love must honor everyone

[roger]

My first teacher told me about 24 years ago that love, if it is truly love, must be loving toward oneself AND everyone else as well. Self-love is not truly self-loving unless it is loving toward others, and an act of love toward another isn't truly loving toward them unless it is self-loving.

 

Well, it took me a couple decades to get the point.

 

I feel that this idea can be grasped, or "remembered," it can click with you, kind of like an enlightenment experience.

 

Another thing is that it should be seen as an absolute.

 

One way to see it as an absolute is to consider the nature of choice itself.

 

Every choice is either born of love, or of fear.

 

If it is truly born of love, it will be loving toward oneself, and all beings.

 

If it is born of fear, it will be loving toward no one, including oneself.

 

Krishnamurti said that people see love as "the conflict between the me and the not-me."

 

I feel that one can overcome that conflict by grasping this truth.

[Marblehead]

And if you can't find anyone else to love just love yourself.  That's hard enough for many people.

[roger]

And if you can't find anyone else to love just love yourself.  That's hard enough for many people.

 

I agree with both of those statements.

 

And the great thing is, every situation, every choice, is an opportunity to love oneself.

[roger]

Sounds like you and your teacher believe that love is the highest concept?

 

We believe that love is the meaning of life, and that love is what we are.

 

So basically, yes.

[silent thunder]

I'll echo that.

[Marblehead]

Love is mostly a human concept.  Let's not go too far with it, okay?

[roger]

I see.

 

Would you say that love = god? Or love = Tao?

 

I think God IS love in the form of a being, as all beings are. I also think that Tao IS love, perhaps as a universal force or consciousness, the ultimate reality of everything real.

[scribe]

I've been thinking lightly on this recently, by accident.

 

First, I've always thought the term "love" is a difficult one in the first place, and gets caught up with anything from "control" and "possession", through to "pity" and "empathy". Unpicking the romantic notions we get brought up with (which are usually more possessive than anything else) takes a lot of doing.

 

Second, once you understand "love" as some kind of inherent connection - a "conjoined empathy" perhaps - then it is harder to distinguish between what is loved, and what is doing the loving - between self and the other, as you say. This sets up a non-zero-sum relationship - by combining our own understanding with someone else's experience, we both gain when they gain. ie if I empathise with someone and then make them happy, I feed off their happiness as well.

 

Hence the TTC #81, right at the end:

 

"The sage never tries to store things up.
The more he does for others, the more he has.
The more he gives to others, the greater his abundance."

 

To some extent, I suspect this linkage can be dangerous as well, and probably why are lot of empathic/sensitive people are depressed - there's a lot of hurt out there.

[silent thunder]

Yea, in my experience there were times when I thought I was in the state of love, but it was a state of want, need and desire.  If there is any sense of ownership, of debt, of give and take, then I am not in the state of love.

 

When I have experienced Love, duality dissipates in the presences of love, revealing it as the illusion it is...

 

 

Also one key feature I realized about this is that in loving there are two avenues, giving out love and for me, here was the kicker for a lot of years, freely accepting the love of others.  So often, with my pride, it was easy for me to offer love, but when it was given to me, I would hold back, out of fear, or pride, and one day I realized, that the act of negating love that is freely offered, actually was a major block to me experiencing the state of real love.  

 

To cut off that flow in either direction, is to withdraw from the state.

[cheya]

Osho used to say that real love needed no object.

It's not that you love someone or something.

You just love.

Or... you are love.

Kind of like the sun I guess.

 

Sometimes I almost think I get it...

[roger]

Yea, in my experience there were times when I thought I was in the state of love, but it was a state of want, need and desire.  If there is any sense of ownership, of debt, of give and take, then I am not in the state of love.

 

When I have experienced Love, duality dissipates in the presences of love, revealing it as the illusion it is...

 

 

Also one key feature I realized about this is that in loving there are two avenues, giving out love and for me, here was the kicker for a lot of years, freely accepting the love of others.  So often, with my pride, it was easy for me to offer love, but when it was given to me, I would hold back, out of fear, or pride, and one day I realized, that the act of negating love that is freely offered, actually was a major block to me experiencing the state of real love.  

 

To cut off that flow in either direction, is to withdraw from the state.

 

I know what you mean about feeling more comfortable doing the loving than with being loved. I've had that problem all my life.

 

The non-physical entity Orin says that one of the greatest gifts we can give to others is to be open to their love for us.

 

It's so loving towards others to want THEM to love and to succeed.

[roger]

I just thought of a time when I was profoundly loved by another, and I was very uncomfortable with it. This is a rather extreme example.

 

When I was a teenager, I was good friends with a guy about ten years older than I, he kind of took me under his wing and helped me spiritually. He definitely wasn't my teacher, just a very good friend who I really needed at that point in my life.

 

Well, one time we were at a restaurant and he said something like, "You have a good heart. There should be more people in the world like you," and he said it very lovingly. It was definitely the most loving he had ever been towards me.

 

I was deeply hurt, I couldn't handle it.

 

I had shown him great love, and he had to me also, and when he very lovingly expressed his appreciation and love to me, I felt very threatened.

 

It's an example from my own life of being able to give love, but feeling very uncomfortable receiving it.

 

That was many years ago, and I've made great progress, but remembering that experience definitely reveals something to me about myself.

[scribe]

There is, of course, a paradox here. Is "love" something that joins "me" and "you", or does "love" move us towards a state of co-existence in which there is no "me" or "you"?

 

Who is the self that is giving or receiving love? Why does it care?

 

If "love" is merely the understanding of the co-existence of things, then is it the co-existence that is important, or the things themselves? Once the things co-exist, can they be said to exist independently any more? And if not, where does the "self" fit into that.

 

It's the paradox that's hard. We fight so much to keep our sense of "self" that we even try to fit "love" into a notion of self vs others.

 

If I have a conversation with you, I speak and you speak, but is the conversation "mine" or "yours"?

[silent thunder]

So it's not that I'm in love with you. Yet somehow when I'm with you, or I think about you, that which is love in me, naturally releases and encompasses my experience of the present moment and I say 'I'm in love'.

 

It's not because you do certain things, or say the 'right things' to me, or about me, that 'make me love you'. Certain things cut through the fog of my monkey mind and shake me a bit and remind me of the love which is already present and I momentarily release my blockages on that love and it flows, naturally. Then I analyze this and say "you love me".

 

Love just is...

 

Do I really have to give myself permission to not need permission to be this love?

 

edit to add: This came to me one morning while sitting, it was a note I left for my wife by the tea pot for when she woke up.

Edited June 17, 2016 by silent thunder

[Marblehead]

I left for my wife by the tea pot for when she woke up.

She woke up, read it, then knocked you out.