YouTube: Loving the Natural Way
“And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37-39).
Love is not something you do; it is something you are. If you try to love someone, you don’t really love them. You apply a concept or a technique to them. If you try to love an enemy, you will wind up suppressing what you really feel.
The best way to approach this problem of loving our enemies is to stop trying to do it and simply expose ourselves to the source of love within our being, to bask in that eternal current of inner light that shines regardless of what kinds of attitudes we hold. In other words, we are to follow the first commandment of loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind. Nothing transforms our attitudes faster than a direct experience with the free-flowing energy of love within our own being.
We have demonstrated that we cannot legislate love and acceptance of others, religiously or socially. The best we can do is enforce a measure of tolerance, and this is often tentative, based more on the fear of getting fined, sued, or doing jail time than on a genuine understanding of the varied facets of the human family. What is lacking in the average person is the direct exposure to their own Source that transcends the basis of all attitudes about all things. It is an energy that, like the sun, or the rain, or a flower, or the song of a bird, gives itself unconditionally. When we experience enough of this Source to fall in love with it, we will naturally behave just like It does, not because we are told to, but because we can’t help ourselves.
Does loving someone mean that we must embrace their unacceptable behavior? Of course not. It means that we deal with their behavior from a loving point of view. Love sometimes binds and love sometimes dissolves. Sometimes we embrace people, and sometimes we let them go. As we stay centered in love, we will be guided to not only do the right thing, but we will also do it from the highest point of view, and our actions will in some way serve to bless all involved.