Dear Friends,
I am republishing this article with some editorial and conceptual changes. Please forgive me any inconvenience, and please read on….
Thank you, Sincerely, with Love, Peace, and Joy to You and Yours,
Carlo
When the ego fights love, it has substantial supposition and a lot of greed, but little spiritual foundation. Thus, this is all it has, for true love is always fully spiritual and completely free of ego and greed, so, true love is always right. When the ego wins over love, all that is accomplished is the assuagement of pride, control, covetousness, fear, and ignorance. Of course, when ego wins over love, tradition is served as well. Love is nothing about tradition (in so far as it blocks true love).
You know it is your ego is fighting your love when you feel in your heart that your beloved attracts you, but you are beginning to look for problems with your beloved instead of looking for solutions.
The ego is selfish, and is necessary for our self-esteem, but it is deleterious to the practice of true love when we do not know that love is mostly work with a strong seasoning of inspiration. When the ego is in control-in the extreme case-you get a wanton playboy or cougar. When the heart is in control, the ego is utilized to guide one’s boundary making, not to destroy the love at hand-and in the hearts of the lovers.
The ego is also that part of us that thinks we can always do better, so we leave a lover because of status, inability in bed, family satisfaction, or sexual predator-like tendencies.
When we do not know that the work of true love can overcome any challenges in our relationships, we look for ‘perfect love” and ‘perfect people”, and we fall into the category of fantasy-lovers. Fantasy lovers believe in story-book romance and in finding “the one”. They say things like, ‘we didn’t match’, more often than ‘we didn’t know how to love one another and were too lazy to find out.’
Fantasy-lovers believe when trouble comes, confronting the problem means there is something wrong with the love they have, and worse, with their partners. Wrong. Usually the conditions are causing the deleterious or unwanted behavior; not faults (though these do exist).
Trouble in a relationship is the opportunity through which true love is measured; how we deal with finding solutions, so we can continue loving, and growing-with our beloved.
Dr. Erich Fromm said Love is an art, and as an art, love must be practiced originally; with an open mind and an eye toward success accomplished through honor, purity, and selflessness-always. And selflessness doesn’t mean we stop loving at someone’s request, or surrender our love. It means we do not love simply for the satisfaction of our self and our material or physical needs; we love even when the road to our love gets longer, more arduous, and even uncertain.
We might even say that if love ever finds a worthy enemy, none is more powerful than tradition, for tradition is about keeping things stagnant (however unintelligently) and keeping things the same-out of fear, whereas love is about change, growth, and renewal; the flowers born of the seeds of courage.
Be sure; love is your only connection to the mysterious, the confluence of health, experience, happenstance and connection that may be explained with rigorous analysis of the mind and the history of people, but what brings you together is the recognition of these contributors –many of them below the surface, challenges and positive commonalities and all–and it is your true self–be it love in the pursuit of your purpose, your freedom, or your soul-mate.
And remember, when love is hard, this is love in its purest form–for any challenge in love is merely love’s school-master; testing your strength as a possible master of “The Art of Loving”.
The joys and graces of love, such as peace, emotional, and sexual fulfilment, a happy and healthy family, fidelity, unconditional affection and the continuation of the feeling of love itself, are all her benefits won through her challenges- not gifts granted through magic, which is a common misconception seen by those not educated in how to love.; in how to practice and master The Art of Love.
The Art of Love is the skill necessary in dealing with the feeling of love and the prolonging of the conditions necessary for the continuation of that wonderful feeling.
Sadly, those who fail at love may be bereft for a time, but if they tried with all their hearts and minds to keep their love alive, they are one with the divine and will be granted great opportunities to have true love again-through their sincerity and understanding of love.
However, those who fail in love due to culture, money, status, or lack of faith (the main reason for a lack of mastery in love) have failed at being human to their greatest potentials in humanity, but have succeeded in being very homo sapiens for the strength of the ego–the saviour of the animal’s greed. But don’t despair, for you who fail at love for such a reason, thus having given up, will be given the same chances again for the mastery of love, later, when the very same challenges in love face you repeatedly, until you solve them within yourself (not by meeting someone who is perfect, or is willing to change alone whilst you remain the same)–to make love work, because we achieve nothing in love without trying.
The only love that is free of such effort is the love of our family and platonic intimates; romantic love between people takes the sacrifice (meaning the giving up), of parts of the ego, greed, and time. This is how nature teaches us the value of love, and finally, how we both achieve it, and deserve it. It never comes before, for the buds never bloom before the seeds have been lovingly planted, watered, and sunned.
Finally, where there is true love in the heart, there is no guilt in the mind, because true love is not exercised with any malice or opportunism. It is a force that, as Khalil Gibran said, “creates the heart”. “The heart doesn’t create love”, and neither does the head.
