Love
means to regard the other as yourself.
You know the other’s desires.
You sense them as your own desires,
and you do everything you can to satisfy them.
Question: People around me want nothing but to hurt me! What do we do when one tries to love and the other does not?
The mutual love that we aspire for is impossible within the ego . I “love” another person because he is good for me, but in fact, I want only to exploit him.
Love within the ego is like loving fish—I love fish because I enjoy them. In the same manner, as long as I enjoy someone I enjoy being with him and I “love” him. But the moment I don’t enjoy being with him, I push him away.
But there is another love, one which we still don’t know. It exists above our selfish considerations, above our nature. When the picture of us being parts of a single, inclusive, and interdependent system is revealed to us, we surrender to its power and the true love of others awakens within us.
And beyond this love there is an even higher love. Beyond mutual dependency, the quality of love itself is drawing us towards it, for we realize that loving and bestowing are the most exalted things in reality.
Love allows us to transcend our regular perception and begin to sense another reality.
When our natural aspiration to absorb everything within us changes into the aspiration to love and to give, the minute and limited reality we now sense relinquishes its place, and the complete reality appears to us—the spiritual reality.
One who comes to feel the spiritual reality realizes that people mistreat each other because they are naturally controlled by the ego, not because they are evil. He discovers that they were deliberately created that way to eventually attain independent awareness of the nullity of the ego. Only then will they emerge from it into a reality of love.