify our distance, to explain why someone else should step in.

And yet, despite all our sophistication, the body still knows. The heart still knows. When we witness suffering and do nothing, something contracts inside us. We may silence it with logic, but it does not disappear. It accumulates—quietly—until numbness feels safer than feeling.

Animals remind us of what it looks like to live without that inner fracture. They act from connection. They protect without needing credit. They love without needing proof. And when we are in their presence, we often feel calmer, softer, more whole—not because they are extraordinary, but because they are unaltered.

That same capacity exists in us.

But unlike animals, we must choose it.

Bearing Witness

I walk a great deal in cities—New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. And over the years, I have watched the number of homeless people grow into the thousands. Tents beneath overpasses. Bodies curled in doorways. Faces hardened by exhaustion and invisibility.

Most people walk past quickly. Some avert their eyes. Others explain—silently or aloud—why they cannot stop. I’m late. I don’t want to get involved. I don’t know what to do. It’s not safe. It won’t help.

I stop. Not because I have answers, but because I believe that the first act of love is presence. To bear witness. To recognize another human being as real.

One evening, after leaving Lincoln Center with friends, we walked up Broadway. It was February—cold, sharp, unforgiving. At the corner of 71st Street and Broadway, I saw a man huddled in a doorway, curled into himself in a fetal position. No coat. No protection from the cold. Just breath and will.

I asked my friends if we could pause for a moment. They didn’t like that. It interrupted the flow of an otherwise pleasant evening. But I stopped anyway.

I knelt down and said, “Hi. I’m Gary. What’s your name?”

“Jimmy,” he said.

“How long have you been out here?”

“Three or four days.”

“Where’s your coat?”

“Some guys stole it yesterday.”

I asked why he chose this spot. He explained—quietly, practically—that being near a hotel made him safer. If something happened, someone might call the police. On side streets, people disappear.

I listened.

Then I said, “This is your lucky day. You weren’t born on the street, and we’re not going to let you die on it.”

He looked at me like someone who hadn’t heard language like that in a very long time.

I asked what he needed most. He didn’t ask for money. He didn’t ask for much at all.

“Maybe a sandwich.”

I turned to my friends and said, “We all have coats. This man has none. We have extras at home. Who’d like to give one?”

No one moved.

One friend offered his gloves.

I gave Jimmy my coat.

My friends walked on ahead. That was the last evening I spent with them. I don’t need friends who are present only when life is comfortable. I want friends who show up when it matters.

We took Jimmy to eat. I told him he could order anything he wanted. He was modest, hesitant—unaccustomed to choice. I encouraged him to eat well. We ordered wild salmon, a real meal, something nourishing. I brought him back to my office and told him to take his time.

Then I went to my manager and asked for a free meal card—breakfast, lunch, dinner—for a month. I handed it to Jimmy. His hands trembled.

We walked to a department store and bought him the warmest down coat they had. Then we crossed the street to a modest hotel—a single-room occupancy place. Clean. Safe. Warm.

I paid for thirty days.

He asked, “Why are you doing all this? No one gives me anything. Why me?”

I said, “You don’t have to accept it. You can give it back if you want. But what I’m offering isn’t charity—it’s recognition. You’re a human being. You deserve a chance.”

I told him I didn’t need to know his story to know he was suffering. And if I had the resources to help, then helping was not optional. That night may have cost me a few hundred dollars.

It was insignificant.

What mattered was possibility.

I told him about four men on 83rd Street who work together collecting salvageable materials—repairing, reselling, sharing income so they can afford a room, a shower, a meal, dignity. They hadn’t given up.

A physician who survived the concentration camps once wrote that those who endured believed they still had something to live for. Those who lost that belief fell into despair—and often died.

Hope is not abstract. It is physiological.

A month later, an envelope was waiting for me.

Inside was a note.

“Gary, you have no idea how that kindness saved me. I was drowning in self-loathing. I wanted to disappear.”

There was money enclosed. For the coat. The hotel. The food. The gloves.

He had paid it all back.

He was working again. He had his own apartment.

Yes—it was just one person.

But that is how love works. It doesn’t wait to fix everything. It moves where it can. And when it does, it restores something larger than one life—it restores belief.

If every person who had enough offered a little—time, attention, compassion—we would not have homelessness as we know it. We would have far less despair, far less addiction, far fewer people disappearing into the cracks.

I’ve seen animals sacrifice for one another. I’ve seen courage, gentleness, loyalty, joy.

Love holds everything together.

It heals.
It prevents.
It gives meaning.

Love is the language beneath all language. And when we learn to listen again—to animals, to one another, to our own conscience—we remember that it was never complicated.

We just forgot.

Yes—it is only one person. But it is one person who has felt what happens when love for humanity is expressed not as sentiment, but as example. And that is how all meaningful change begins. Not through slogans or policies alone, but through lived demonstration.

Now imagine something quietly radical. Imagine if every American who had a roof over their head, food on the table, and some measure of stability chose—just once in a while—to extend kindness beyond their immediate circle. Not out of guilt. Not out of obligation. But out of recognition.

If that happened, homelessness as we know it would not exist. Despair would diminish. Depression would loosen its grip. Drug use, suicide, addiction—so often symptoms of isolation and hopelessness—would lose much of their fuel. Not because we fixed people, but because we remembered them.

I see this truth mirrored constantly in animals. I see animals sacrifice for one another without hesitation. I see them respond to vulnerability with presence, not avoidance. I see courage that does not announce itself, gentleness that does not weaken strength, and joy that does not depend on circumstance.

Animals do not pretend. They do not posture. They do not intellectualize love. They live it.

I see love. I see courage. I see gentleness. I see joy.

We simply have to learn how to understand their language—to harmonize with the energy that is already being shared. Animals communicate through resonance, not rhetoric. Through tone, posture, attention, and intention. They feel us long before they respond to us.

Your dog knows when you are depressed. It knows when your energy has collapsed inward. It knows when you are anxious, distracted, or disconnected. And when you are happy—when you are present—it feels that too. Animals live in emotional truth. That is why they are always happy when love is present. Not euphoric, not manic—simply whole.

So never take that presence for granted. Never dismiss the quiet exchanges of affection and recognition that happen every day without words. Always make a pet. Always make a friend. Always make relationship—not productivity, not achievement, not status—central to the balance of your life.

No matter where I travel in the world, I see the same truth expressed through countless cultures and conditions: love is what holds everything together. Love is what heals what medicine cannot reach. Love is what prevents harm long before intervention is required. Love gives life texture, nuance, meaning.

Love determines how gently we touch. How generously we listen. How joyfully we share.
How deeply we feel.

And yet, love is not something we earn. It is not something we discover through effort or acquire through success. Love is what remains when everything false has fallen away. When the masks drop. When the striving stops.

We spend years searching for love—in people, in careers, in recognition—believing it is something external, something bestowed. But love is not found in those places. It is the quiet field beneath them. The subtle vibration that connects all things. When a person awakens to this realization, they stop reaching outward and begin listening inward.

There is a current that moves through the universe—the same energy that animates a seed into a forest, a heartbeat into music, an idea into action. Call it God. Call it Tao. Call it consciousness or the pulse of life itself. It has many names, but only one essence. When we touch that current—when we act from it—we are in love.

The great tragedy is not that love is rare, but that we are taught to forget it.

Every child enters the world radiant and open, a being of pure love. No infant arrives cynical or hardened. But almost immediately, conditioning begins. Don’t be so loud. Don’t cry. Be good. Be careful. For every affirmation, a child hears dozens of prohibitions.

We grow through yes, not through no. Through acceptance, not rejection. Through being seen, not corrected. Yet most people learn very early that love is conditional—that approval must be earned through obedience, performance, achievement, and pleasing someone else’s idea of who they should be.

A parent raised on “hard love” often passes it on, believing it builds strength. And so the cycle continues. What begins as the purest energy in the world becomes tangled in fear. By adulthood, love has been confused with transaction—rewarded when earned, withdrawn when disappointed.

We spend decades chasing what was never lost, searching for love in the eyes of others, when it was the foundation of our own being all along.

To understand love fully, we must also understand its shadow. Fear is not the opposite of love—it is the absence of love. The vacuum left when we contract instead of open. Fear separates. Love unites. Fear whispers, You are alone. Love answers, You are part of everything.

Even the body knows this truth.

When we are afraid, the brain releases chemicals designed for survival—cortisol, adrenaline. In short bursts, they protect us. When chronic, they exhaust us, inflame us, and quietly erode health. When we are in love—when we feel connected, safe, seen—different chemistry flows. Oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine bathe our cells, restoring balance, strengthening the heart, calming the nervous system.

Biology itself tells the story. The body flourishes when it feels connected. It declines when it feels cut off.

In this way, science and spirituality quietly agree. What mystics have always called the heart, biologists now recognize as coherence. Love is not sentimental—it is regulatory. It brings systems into harmony. It is alignment. It is life itself remembering how to live.

And when we live from that place—personally, socially, collectively—we do not have to force healing. It occurs naturally.

Science and mysticism meet here—not as opposing worldviews, but as complementary ways of describing the same reality. What ancient teachers once called the heart, modern biology now recognizes as homeostasis: the body’s innate drive toward balance, harmony, and coherence. Different languages, same truth. Love is coherence. And coherence is life.

When we are aligned—emotionally, mentally, physically—the body knows it. The mind quiets. The nervous system settles. Energy flows without resistance. Love, in this sense, is not romantic or sentimental. It is regulatory. It is organizing intelligence. It is the principle that allows living systems to thrive rather than merely survive.

And yet, love is often misunderstood. We frequently mistake love for need. We say “I love you” when what we mean is “I need you,” or “I’m afraid of losing you.” But love is not possession. It does not cling. It does not grasp. Love allows.

Love is not dependent on agreement, compliance, or behavior. It does not demand loyalty as proof. It does not keep score. True love is a way of seeing—a quiet, deliberate recognition of the sacred in another being, even when that person cannot see it in themselves.

The ego, however, can imitate love. It can borrow its language, adopt its gestures, even perform its rituals. But ego cannot sustain love. Ego loves conditionally, in the grammar of transaction: I will if you will. I’ll stay if you behave. I’ll care as long as I’m rewarded.

Real love requires something ego fears—surrender. The willingness to release control. To drop self-importance. To loosen the need to be right. This is why love can feel threatening. It asks us to step out of our defenses and into uncertainty.

When we resist, love does not retaliate. It does not punish. It does not withdraw in anger. Love waits. It is patient enough to outlast every wall we build. It does not force entry—it remains present until we are ready.

Relationship, then, becomes the great classroom of love. It is in our closest bonds—intimate partnerships, friendships, family—that we encounter both our highest capacity for tenderness and our deepest reflex for fear. Relationship reveals us to ourselves.

A healthy partnership is not two incomplete people seeking rescue. It is two whole beings choosing to create something larger—a third presence, the relationship itself. That relationship must be fed, tended, and honored. It has needs distinct from the individuals within it. When neglected, love does not die—it simply goes unattended.

Love thrives on presence. On honesty. On vulnerability.

And vulnerability, in a culture that worships invulnerability, feels dangerous. To be vulnerable is to risk pain. Yet pain is not pathology—it is evidence of openness. Love asks us, again and again, to remain open. It says, Be seen. Even here. Even now.

Those who have learned this lesson carry a particular gentleness. A humility born not of weakness, but of understanding. They know how fragile life is. In their presence, others feel safe enough to lower their armor. That safety is love made visible.

Not everything that calls itself love deserves the name. Possessiveness, jealousy, manipulation—these are counterfeits. They wear the mask of affection but are rooted in fear. Love does not deceive. It does not dominate. It does not wound in order to control.

When trust is broken, the heart recoils instinctively. Betrayal can fracture our sense of safety and shatter the illusion that love protects us from suffering. And yet, paradoxically, heartbreak becomes a teacher. It shows us where we placed our worth outside ourselves, where we confused another’s attention for our own inner source of value.

Love does not abandon us in those moments. It calls us back. It whispers, You are whole already. Stop asking to be completed.

The absence of love is visible far beyond personal relationships. It shows up in our institutions, in politics, in economics. A society that prizes wealth over compassion, efficiency over dignity, success over decency cannot sustain its soul.

Children go hungry not because food is scarce, but because love is absent from the systems that distribute it. Wars are waged not because peace is impossible, but because leaders remain trapped in the illusion of us versus them. Love recognizes no such division. It knows no borders. It does not exclude anyone from the table of life.

If compassion guided policy, peace would arise as naturally as breath. Love is not weakness. It is the only strength that endures—the courage to see oneself in another, to choose understanding over dominance.

Sometimes love must dismantle what is false before it can reveal what is true. Tears are part of that dismantling. They cleanse the nervous system of stored grief. Science confirms what intuition has always known: emotional tears contain stress hormones. Crying is not weakness—it is release.

For generations, men especially have been taught to hide tenderness behind anger. They were told vulnerability is unmanly, that emotion is dangerous. But a man who cannot cry is half alive. The human body was designed for the full range of feeling—laughter, sorrow, compassion, awe. To suppress any of it is to starve the soul.

A person who can laugh deeply, weep freely, forgive easily—that person is healthy, regardless of diagnosis.

Love is both spiritual and physiological, and at times the two meet in ways we are only beginning to understand. A scientist once observed that cells thrive in a nourishing environment and wither under stress. Humans are no different. The chemistry of love—oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine—signals safety, growth, repair. Fear tells the body to defend, to contract, to survive.

Our perceptions shape our biology. When we see the world through love, our cells receive that message. When we see through fear, they receive that as well. Every thought becomes a pulse in the bloodstream. Every belief leaves a signature in the body.

To live in love, then, is not idealism.
It is alignment with life itself.

This is not metaphor. It is not poetry standing in for truth. It is molecular fact. To live in love is to live in alignment with life itself. Every system in nature—biological, ecological, relational—thrives when it is coherent, when its parts are in communication, when nothing is cut off or excluded. Love is the state of coherence. Fear is the state of fragmentation.

Compassion, then, is love set into motion. It begins with a simple but radical recognition: another’s suffering is not separate from our own. This is not pity, which looks down from a distance. It is participation—the extension of identity beyond the narrow borders of the skin. When we allow ourselves to feel another’s pain without turning away, something in us expands. We become larger than our fear.

Acts of kindness are not sentimental gestures; they are biological events. Neuroscience has shown that compassion stimulates the growth of new neural pathways and strengthens the circuits of empathy. Each act of care literally rewires the brain toward wholeness. Even the smallest expressions—a smile, a gentle word, the willingness to listen without interruption—send ripples outward. They calm nervous systems, restore trust, and contribute to the healing of the collective body.

Life rewards coherence. Cooperation, not competition, is nature’s preferred design. Cells cooperate to form tissues. Organs cooperate to sustain a body. Ecosystems cooperate to maintain balance. When cooperation breaks down, systems collapse. When it is restored, life flourishes.

Love is not confined to the personal or emotional realm. It is a cosmic principle—the organizing intelligence of the universe itself. From the smallest cell to the largest galaxy, every living system depends upon harmony. When harmony is disrupted, disorder follows. To live in love is to participate consciously in the order of things, to align one’s inner life with the deeper architecture of reality.

The great teachers across cultures and centuries have always known this. “Love your enemy.” “Have compassion for all beings.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Different words, same recognition: there is no other. The division between “me” and “you,” “us” and “them,” is a construction of the mind. The heart does not recognize it.

When we act from love, we align ourselves with the creative force of the cosmos. To harm another is to harm ourselves, whether we feel it immediately or not. To forgive another is not an act of moral superiority; it is an act of liberation. What we extend outward becomes the environment we live within. What we send out, we become.

Can love die? It can be obscured. It can be smothered beneath fear, distorted by trauma, buried beneath conditioning. But it cannot die. Love is life force itself. And life force does not disappear—it transforms.

Even when the body fails, the energy that animated it does not vanish. Our cells cooperate in astonishing harmony every moment of our lives. Trillions of them communicate, repair, adapt, and sustain us without conscious effort. This cooperation is love written into biology. It is evidence that unity is not an aspiration—it is our natural state.

When we forget this, we suffer. When we believe we are isolated, separate, alone, the body contracts, the mind hardens, the heart closes. But when we remember—when we feel our connection again—healing begins. Not because something new has been added, but because something essential has been restored.

The journey of love, then, is not discovery. It is remembrance. We are not learning something foreign; we are remembering what we have always been. Beneath every layer of conditioning, beneath every fear and defense, love remains intact.

Love is the essence of sanity in a world that has forgotten itself. It is the foundation of peace, the antidote to fear, the ground of genuine freedom. To live in love is to live awake—to recognize connection everywhere, to act with kindness not as virtue but as truth, to honor the life that breathes through all things.

When love moves through thought, it becomes wisdom.
When love moves through action, it becomes justice.
When love moves through being, it becomes peace.

And in the quiet space beyond striving—beyond identity, beyond achievement, beyond fear—love simply is. The pulse beneath every heartbeat. The breath within every breath. The single song the universe has never stopped singing.

When we listen for it, we remember who we are.