A Vision of Love First
In December 2017, a week before Christmas, I hit my rock bottom.
The Origin Story of Love First
Earlier that year, I lost a 7-year relationship, then my job, and then my sense of identity. I was working in Tech, and with the Cambridge Analytica revelations came a painful awareness that my industry was operating far more unethically—and destructively to the fabric of a healthy society—than I ever knew.
No relationship. No job. And did I even want to work in this same field anymore?
I truly felt like I was rudderless at sea, unsure of who I was and wanted to be. And soon I spiraled into a depression, worse than ever before, to the point of trying anti-depressants for the first time in my life. My therapist agreed that with everything going on, my usual coping mechanisms around depression weren’t enough.
Come mid-December, I thought I was finally starting to feel a little better. My ex and I had three (very) late-night conversations in a row to process the end of our relationship. The next night I went to my first-ever play party. I thought life was gonna get better…
And then I had to put my cat to sleep.
My furry friend of 13 years, Buranshe had been with me through all of my losses, even sticking it out through two years of Feline Leukemia with the help of blood transfusions. But now, a week before Christmas, that was no longer a viable solution, and there was nothing left to do other than stretch a little more time out for her, but in so doing give her an unhappy (potentially miserable) life experience.
It was time to say goodbye to her, too. In fact, when I heard the news from the veterinary hospital, I realized that she had been tying to say goodbye to me all week—I had just been too busy with the ex and the party to notice.
After a beautiful, long, and tearful goodbye, my roommate Judy and I bought pints of Ben & Jerry’s for comfort, and watched Big Hero 6 (the internet’s recommended movie for loss and grief).
A Lens of Grief
The next day, I declared my rock bottom. I said out loud to myself, “Faruk, get your shit together. What are you going to do with your life? Figure it out!”
I sat down on the couch and started grieving all my losses. My therapist had pointed out that I hadn’t really grieved the losses of my relationship, job, or even identity yet. “How do you do that?” I asked.
“Same as grieving loss through death: you sit with your feelings, let yourself feel whatever comes up, and you reflect and process them.”
I can do that. So I started vaping some THC to feel my feelings more deeply, and began grieving the loss of my relationship.
As I had just spent three long nights in a row with my ex, the week before, processing everything that went wrong or poorly during the seven years, I now only wanted to think about all the good things we’d had. All the love, the beauty, the romance, the moments of joy and connection. I wanted to make sure to remember that relationship positively, in the end.
After feeling complete on that, I moved on to grieving the loss of the job. I loved the work I had been doing, and so I reflected on all the positive experiences and contributions I had made. That led into me grieving the loss of identity, my self-worth and self-image that had been tied to having work. As I untangled those two, I looked at my contributions to the field, and thought about what I still loved about Tech as an industry and its potential for good.
Then, it was time to grieve the loss of Buranshe.
Right away, one of the first things I realized was that no matter how long it had been since I’d left the house, and no matter how upset she may have been with her food and/or water having run out, she always came to greet me at the door with love, first.
And those two words stood out to me. They sparked something inside.
I’d recently recorded a voice note for myself while walking around town in which I ideated on wanting to act through a lens of love, first. A way of channelling my energies to carry the feeling of love as the first experience for other people, no matter what I was doing or saying.
A Lens of Love
Love first.
Those two words unlocked something in my brain, and in my heart. I looked back at all the grieving I had just done, and I noticed that there was a consistent pattern to all the best experiences, best moments, best contributions and outcomes throughout my life. There was a structure to love, one that could be understood… reverse-engineered, even. And seeing that structure now, I could see how it showed up all throughout my life, going all the way back to my childhood. And I saw how, every time I had acted ‘through’ this pattern or this “lens of love,” I had gotten my best results, outcomes, and experiences. All the most connective, nourishing and healing moments in my relationships. My most creative ideas, my most innovative contributions, my most important moments of growth and change: they had all come when love was more present.
And I now saw how and why love was more present in those moments.
And, I saw how whenever it wasn’t present, whenever I didn’t act through this lens of love, I had gotten mediocre or even poor results, outcomes, and experiences.
So then I asked myself the question that changed everything:
“If acting through this lens of love consistently leads to the best results, but I’ve only done so in a coincidental, unintentional manner so far… would acting through this lens consistently, every day, lead me to a life of consistently the best results, outcomes, and experiences?
And that’s when my mind exploded with ideas, because I immediately just knew: the answer is Yes.
I grabbed my phone and started writing down every idea that was coming to me, for how this structure of love ‘worked’; how we could learn it and make use of it; how we could spread it and teach it to other people so that they, too, would be able to get a lifetime of best outcomes in everything they did; how this connected to a ton of scientific research explaining the science behind why these ideas and perspectives worked on a psychological, physiological, biological, and neurological basis. And I started to see my future coming through in flashes, of me on stages, doing public speaking again, sharing with people how this framework could change their lives in the way it was about to change mine. I wrote down plans and strategies for how I would devote my life to Love First, how I would bring it into the world, and make it my mission to spread this message from Love itself. This is going to change the world!
I sat there writing down everything the universe was downloading into my brain, for six and a half hours.
Eventually, I wrote down an instruction telling myself to go to bed! And so I put my phone down.
And then I cried.
That morning, I started the day declaring my rock bottom, feeling the lowest low I had ever felt in my life. And I ended the evening feeling uplifted beyond measure, lighter and higher and happier than ever before.
I wept because I had charted a course out of the swamps of my depression, and I felt like I was sailing in smooth seas under clear blue skies again. I felt a clarity of purpose I never knew a person could feel.
It was as if I had been trying to solve the puzzle of my life all year long but with the pieces upside down, and just now, all of the pieces suddenly flipped over and I could see the big picture of my life. The vibrancy, the color, the richness and texture and the joyful feelings it evoked.
I went to bed a brand new Person.
A Reckoning
The next morning I got to work right away. I started exercising my body—one of the more than hundred items of my cosmic download—and sharing what had happened to me. I blogged, I tweeted, I wrote Facebook posts and recorded videos to tell the people I loved about my life-changing experience. I started registering domains and figuring out how to get this message out, and how to build the technologies that would support it.
I was tireless in my new life, publishing and sharing and talking enthusiastically to everyone, everywhere, all the time. I was a changed man, but because my obsession was a deeper understanding of Love as a cosmic current and the structure it possessed—as opposed to, say, having found a known religion—people were fascinated and intrigued.
For the most part, anyway.
After a couple of weeks of enthusiastically (and, frankly, excessively) sharing and spreading all the ideas that had come and were still coming to me, my roommate came home one night and asked to talk with me.
“I’m really happy for you that you’ve had this vision of Love First,” she started, “and I really like some of the things you share, some of the ideas and perspectives. But then sometimes you say things that I don’t really understand, and they seem weird and out of character for you, but you seem really excited about them…and I just feel like something’s off, so I thought we should chat.”
Judy had been with me, supporting me through this entire past year of loss and depression, so if she felt something was off, I was gonna take it seriously. We explored what might be the cause of the discrepancy and ‘weirdness’: was there a disconnect between what I shared online versus in person? Was there a lack of context? We chatted for hours but couldn’t pinpoint any clear or particular reason.
Eventually, it was late and Judy needed to go to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I laid in bed, wide awake, pondering it over in my head. Eventually, I wondered: what else besides Love First had changed in my life?
That’s when I remembered that I’d started on anti-depressants, for the first time in my life.
And those can have side-effects.
I started researching the side-effects of Prozac, late at night on my phone. The first list, common side-effects, was not at all relatable to me. Headaches, dizziness, anxiety—nope, I wasn’t having anything like that. The second list, uncommon side-effects, was longer, but none of it applied either: vomiting, diarrhea, sexual problems… in fact, I was feeling better and more excited in my body than ever before!
The last list, rare side-effects, was so long it was alphabetized. I scrolled through, shaking my head at every item, until I got to ‘S’: “Shaking or trembling in the hands or fingers.” Okay, that one’s true for me. I’d noticed it a couple days ago, and had decided to quit coffee since I didn’t feel like I needed it anymore, anyway.
The next item: “Talking enthusiastically or excessively beyond control.”
Oh shit.
This was me all over.
I took a screenshot, sent them to my therapist with the note that “Hey, I’m having these two side-effects of Prozac, what do I do?” and finally fell asleep.
The next morning, she texts back: “Those are the symptoms of mania, if they get worse they could lead to a psychotic break. You need to call your doctor right away.”
On the phone with my doctor, I ask if I can stop taking the pills, as I don’t want to put them in my body ever again. “Normally you’re supposed to ween off them slowly, but yeah, it’s probably better if you stop.”
Okay, but now what?
What was I to do with my life’s work, my life’s mission, the best thing that had ever happened to me?
I told my parents about the latest revelation, and amazing parents that they are, they bought me a plane ticket home for a few weeks to detox in my hometown environment, get grounded again, and be taken care of by them.
During those weeks, as I detoxed from Prozac, I looked at every aspect of Love First: the philosophy (as it had started to become), the mission, and its vision of the future that was emerging. The research and knowledge that it was rooted in was all sound—it was other people’s peer-reviewed work that I was building on. No mania there. The ideas that I had, the new perspectives and modalities, and how I was connecting the dots between everything… all that was still solid, too.
The timeline in which I thought this idea was going to change the entire world? Oh, yeah, that was mania.
And as I detoxed, I noticed one other thing: my hypomanic state had made me forget that other people don’t have the same context in their mind that I do, and it was blinding me to social cues. I was doing and saying things that made perfect sense within the context of my mind…but were definitely out of character and ‘off’ for anyone who didn’t have the same context……which was everyone else.
After thanking my family for their wonderful loving support and healing help, I flew back and continued with my mission.
Now, the work truly began.
A Vision For The Future
Love First was quickly becoming more than ‘just’ a philosophy with a framework for understanding Love as the cosmic current it is. As I was researching and learning more and more about love, and everything it touches—which, frankly, is everything—the entire thing grew to incorporate ever more and greater ideas, more strategies, more technologies, more teachings and philosophy and models and essays and stories and…
It started crystallizing into a comprehensive vision for what the future could look like.
Love First offered a new way of being in the world, for individuals and entire groups of people all operating in harmony with one another. And the idea of humans pursuing their dream life while that very journey was also one of healing our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the planet, and remembering who we are, offers profoundly exciting ripple effects across society.
Driven by that vision of hope, of Love, I kept distilling the practices that bring you into closer and closer alignment with Universal Love, a cosmo-centric understanding of love that is fundamental to the universe. And I was experimenting with the core teachings of Love First; in fact, during all of 2018 I was running three simultaneous Love First Experiments with my life, each of which proving to be remarkably successful in their own way.
My hypothesis—that my life would become an endless series of best moments, results, and outcomes if I lived a Love First way of life 24/7—was proving right more and more with each passing day. Even without the Prozac-induced hypomania, my life was quickly becoming epically exciting. I was having more meaningful connections with the people in my life; the exact right opportunities came to me at perfect times; and I felt deeply fulfilled in the work I was doing. Even my sex life had become incredible!
But my dream life was merely the conduit for something bigger. I was merely the first experiment to test the hypothesis.
Love First is about everyone. It’s about the story we can write for humanity’s future together, and what we want that future to look like.
At this point, Love First is a framework consisting of 55+ Pieces that form a larger ‘puzzle’ of perspective, inspiration, and magic. Together, they offer a plethora of tools to help guide your inner and outer world transformation, tap you into the cosmic current of Love, and bring awe, wonder, and serendipity into your life like never before. You might already be doing many of the things Love First teaches, and you might already have experience with the magic of Love as it emerges from them.
What this bigger vision for our collective future looks like is something that isn’t just mine to share, it’s ours to co-create.
Alan Kay taught us that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” What you’ll learn, over the course of your Love First journey, is that the future is shaped heavily by the stories we write for our future. Fiction can and does become reality, not because of ‘coincidence’ but because of the nature of the universe. So it is imperative that we write stories for the future we’d like to live in, both to help inspire ourselves and others, and to put energy on that future and make it more likely to become reality.
Right now, Love First is in its first Volution with Codex 🌀 1. Once more of the philosophy, framework, and teachings are published, we’ll start exploring exactly how (and why) we can co-create a better future using Love.
For now, I invite you to dream big. Dream happy. Dream of a loving, kinder, sustainable and beautiful world.
A world where we harness every regenerative method to heal our environment and replenish animal populations.
A world where we are supported in healing the emotional wounds of our ancestors and present-day selves.
A world wherein policies that are widely popular drive the systems of our society.
A world made with Love, First.