Love For Oneself and Love For Others

Imagine being jealous of your own love; rather than being jealous of someone else's love for someone else, being jealous of your own love, for anyone but yourself. What if love for others were, in certain instances, and in a certain sense, infidelity to oneself?

While we often look for love from others, and not from ourselves, what we seek is the same loving validation which we cannot (or will not) give to, and receive from, ourselves. In seeking that validation indirectly, and outside of ourselves, are we perhaps committing an indiscretion? When we love and seek love from others, are we being unfaithful to ourselves?

Who would say so? We all feel encouraged to give our love to others, rather than be overly concerned with ourselves. We feel that love of self must be subdued, or else defended, justified and explained. At the same time, we believe that having love for oneself is somehow a prerequisite for loving others, and that self-love is redeemed, but only on account of that larger purpose.

So, is it that, before we have loved ourselves, our love for others is a kind of betrayal; a desperate, insecure and untethered love, which, not tied to ourselves, is loosely blown about by the wind, and loosely wrapping itself around people and things?

On airplanes, they tell people, in the event of an accident, to secure their own oxygen mask, before trying to help anybody else on with theirs. If you do not secure your own air first, you will not have the air you need to secure anybody else's. In a subtle sense, your air is also their air and your lungs feed into their lungs. Your love for others grows faint and disperses when it is not fed by a strong (i.e. loving) connection to yourself. You yourself grow petty with jealousy for your own love; for the love you tried and failed to give, and ought to have given yourself.

It is our responsibility to love ourselves, and begin with ourselves, before anything. Then we can allow our love to wander, -- or, more precisely, we can wander out together with our love, beyond ourselves, -- without experiencing a loss or diminshment to ourselves; rather, an expansion of self; for if, having sufficient love for ourselves, we harbor no resentment towards the love that is given away, then we wholeheartedly take part in the giving, and are a part of what is given.

Conversely, we can be open and responsive to the expressions of love coming to ourselves from others, and take part also in that love, inasmuch as we allow it; and thereby add our self-love to it, as one river giving into another.

Of course, we cannot forget, ignore, or deny the concurrent responsibility which society bears towards the individual. While we have a duty to love ourselves (and not to bake the poison of resentment into the bread of our love for others), so, also, does society have a duty to provide for us.

In fact, our duty to ourselves is the same duty we perform to others as members of society, just as their duty to themselves is the same duty they perform for us. In loving ourselves, and being responsive to the expressions of love from others, we help to create an atmosphere, an entire culture, of love.

How often do people reject our love, and how often do we feel rejected, simply because the ones we love do not yet love themselves, and, so, cannot or will not receive and respond to any expressions of love from others? They resent such overtures as an impertinence, as if to say, "Wait! I'm not ready," because they are entering the world, as it were, naked or half-naked; completely or partially stripped of self-love. It is the absurdity of refusing clothes because they have none, and, yet, if you are, at the same time, stripping yourself of love in order to clothe them, what sort of indecency, and what manner of absurdity, is that?

What disturbs me, though, is when we are fully clothed in love for ourselves and our expressions of love for others are still being rejected, out of some unreasonable pride or sense of propriety. In such instances, there is no shame in being naked, and the shame people feel must really be a distorted manifestation of an already distorted pride; pride which is itself a distorted manifestation, or symptom, of their lack of self-love; that is, their nakedness.

The shame of nakedness in this world, then, is a part of nakedness, just as it is impossible to be nude in the cold and not to feel chills. Moreover, the chilling winds of shame are felt, and felt more bitterly, by those who are too proud to clothe themselves with love, which they believe does not belong to them.

But, again, pride, like shame, is only a natural and necessary part, or adjunct, of lovelessness (inasmuch as a symptom of illness may be termed "natural", given that illness is itself unnatural, or indicative of some behavior or condition which runs at cross purposes to the designs of nature). Granted, it is a pride mingled with humility, but what a strange humility. And what is that, anyway? What does it mean to be simultaneously too humble and too proud to receive and/or respond to love? And how is it that there is a sense of propriety connected with not receiving and responding to love?

It is because our civilization still carries a Stoic thorn in it's pride; it still affirms the notion that each individual is 100% responsible, -- 100% to blame, or to credit, -- for his condition.

According to that way of thinking, accepting love from others is an admission of weakness and insufficiency, while expressions of love from others are not only charity, but moral displacements, the acceptance of which constitutes a form of theft.

What we require is a civilization rooted in the Christian conception of the free distribution of love; which views love not as a private possession, privately won, but as a public possession, which comes ultimately from God, and which is intended to provide for all the people.

No individual, and no family, would be shamed for giving or receiving love.

Consequently, nobody would be shamed into stockpiling or hoarding excess love originally intended to be shared; intended for others. Nor would they be encouraged to gorge and luxuriate on this soured love until they were incapable of distinguishing between the wholesome love which is theirs (that is, the love they need) and the putrefying love which they've merely become addicted to (that is, the love they still want, having been accustomed to want it by society).

Likewise, nobody would be forced to starve, unable to accept the love coming from others which is rightfully theirs, and wrongly convinced that all love, in order to be legitimate, must be manufactured directly from within.

Though it is true that love for oneself ought to begin from within, it is just as true that the love which comes from within cannot be separated from the love which comes from God. And, as true as both these things are, there is a third which is no less true than them: that neither the love which comes from within nor the love which comes from God can be separated from the love which comes from outside ourselves; as it also comes from within others, and from God. It is all the same love.

Only when love is withheld, or stored up, -- rather than consumed when it is freshest; consumed when it is needed, and by whom it is needed, -- does it become difficult to say to whom it belongs. If it has been either denied to or denied by it's rightful heir, then whose is it? Whose does it become?

A love shut out of doors, or shut in, is a breath of the Holy Spirit which has been cut-off from it's source and can no longer blow where it pleases; that which is locked out passes on, while that which is locked in collapses and dies on the floor. We must learn to open the doors and windows of our hearts to love. We must learn to break bread with love, allowing her to enter and to leave, to pass through, according to her own circuits; neither refusing her company, nor detaining her with vain conversation and excuse.

Love is a beggar, but she is also the richest person in the city.

She is a stranger, yet is known by name in every corner; she is a household name, with no home of her own. Or, rather, her place is mysteriously everywhere and nowhere. One day, she is perfectly at home with you, but the next she is restless for somewhere, and someone, else. Tonight, her bed is your bed, tomorrow it is another's.

Consider that you are twice-blessed; blessed to share your bed with her, and equally blessed to share her with someone else. She belongs to no one, yet her will is to come to everyone, when each has need of her.

She is the treasure of the city.

Sure, all of this must sound utopian. And the classic objection to the idealist or utopian thinker is that his ideal, his plan, being incongruous with the present order of things, is therefore impracticable.

But what is the truth?

In truth, the vision is the blueprint; the theory is the chief tool to be used in the formation of it's own realization in matter.

Must we begin with a faulty schematic, simply because the present structure is faulty? That is to remake the old temple, faults and all. It is renovating a thing which is faulty by design, and only made to be broken.

So, what is the proper conception?

Love, in its spiritual form, is fluid; when it enters a vessel, it spreads easily and evenly throughout the whole, only welling up in places of dryness or depression.

Love which enters an organism, according to it's purity, passes easily between the organs. If the love is impure, if it aggregates too much, becomes turgid and sticky, and bonds too tightly in places, while in other areas of the organism its presence is scarce or thin, then it cannot maintain the overall health of the structure.

Apply this to the case of civilization.

How is love permitted to work through the culture, and how is it diluted and made thick with impurities?

Relationships between individuals which do not increase their connectivity to the whole of humanity, but only to one another, must be recognized as calloused and cancerous tumors in the life of a society.

Monogamy is, in essence, a prescription for cancer; a treatment which seeks to heal the internal divisions of society (caused by lack of love) by completely fusing some of its parts, while allowing other parts to atrophy.

Rather than raise the vibration of love to where it is quicksilver-like, electric, and capable of touching every part of society precisely when it is needed, our paradigm demands that we slow love down, and attempt to sequester it in various places.

It feeds those parts for a time, then gradually isolates them from their environment, until the entire system collapses. And they in it.

Like their relationships, along with the value systems which form the substructures of those relationships, individuals themselves are manifestations of various energies and impulses circulating within the culture.

Prominent individuals are particularly extreme examples; gathering within themselves, and channeling through their own lives, those patterns of energy which are most ripe for manifestation in their cultures.

Individuals like Saint Francis are historically-sized expressions of self-love; an impulse arising within the culture which seeks the well-being of all its parts. To the extent that it is selfish, it is benevolent.

On the other hand, individuals like Hitler are expressions of self-hatred; an impulse arising within the culture which seeks the destruction of the culture itself. To the extent that it is destructive, it is self-destructive.

Homicide and suicide are two sides ((or "cides")) of the same coin; the former destroys society from the outside-in, the latter from the inside-out. Whenever a society shows neglect or contempt towards any of its parts, it shows the same for itself, and engenders in those parts a corresponding neglect or contempt for itself.

The conditions which give rise to a murderer are put into place long before the murderer himself is even born, to say nothing of when the murder is conceived. One could say, without being entirely unjust, that the great-great-great-grandfather of the victim is as guilty of the crime as any man alive.

Indeed, regardless of whether a man has been creating murderers or saints, the longer he has been dead, the more responsibility he shares; since the consequences, implications, and repercussions of his actions increase in direct proportion to the moment of his death.

Our good and evil actions posses the greatest significance for, and bear the greatest impact upon, people who have not yet been born. The fact is that we barely touch the people we impact directly, but we are like gods to creatures born light-years from now.

We must be idealists. Our thoughts eternal. Our ambitions absolute. For the worlds we imagine are the worlds we create, and the visions of today are the politics of tomorrow.