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Love: An Overview The most crippling disease of mankind is pandemic in its proportions, and it appears
to be worsening with every passing year. For want of a technical name, I will
refer to it as lack of love. Literally millions of us function on a bare
subsistence level of emotional fulfillment which
deprives us of any real sense of warmth in our lives. Without receipt of
love, we cannot give love; and this points out that
love is a currency which must always be kept in active circulation or else we
all suffer emotional bankruptcy. Human beings are social creatures, not so
much because of the herding instinct of animals but because of the interdependency
of Egos for the love that nurtures the emotional
aspect of their minds. Our psychological make-up purposely was
created with this need. Throughout the world there are vast legions of love-deprived souls who
never experience love from birth to death. They may go through all the
motions of sex, marriage and child rearing, but it all rings hollow. Their
ability to engage fully with life—and life is the interplay of people—lacks
enthusiasm and outgoingness, and their life is but a series of struggles with
few satisfying rewards. Striving for power or material gains becomes a
substitute for love for some persons, but the majority
suffer a malaise of spirit which keeps them from being successful at
anything. A sense of unworthiness dogs the person who experiences no love,
and this results in depression and defeatism. I distinguish between “experiencing” love and “receiving” love because
a chronically love-deprived person cannot participate in a meaningful receipt
of or acceptance of love should he later become involved with a loving person
who can give and express love to him. The exchange of love requires
clear mental-emotional channels of the mutual recipients. It is difficult to learn
how to love and be loved if one enters adulthood
without having acquired a loving nature in early childhood. However, many
grown persons have determinedly managed to learn how to love. Acquiring this
ability is intimately tied to one’s achievement of
emotional maturity and mental health. The crux of the problem lies with the
fact that most babies are given no love because
their parents are incapable of loving. There is a far cry
between a woman fulfilling her maternal instincts and being able to love her
child. A baby’s body is inhabited by an Ego of
thousands of incarnations of experience, and the Ego’s ability to communicate
on an emotional level is especially free when he is in the early years of a
new incarnation. He is in need of assurance of acceptability and security
while in the frustrating circumstance of trying to function through a
helpless, infant body. The Ego in a baby’s body is acute in his telepathic
perceptions, and his astral awareness is not yet overlaid
by physical awareness. An infant, therefore, is very sensitive to the moods
of the people around him, and he responds particularly to emotions of love.
When instead there are only feelings of impatience,
irritation or unconscious hostility directed toward him by his mother, he is
set upon a path of lovelessness in his life. It is not enough that parents
express good will toward their offspring and provide their physical and
educational needs. Real love is of paramount importance to their children,
but many “good” homes have none to give. A child is
intended to take in love along with his mother’s milk, and he quickly
learns to love in return at a tender age. The emotionally mature, loving
mother rears children who learn how to love by example, and they come to
expect that the world is a loving place. Such children are a delight because
of their own loving nature, which is a reflection of their environment. They
are well on their way to becoming capable, confident, outgoing youngsters who
will engage with life in a zestful, creative manner and be able to cope
successfully with the problems of life. Moreover, these healthy-minded people
develop a sense of acceptance of themselves because their successes engender
a sense of personal worth as well as the ability to love themselves.
When a person is feeling on top of the world, when he can find joy in
everything he does, and when he finds good in everyone he knows, then he
expresses love in the most expansive terms—he loves God and man and needs not
hoard his love. The person who does not enjoy a sense of worth is miserly in
his love feelings and must figuratively turn what little love he can engender
inward upon his own crippled self for sustenance. Therefore, he is not a
channel for God’s love to function through him nor can he be
in sympathetic attunement with love flowing toward him from any other source;
so, he himself blocks fulfillment of his most urgent need. We all envy the loving
person because he is so attractive to others. How, then, does one learn how
to love and thus attract even more love into one’s environment? The key lies
in developing self-worth, and this depends upon performing and accomplishing
in accordance with one’s higher ideals (rather than the current psychiatric practice
of reducing frustration by lowering one’s ideals and demands of conscience in
order to satisfy one’s desires without psychic conflict), so we are talking
about an aspect of emotional maturity again. Acquiring the Great Virtues,
being recognized for one’s contribution of skills, practicing love of Christ,
and accepting responsibility in serving others are the paths to self-worth
and self-love; and these in turn eventually allow one to give love and become
an open channel for it. Love supplants fear and hate; and inasmuch as bodily
ills, insanity, bigotry and warlike tendencies spring from fear and hate, the
loving person is free of these destructive, crippling conditions. Indeed, he
becomes attuned to Christ’s work for mankind’s
uplift. (06-1969) |
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