Saturday, February 24, 2007

Surprise! You are Loved

What would surprise and delight you more than anything? For me it would be to learn I am loved. For to be loved gives me a solid place to stand. It affirms from the outside what my self-love affirms from the inside. It lets me feel life is worth living. But more often than not I do not feel loved.
Most of the time we travel in an environment that seems without love. The lack of love we perceive becomes, to one degree or another, the very foundation of our lives.
Here's how it starts. From early childhood many of our experiences suggest to us there is no love, at least not for us. Then because we are human souls, not machines, we internalize this information and store it in our memory with all the meta data (physical, emotional and psychic pain and shame) that accompanies it. Then we proceed to confirm it experimentally. Because we assume a biased posture for the no-love issue our experiments and their results become skewed toward the no-love result. When it comes to the issue of Love or No-love, we are not good scientists. Neither are we good historians. We are fraudulent and the results are wrong. Not only that but we rarely stop to re-examine them. Instead, something unconscious and automatic takes place.
The wrong information from our fraudulent life-experiments go directly into our actions without evaluation. The no-love belief system publishes itself in our spiritual, moral and ethical lives.
Now, mind you, I am not talking about me not-loving others. I'm sure I will write about that another time, but now I am talking about me not believing I am loved by others.
If you can't relate I'm not going to try to convince you. If you feel a tug you may examine your own heart. I hope you do.
But if you can relate, then surely you are thinking about re-evaluating this belief system. If we were biased historians or fraudulent bio-chemical researchers we would have to go public with our dishonesty and take our lumps. If our offenses were serious enough our professional careers might not even survive this attempted turn-around. We might have to find a new line of work.
But not so with the Love or No-love problem. We open our eyes, turn and see what we refused to see in the past—that there was love in the past, and there might be love around us now trying to touch us. We go back in our memories and look with unjaundiced eyes. I'm not speaking of a small change. It would be a big change. A new world-view. A re-birth actually.
In the professional, ethical, legal world we have to take our lumps when we want to turn over a new leaf. Not so with love. Love does not stab us in the back or kick us in the stomach. Love doesn't levy fines or probationary periods. It does not assign penance or punishment. Love opens its arms and welcomes.
Surprise! You are loved. Can you believe it?

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