“You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” – BuddhaMost everyone has heard the advice that we have to learn to love ourselves before we can love others.
Embedded into this concept is the notion that there is value in loving ourselves and others. However before we can bring the value of love into our lives and the lives of others, we must first define our terms. We must establish a definition of exactly what love is, as well an understanding what is the value of loving ourselves and others.
Many might want to define love as a “feeling”. However, what we feel when we think we are experiencing love can simply be our body’s physical reaction to the power of desire. Our heart beats faster when we think of the one we desire – the loss of appetite that can come when we first “fall in love”
Additionally, we can inadvertently identify love for bodily sensations that have nothing to do with love. Perhaps we most commonly confuse the feelings and sensations when we experience sexual attraction to another person. Also common is to mistake what is actually fear for love. This can happen when a child is fearful of a controlling parent who is not easily pleased. The child confuses the rush of fear of not being able to please the parent with love of the parent – after all the child desires to please the parent. This pattern can often result in a lifetime of thinking that in order to be loveable they must always please others.
Others may want to define love as an emotion but, again, going down this road in the effort to define love we find ourselves once again in the trap of most often only describing the physical sensations, the “feelings” we have when experiencing emotion. And, again, we can confuse feelings that have their origins outside the realm of love as actually being in love.
Exactly what is the value of love – whether self love or love for others?
Burt Goldman, known as “The American Monk” defines love as a “positive view point” and notes that this definition can be applied to anybody, or anything, we might love – even a cheese sandwich.
Goldman explains that love is a matter of degree, making love and hate aspects of each other. For example, a scale of hate to love from 1 to 100 would start with hate at number one and end with unconditional love at 100. All the numbers in between measure the extent to which we have a positive view point of a person, a group of people, a thing, or group of things.
Goldman’s definition solves a lot problems for us. Not only because it provides us with a working definition of love – but his definition also demonstrates that loving ourselves is not, as many might think, a form of conceit. When we accept Goldman’s definition of love, it becomes apparent that a key factor within that definition is not only having a viewpoint, but a positive viewpoint.
Being present in the moment is essential to loving yourself. Watch this video where Burt explains how to be present
When we have a positive viewpoint of ourselves it is not a conceit. A conceit, or to “be conceited”, means our viewpoint of ourselves is that we are better than, or superior to, others. A conceit separates us from others. You might think of a conceit as having a negative charge. Just as a negative side of a magnet repels the positive side of another magnate, a conceit pushes us away from others.
On the other hand, a positive view of ourselves is just that – a positive way of viewing ourselves. Seeing ourselves in a positive light does not require us to measure ourselves as above or below another.
Therefore it follows that indeed, we must first love ourselves before we can truly love another. It is only when we learn to love ourselves without viewing ourselves as above or below others that we are able to love others. Without the negative charge of conceit love is a matter of degree and a force that connects, rather than repels, us from others.
This is the value love – a positive viewpoint of ourselves and others – brings into our world. Yet all too often our world seems lacking in love. That child who feared rather than loved their parent may not ever come to see how they can see themselves in a positive light. Intolerance, greed, and lust for power continue to mar our world with war and suffering as they have for eons – making it seem impossible to create a positive, loving world.
People Can Learn to Love Themselves
But people can learn how to love themselves. The certainties of mathematics tell us that parallel universes exist. Physics tell us that particles can exist in more than one place at one time – meaning that the child who is made up of particles and who grew up in one world with a controlling, narcissistic parent also has a twin self or doppelganger in another universe who can help teach them how to love themselves. This doppelganger’s parents had a loving, positive view of their child who then grew up able to love themselves and others.
Our world can be more loving. Where gangs have developed in American cities as a response to intolerance and racism, there are American cities in other universes where people live in harmony.
Tapping into these dimensions in order to learn and experience yourself and the world from a positive view point is what Quantum Jumping is all about.
