Love thy neighbour

New Reply

This topic has 9 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 10 months ago by Peter.

Viewing 10 posts - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

Author

Posts
September 22, 2015 at 4:45 am #83820

jock
Participant

And this commandment I give you:
Love one another as you love yourself.

Do you follow this rule in your daily life?
Or are you in situations where you need to protect yourself? Need to put up your guard. Not be vulnerable.

Life is like that I fear. We have ideals and then we have reality. Ideally, we can love each other and love ourselves at the same time. But reality reminds us this can be extremely difficult. it is hard enough to even to accept ourselves or look in the mirror and like what we see.
All we can hope for is some kind of compromise. Life is a compromise. None of us are perfect. If we can learn to see some good in others and not emphasise on their weak points, then that is an achievement at least. We need to be practical or pragmatic is maybe the best approach. If we are too idealistic, we are bound to be disappointed.
Those that have warm hearts and display kindnesses, despite their challenging circumstances, are heroic indeed. We can all be heroes, mini heroes, minor heroes at least.

September 22, 2015 at 5:33 am #83823

Anonymous
Inactive

and then is being nice to everyone and helping others sometimes a way of avoiding our own fears/ problems? A need to be needed/ helpful etc..

and as much as many of us don’t love ourselves properly then maybe we are fulfilling that commandment but not loving others properly…

where are you at? do you like what’s in the mirror? what things are you proud of yourself for?

what makes a mini hero?
what would you do if you saw a man on a bridge?

September 22, 2015 at 5:46 am #83825
Inky
Participant
Hi jack,

Someone told me “Be nice but not TOO nice”. Even with myself, I’ll eat a piece of chocolate cake, but I won’t eat the whole cake in one sitting. That’s not being “mean” if I don’t give myself or anyone else the whole cake. Sometimes love, real love, is saying “NO”. A few years ago I had a real oppose-er to my boundaries. And when I stood by my “NO” I lost the friendship. Now, I did love this friend. Even as myself. But no regrets.

So yes, you can (should?) love others as yourself. However, the other people shouldn’t act like jerks! You can, though, even love a jerk. But from a distance.

Inky
- This reply was modified 8 years, 11 months ago by Inky.
September 22, 2015 at 6:12 am #83828

jock
Participant

thanks pomp and inky
I appreciate you posting

September 22, 2015 at 6:14 am #83829

jock
Participant

but inky yeah I get your point about boundaries
people need to respect our boundaries and we need to respect theirs

September 22, 2015 at 9:19 am #83838

Anonymous
Guest

Dear Jack:

I can understand the need to compromise in a work situation (your other post, Jack)- if there is no other visible source of income that is more palatable. In other words, if someone is paying my bills, I see a reason to compromise, or in other live-or-die/ emergency situations. But why compromise with strangers whom I do not need? This is what boggles my mind, my pet peeve about people who try to be liked by what i call people-of-no-consequence. People who sacrifice their persons and their lives so to be approved by a parent (who never will anyway) when the pleasers are not in actuality dependent any longer on the parent. And then there is the trying to people-please just about anyone. Why?

By the way, in this post of mine I am talking to myself, really, so it is between me and me but I hope there is some value in it to someone else. Maybe.
anita

October 17, 2016 at 11:37 pm #118399

John
Participant

I am seeing a very liberal woman with a 13 year old girl. When Bill Clinto was dealing with Monica he said that Blow Jobs were not sex. Remember. Well this girl had found that clip on You Tube and the girl loves Bill Clinton. So the girl bought the argument hook line and sinker. She gives blow jobs to her boy friends. This goes on relentless ly. Her mother had tried talking with her but the girl sees nothing wrong with it.

October 19, 2016 at 5:24 am #118488

ketzer
Participant

Hi jock

Good timing.

I was just contemplating this issue after surfing across one of King’s speeches/sermons on this subject.
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_loving_your_enemies/

One part in particular that stood out as relevant for me at this point in my life was this:

“There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate.”
MLKJ

A bit back I recommended an article from Robert Berezin to someone:
http://robertberezin.com/dreaming-and-wakefulness-in-the-theater-of-the-brain-everything-is-a-neurological-illusion-of-consciousness/

The article does a good job of talking about the reality of how we control our reality. We live out our lives in the theater of the mind. It is our own mind that creates the set, cast, and the protagonist. Our emotions add color to the set, control the weather so to speak. If I focus on events and others who have wronged me in life, spending my time hating on them, then I color my world gray with an overcast dark sky.

What got me surfing in this direction in the first place is that for whatever reason, life has dealt me a rather unbalanced hand of karma over the last several years. Both chance and others have seemed to be piling on the negatives with fewer positives in-between to keep me going. Though I try not to, I keep finding myself ruminating over it all and hating on those who have wronged me. What becomes apparent is how exhausting this can become and how much energy it can sap. Even though I know that ruminating over my wrongs is only hurting me it is a rather hard thing to stop doing. One part of me is saying “stop thinking about all this it is only dragging you down.” Yet another part of me is angry and fixated on finding some way to balance the scales of justice. It’s like a little battle between good and evil going on within my mind. You see people who have grown bitter and hateful as they have grown old, I don’t want to become one of them. Like everyone else, I live in my own world, created by my own mind, if I fixate on what I hate, then that world will be a dark place. Yet even knowing this, it is still hard to let go of anger and hate.

October 19, 2016 at 10:34 am #118497

Peter
Participant

Love one another as you love yourself. Do you follow this rule in your daily life?

Before I think that question can be answered I think we must understand what it means to love oneself.

What is this thing we call Love and If we were to love ourselves unconditionally what would it look like?

For many unconditional love is an unconscious expectation or requirement of unconditional allowing.
We are told love means we must turn the other cheek and that that means someone can be and do what they will and that forgiveness means saying what happened was ok. That is not love and not if we look how we love ourselves.

The expectation or demand that love be unconditional in this way is one heck of a condition!

What then is unconditional love?

When we meditate on the nature and experience of love it appears to operate on multiple planes. As conscious Beings we want who we are and so what we do to matter, to make a difference, to impact and be valued, especially in or interactions with those we care about. We seek meaning, purpose in our experience and expression of love.

We love ourselves unconditionally when we allow ourselves the experience of meaning and purpose in who we are and what we do which requires ‘getting to be’ held accountable for who we are and what we do.

When we don’t hold ourselves or others accountable we do not love them for such a thing would mean that who they are and what they do has no value.

For meaning and purpose to be experienced the qualities of accountability and responsibility must also be qualities of love. Love means we get to be held accountable and responsible for who we are and what we do. Thinking, feeling, doing, being

So it seems to me that we love ourselves when we hold ourselves accountable, in grace, for who we are and what we do. To love others as ourselves we love unconditionally and say YES to life as it is.

Loving others as ourselves is not a compromise nor does it require that we or the other be perfect.
Loving others as ourselves does not mean we make ourselves vulnerable. Acts of ‘turning the other cheek” are actually quite aggressive as it forces the person to see themselves as they are. Turning the other cheek can be acts of love or hate.

Loving ourselves means we live our truths in grace so that when we learn better we might do better. Holding ourselves accountable not out of anger or sense of justice but because that is how we learn who we are and experience meaning and purpose.

When we love others as ourselves we say YES to who we and they are.
We accept getting to be unconditionally accountable, for the good we and they do and what we might experience as bad. Not from a place of anger, hate, justice but Love.

Too often we create labels of our experience to justify and empower what we do to others and how we treat them. We call it justice or self-protection. We use hate and anger to hold others accountable, (and sometimes ourselves) but we can do not need to hate to empower our actions and being we can love.

This is not a Hate the sin love the sinner philosophy. When we say Yes to life as it is we say yes that we will missing the mark in our becoming (sin). This is not a passive allowing and accepting. We must live our truths. Saying Yes we must stand up and say no to what our truths require us to say no to, just as we must allow others to live there truths, coming from a place of love.

The emotion of anger might point to a confrontation with our experiences of our truths and others however we don’t need to empower the action we might take from a place of anger.

We say yes to life as it is by living our truths as authentically as we know them while being open to learning better. We will get it wrong just as the other we love will get it wrong yet in grace we create the space were everyone involved might become more conscious and awaken to who we are.

October 19, 2016 at 10:50 am #118499
Peter
Participant
Sorry if the above is confusing. It’s something I’m still trying to work out and the limitation of language tends to get in the way of how I experience love intuitively.

I do have a last question.

What if ‘Loving others as ourselves’ isn’t only a command but the reality of how we love?

That how we love others IS how we love ourselves and that for the most part we don’t really know how to love ourselves very well?
- This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Peter.
Author

Posts