Question: "What do you make of Nelson's suspicion about love in the extended consciousness realm?"
I am suspicious as well. Can't help but repost this:
https://images.app.goo.gl/2nunMWYKEUSkpfZK7
Love is an "epiphenomenon" arising from an environment where the older entities fade and die and power and resources must be voluntarily transferred from the older to the newer entities in order for those entities to survive. Within the human species is contained the maximum tension between empathetic love and predation. We are apex predators shaped by a harsh environment and yet we have the most delicate young requiring a strong parental team and requiring the most care of any species and this has developed our empathy. Jesus or "Christ consciousness" or the brilliant light and love experienced by some is an empathy program... a set of ideals around love. Love is a necessary ingredient of a stable psyche and a societal structure. If we are an experiment being run by "ET" then it is understandable why ET might want to inject a little Love here and there to see how things develop from there... but not too much love and empathy or everything will fall apart as well... it is a delicate balance.
By calling love an "epiphenomenon" I admit I'm being a little provocative... I'm not really saying love is
only an epiphenomenon existing uniquely at our level of development, but that Love appears when the conditions are right and that the conditions are right at various repeating fractal scales of reality from top to bottom. As above, so below... we can assume "the higher powers" also have an axis or a polarity around empathy and predation but this requires a form of death and birth. If they have attained "tree of life technology" to overcome death, then the lack of a death/birth environment is a kind of limitation upon the set of meaningful choices they can have and so they must revisit a realm that has death in order to be revitalized.
The development of human consciousness and civilization requires this tension between empathetic love and predation. Without a harsh predatory environment, the species weakens physically and mentally. Without empathy, intelligence and group cohesion decreases.
To understand any entity and the actions it takes, you must also understand its environment and its body.
Our choices require limitations. Choice without limits is meaningless chaos. The environment and the body are the set of limits upon the entity which provide meaningful choices. They are the rules of the game.
ET and entities encountered in "extended realms" must have rules limiting their choices as well - otherwise they wouldn't have meaningful choices or ability to interact. Any star-faring civilization must either have time traveling abilities or operate on longer time scales than we can imagine. They have a different set of limitations than we can imagine which makes understanding their actions difficult.
We can relate this to our development of AI agents in which we run millions of simulations... placing an AI agent in a simulated environment and let it figure things out over millions of iterations and because our "clock speed" is different than that of the computer, we age very little while the AI agent develops relatively rapidly.
Entities that interact with us are either doing this for fun or for a purpose... and if "for fun" then that which is fun is mimicry or is developed out of an environment of that which is serious. The only difference between fun and seriousness is that seriousness implies irreparable pain and loss.