You most likely won't find the spiritual definition of love in the dictionary. Love is the wish for other to be happy. Anytime you wish for someone to be happy you are loving them. It would be a beautiful world to live in if everyone could develop this wish for everyone else. It would be incredible if we could hold onto this wish in our hearts all the time for everyone. We would all be a lot happier.
Sadly, most people only have that wish for themselves. They want to be happy all the time and don't care if anyone else is happy, especially someone they hate or anyone that is a stranger. They could care less about those people or animals or insects. They get into a relationship thinking this other person will make them happy, will give them the love they want. Once again, many people have got this all completely backwards. They want to be loved, to be given love to make themselves happy. It is by giving love to others that we find happiness and contentment within.
There are different types of love. The love we need to strive for is the wish for others to be happy. It would benefit us most if we can let that wish grow for more and more living beings over our lifetime. We don't have to reserve love for those we are closest to, we can love strangers, animals, insects, just as easily. It is not difficult to wish for them to be happy and it won't cost us anything. If we are afraid to show this love, we can keep it inside of us and hold this wish in our hearts and minds. When we become brave enough, we can show it by helping others, by being kind to them. We will be happier when we work towards helping others to become happy.
When it comes to romantic relationships, many people confuse lust with love. They think they love someone because they find them irresistible or they are sexually attracted to them. Romeo and Juliet is not a love story. It is a story about teenagers in lust. The feelings they had were lustful. They don't even know each other at all, so love hadn't even developed on that level. Romeo was an 18 year old that fell in and out of lust easily with many young women. The nature of lust tends to be rather short term. Juliet was an inexperienced, sheltered 13 year old and Romeo was the cutest guy she ever laid her eyes on. She had a school girl crush on him and he stirred feeling of lust in her. Romeo finally found a girl that responded to his advances. From there the tragedy unfolded.
If Romeo and Juliet had lived, and revealed their marriage to their parents they would have ended up being miserable. The kids most likely would have ended up disowned by their parents. If not, they would have had to listen to both families complain about the other family all the time. There would be constant conflicts and they would have found themselves caught in the middle of them. Romeo would have eventually gone after other lust conquests, cheating on Juliet without a second thought, because that was his nature. This was not a match made in heaven. It wasn't love that brought those two together.
Some people confuse attachment with love. When a person stalks an individual, the person is sick with attachment. They become obsessed with the person they are infatuated with. They dream up fantasies of being with the person. They believe they are the only ones that can make that person happy and that the person they are focusing on is the only one that can make them happy. If someone like this gets into a relationship with their intended, and then if the relationship breaks up, they can go insane. They wrongly believe that love and happiness come from their partner and when that partner leaves them, they are devastated. They may even kill their ex and then themselves, too. This is not love.
When we get a crush on someone, we are attracted to the idea of them. We imagine what the person will be like with us. We imagine all sorts of things about that person, without even knowing what they are really like. We dream up what it would be like to be in a relationship with them. None of it is true. The more we dream about them, the more we get attached to the idea of being with them, the bigger our crush becomes and it is based on nothing real. It is all fantasy on our part. If we do date them we may even go so far as to ignore what they are really like in person, preferring our dreamed up version of them. One day the reality of that person will all come crashing down on us and we will be left heart broken, when it is our own fault. We need to throw away our rose-coloured glasses and look at people realistically. We need to get to know what a person is really like before we decide to have a relationship with them.
Some people foolishly think they can change their romantic partner into the dream they have developed about them. They think they will get them to stop being who they truly are and mould them into what they fantasied the person to be like. This doesn't happen. The less you pay attention to who the person truly is the worse pain you will cause yourself. A person will only change when they themselves want to. They are not going to change their personality or their habits for you, especially if you put up with them already. Why should they? If you nag them all the time to change, they will get fed up with you and spend less and less time with you, perhaps even leaving you. Once again, so many people have this all backwards.
If you are involved with someone who is married or in a relationship with someone else, then you need to realize you are causing everyone a great deal of harm. Not only is your love interest cheating on their partner, but they are cheating on you. Why would you do that to yourself? That is not love. They certainly do not love you, which is obvious because they are cheating on you. People that cheat don't love anyone. They don't even love themselves. They don't know what love is. The cheaters are creating the karma to be cheated on in the future. Everything just goes around and around in an almost never-ending circle.
Love is an emotion. We create our own emotions. We decide how to feel in every situation we encounter. We choose to feel love. We choose whether or not to love someone. We create the feelings of love within ourselves. The feeling is not given to us. Sure other people may love us, but they don't make us feel that way. We are solely responsible for our own feelings of love. No one else makes us feel love. We may feel loved, but they do not make us feel love towards them in return. That is our own choice.
Most of us at some point in our life, have encountered a person that was attracted to us. They may have declared their love for us, or demonstrated their feelings for us somehow. If this was someone we were not attracted to, we may have discouraged them. If other people were responsible for our feelings, then why was this person not able to make us love them? They couldn't. We had decided for whatever reasons that we did not find the person attractive and so did not choose to return their love and affection.
Now if we found someone that was attracted to us and we found them attractive back, we may have shared our mutual feelings and could have even gotten into a relationship with them. Even so, they did not make us feel love for them. We decided this time that for whatever reasons we wanted to love them in return. They did not give us our feelings of love, they couldn't. They may make us feel that they love us, but they do not make us feel that we love them. How can you know this? Well, there were probably times, that you felt attracted to someone that did not return your feelings. You were not able to make them love you, because we cannot make others feel the way we want them to. We are all responsible for all of our own feelings all of the time. No one else makes us feel anything. We are solely and completely accountable for our own feelings. You love by your own choice.
We want to develop love that is the wish for other to be happy as often as we can. You create the feeling of love within yourself. You can love everyone and everything you encounter in life, if you choose to. You can wish for every living being to be happy. You are completely responsible for your own feelings of love, so you can choose to feel this way anytime you want to. Wouldn't you be happier if you chose to be filled with love rather than with hate? The decision is yours to make.
You can find the podcast for this here: https://youtu.be/7RxDzxoQyGk
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