How much love is Enough?
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When a man is loved properly, he stops needing and desiring to “get” love – the love he receives works to restore his integrity. Then, he becomes capable of focusing on giving love without expectation for it ever being returned. His natural way of “receiving” love is facilitated through his own will as “giving” love.
When a woman is loved properly, on the other hand, she relishes in the experience and lets it empower her to her core in a never-ending way. She can never receive too much, because receiving love ignites her connection with herself. This becomes an ongoing exercise of continuously increasing her capacity. There is no end to this ocean.
It is a very different perspective and can be very intimidating for men, thinking that “they” are the ones who are not enough. Actually, quite the opposite. When a man sees himself as enough it becomes much safer for a woman to receive his love without compromising her safety. When a man is resolving his love addiction, it doesn’t necessarily need to come from a woman or even another person. It can come in a variety of ways, including from himself. A man’s ongoing “needs” are a myth – enabling a love addiction is not love, it is the maintenance of a broken system.
When a woman receives love, she has an inherent knowing that this is “her” and is not separate from her. Her deep knowing about the impersonal nature of love is generally impossible for men to understand and so men can feel threatened by love itself.
It’s not a coincidence that women are rolling their eyes at men for not grasping this.
Men tend to want to be rewarded for the love they give, and women know this. Women often end up betraying themselves just to appease this vampiric tendency in men who are unwilling to address their shadows. Through this self-centric mechanism, men often enslave not just themselves but everyone around them.
In this typical situationship, life then becomes a game of resources and survival and is no longer about love at all. This is how the prostitute shadow forms itself – everyone prostituting themselves for what they think is going to happen. Manipulating others – giving to get.
The spirit of Will is giving, while the “getting” part is usually quite unconscious. This angry entitlement to “get” births the child shadow – “now that I have given it is only fair that I receive!” We play this game with the universe and project it onto anyone close to us as an extension.
When the child’s rebellion doesn’t work out, this is when we surrender to apathy. We give up on enjoying life. We throw in the towel. We wanted to embody goodness, but then we come to see it as ineffective and useless. We end up seeing goodness as just another form of self-sabotage.
This births the sado-masochistic victim shadow. We are now swimming in pain, and doling it out as a management strategy. This place of victim consciousness is even worse than failing to survive – it is resenting life. We have gotten here because of the failed strategies of the other shadows. Our culture’s shortcomings have now completely hijacked our body and mind and are being channeled through us on the instinct of traumatized animal reactions.
And yet, many of us still mentally value “being nice” and “getting along with others” and so we disconnect from that pain completely and learn to reside in our minds. This disconnection from the body places us squarely in the dream of the world – society’s rules and society’s game become our rules and our game. We fully subscribe to the mental constructs handed to us.
The victimhood and the rage and the surrendering of our values still exist inside of us, and yet we think we are “smart” because we can still “think”, not realizing that we are pruning all of the useful thoughts and reinforcing all of the programmed thoughts. We have made ourselves subconsciously into an “evil” person, and so our existence becomes a constant striving to compensate for the guilt we have for existing.
This all comes from not being properly loved and reflected in the first place. It’s not too late. And there is no required prescription for how this is to happen – love can penetrate our cells in different ways for everyone. We must learn to swim back upstream through the mess that has been created in our nervous systems. In doing so, we are challenged to re-live every stage of self-abandonment as described above.
Such a hellish proposition is not very attractive but is a necessary purging of the poisons we’ve accumulated. The fluidity of freedom exists upstream – increasing all we have inflicted upon ourselves.
To wrap things up, here is a photo of my cat and I spending the morning together.
Joshua
