Everything under the sun wants to be loved. Trees reach up for the sunlight that brings them life. Flowers need the touch of the bees that pollinate them. Babies cry out to be nourished and protected. We can state this same celestial principle in different words: Everything in existence seeks what it needs to complete itself... and this includes negative states like anger, resentment, or disappointment. These negative energies do not come into existence on their own, and neither can they complete themselves - heal themselves - on their own. In other words, no pain is created in our life without there also appearing - in the moment of its conception - what it needs to complete, and to release itself all at once.

Such a timeless principle belongs to a higher level of consciousness that, as it is realized, allows us to see - and to understand - many of the underlying laws that invisibly govern our relationships, and that have been taught by illumined souls - east and west - who lived to help us learn and to grow in the ways of love. The following lesson, summarized as follows, is a major law they all taught in common:

As long as we resist - unconsciously oppose - the onset of any pain in another person, we will never be able to see, let alone understand, its real purpose... in either our own life, or in that of another. Here's the simplest way I know to summarize this law, as well as the action it implies for anyone willing to take it to heart:

For love to grow, anything that opposes it must go... including any old, familiar sense of self that would impose its thoughts on us otherwise.

This last point should be clear enough; yet, so many times - especially in times of duress - we lose sight of its perspective and, accordingly, its power to help us remember what matters most. Here's the unseen source of our forgetfulness:

Pain is blind; and because it is... unseeing, it's uncaring.

We know this is true because we've all seen how pain can make us blindly lash out - hurting others, even those closest to us. And how it's almost always after the fact that we regret having turned against them, seeing - too late - that some unconscious pain had pushed us into that action. And this door swings both ways: whenever others are in pain, they too are blinded by it in every meaning of the word. They can't see what they are doing to themselves, let alone to us.

In a word, we are locked in a true standoff: as long as each of us continues to assume the alternating role of one moment being an irresistible force (i.e., demanding what we're sure someone else "owes" us), and the next moment, an immovable object (i.e., refusing to budge from our insistence that we are the one who is "owed" some kind of payment now due), nothing new can come into this struggle to change it.

Only a greater power, something outside of this pattern can reveal it and, at the same time, release us from our unconscious role in its continuing creation.

In one respect, this mysterious power isn't really outside of us at all, but rather it dwells in the deepest part of our heart. It is a higher level of love that - while it gives rise to the opposing laws of attraction and resistance, is not bound by them. Rather it transforms these opposing forces into the unity of a new order of awareness in which is revealed not only the possibility of being able to love one another unconditionally, but also the path that leads us there.

Love's immeasurable gift, for those who will open the door to receive it, is a whole new understanding that changes not just the meaning of what we see - and react to - in others, but that also changes how we respond to what they reveal to us... about ourselves.