True Love

There is a Love that transcends every experience that a human being can have of the sensation or the emotion that we call "love." It isn't the love we have for our family. It isn't the love we have for nature. It isn't even the love that we feel when we're thinking about a truth and we feel uplifted by it. It is a Love of a completely different order.

When we are "driven" to succeed in this world, it is always to arrive at some point wherein we will no longer feel as though something is missing in us. All such drives in us are doomed at the outset. Here's why...

Our experience in life is what it is teaching us: that the whole business of reaching for what we do and the way we do it is incapable of producing the perfection that our heart is looking for. What is it about seeing a great performer, a great athlete, a great mind that makes them seem so special? Is it what they have been able to bring into their lives as a result of what they love? Or is it the love itself that the person has become an expression of?

There are three ways to get what one wants from life: industry, cunning, or love. Industry is good but at best conditional, for it is subject to the passage and ravages of time. The "crafty" inevitably trap themselves. Love, on the other hand, liberates those who seek its company, and it is timeless. When all is said and done, this order of love has the last word because it is its own reward: whatever we are willing to let it make of us, it fashions from itself.

In this answer to a viewer's question, inner-life author Guy Finley talks about doing the right thing in our relationships with others, and how unconditional love does not mean unconditionally tolerating people who repeatedly refuse to see where they are hurting themselves and others.

Which would you rather have: a treasure room that is filled with an old potato, a worn-out shoe, and a dented can of Spam... or a room filled with precious stones, rare silks, and a chest of gold? It seems like a silly question, and yet... why do you choose a mind and heart filled with dark thoughts, anxiety, anger, and self-doubt when you could have a mind and heart...

Topics covered: Relationships help people discover hidden aspects of themselves; Most suffering comes from unconscious expectations and demands; Negative emotional reactions are conditioned responses from the past; Become curious, not furious; Childhood trauma and chaotic environments condition the brain to expect danger; People often unconsciously recreate familiar emotional pain because it feels psychologically familiar...

Topics covered: There is an interior sanctuary that awaits human beings if they will only follow the breadcrumbs of truth that lead them there; There is nothing within thought that can satisfy the soul that hungers for what is true. What we really hunger for already exists; How often have we filled ourselves with things outside of ourselves -- including images produced by our own mind -- that turn out to be futile?