Please read the signature line at the end of the
article about a book you should read and a worldwide
plan to make the world a safer and healthier place
to live.
Learn more about the book and the plan at
http://billallin.com
.............................................
Love is the condition in which the happiness of
another person is essential to your own.... Jealousy
is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The
immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or
assumes that the greater the love the greater the
jealousy.
- Robert Heinlein
I have found the paradox that if I love until it
hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
- Mother Teresa
Though Mother Teresa and Robert Heinlein may have
been speaking of different kinds of love (though not
necessarily), I believe these two quotations fit
together well.
Love may be the most mysterious of emotions. All
emotions are mysterious to us because we know so
little about them. Imagine trying to explain to a
non-homo sapiens sapiens (the double use of sapiens
is correct, as neanderthalensis is also a homo
sapiens) our emotion of fear, or melancholy, or joy.
The word love, however, often requires the most
space of any definition in an English dictionary.
Heinlein says that love is a healthy condition,
yet many people who feel they have been betrayed in
love believe that love is a risky condition because
it involves trust and trust can be betrayed. If you
can't trust, then you can't love fully, so you can't
offer the kind of commitment that most love partners
seek in a relationship.
Jealousy is not a malformed version of love, as
many believe. Beneath the surface mistrust of a
jealous person lurks the dark secret belief that he
or she is either not worthy of the love of the other
person or that the other does not love them fully,
completely, only. Jealousy is not so much a badly
formed kind of love but rather is a form of self
hate. A person who dislikes or hates themself is
incapable of forming a healthy kind of love
relationship with another.
Living with a person who dislikes themself and is
jealous of another they purport to love will
inevitably develop a sour, if not hateful,
relationship.
Mother Teresa had the solution. She was under no
misconceptions about humans and their love being
perfect. She harboured no resentment toward those
who could not return the level or kind of love she
offered. She didn't forgive people their defects and
limited kinds of love, she disregarded these
completely.
The Mother cast all limitations aside and told us
to love without reservation, without restriction,
without bounds of any kind. She was so busy loving
others that the fact they could not return it the
same way was unimportant to her. She gave so much
love without any hesitation that others could not
help but love her in return. She was loved, to
varying degrees, not by one, but by millions, people
who would have done anything she asked of them.
Indeed, many still do what she asked of them, years
after her death.
Love has a most peculiar characteristic: the more
you give it away, the more you get of it in return.
It's impossible to become impoverished of love
because you gave yours all away. You can only become
rich with love by giving it.
True, some people will mistrust, some will
betray, some will hold their own love in reserve.
That will only matter to you if you love only one
person. That doesn't mean that you should have sex
with as many people as possible. Sex is entirely a
separate issue from love. You may have sex with
someone you love, but having sex with someone you
don't love or about whom you have reservations is
far less satisfying. The latter is more of a "sex
for pleasure" thing, based on the "sex for
reproduction" commandment of our hormones.
Love with restrictions or reservations is not the
kind of healthy love spoken about by either Heinlein
or Mother Teresa. A person who gives away true love
freely to everyone is never without support when one
of the recipients betrays their love and trust.
There are always others to fill the void.
Giving anything away to excess is something most
societies teach is wrong, even immoral. That
condition has never applied to love, to the best of
my knowledge and from my studies of many societies
and religions.
Learning how to cast aside all inhibitions and
self imposed limitations in order to love everyone
freely, now that's a challenge. No one can teach
that.
However, here's a hint. You have to love and
respect yourself first before you can love and
respect others freely. And you would be well advised
to ignore the imperfections and faults of others you
hope to give your love to. After all, you expect
them to ignore or forgive yours.
