Institute for Research on Unlimited Love
From the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love website...
Visionary research does alter the human future. Many of the major improvements in the human condition emerged from paradigm-shifting research. Once no one believed that polio could be prevented, but a small group of researchers went on to change human history. In a time when group conflict, rudeness, selfishness, and hatred are so evident in the world, and when the technologies of destruction are so vast, we owe it to the human future to bring the best methods of science to the study of that which is most good. It is urgent that we learn how to enhance the human potential for a love that affords for all humanity the full moral and spiritual significance that we otherwise acknowledge only for ourselves, or for those most like us.
With support from the Templeton Foundation, the Institute has funded nearly 50 scientific research projects at universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and Case Western Reserve University. The questions being addressed are important to us all. How, for example, can we raise children who shape their lives around unselfish love and the service of humanity? How can we develop cultural and educational environments that foster such behavior? Is it true that kind and benevolent people generally experience higher levels of well-being, happiness, and health? How can love be made more lasting in marriage and family life? How do individuals whose loved ones have been killed or maimed manage not to succumb to hatred? Where do love and justice converge? Is unselfish love - understood evolutionarily, developmentally, and spiritually - the deeper and most fulfilling ground of human nature? How do catastrophies like 9/11 or the tsunami wave elicit such compassionate responses? Can we better understand rescuers who put their lives on the line for perfect strangers? Is love the “Ground of Being” that philosophers and mystics speak of perennially?
