In this answer to a viewer's question, "letting go" author Guy Finley explains that it is possible to know and experience higher forms of love only when we allow everything we come into contact with -- including our so-called enemies -- to introduce us to the parts of ourselves that we would never discover otherwise.

We each have ideas about who we are, how the events in our lives should go, and how other people should treat us. We believe that if everything goes according to our plan, we will be safe. By the same token, anything that threatens the fulfillment of the plan is seen as an enemy. What might some of these enemies be? Other people who don't give us the respect we deserve.

Anytime you blame someone else for how you feel, you avoid seeing your pain is self-inflicted by a level of consciousness that lives to have enemies.

The real adversary in our lives, that proverbial thorn in our side that leaves us aching and angry, and then sends us looking for someone to blame, is not what we have always believed. It is not something "out there." It's something "in here": an intimate enemy.

Classroom Talk: 8/28/2022 - Who is to be counted the most dangerous of all my enemies other than the one I see as being a "friend"... who is not.

What is any form of true art - whether expressed in verse, through action, or by a sublime vision revealed - other than the heart, having awakened, stretching its wings and rising into worlds yet known...and where, upon arriving there, claims them as its own...as does the eagle the open skies through which it effortlessly soars.