Love Is Not Pain….

Love is the bottom line of life. But we are capable of twisting Love into pain. Why do we do this? We do it through ignorance of what Love really is. In order to get to pain, we have to twist Love so much. Love grounds and encompasses everything; pain is so paltry in comparison. Love is Self-illuminating; pain cannot sustain itself. And yet, we manage to confuse the two.

We all like to think we know the difference between care and cruelty. The truth is, most of us have been fooled at some point in our lives.

If we are going to conflate Love with pain, care with cruelty, then cruelty has to have something within it that can fool us. What it has is attention. If attention is all you are looking for, then the difference between care and cruelty will not even occur to you. Attention is not dependent on feeling; without feeling, you can easily confuse cruelty and care. Someone is seeing you, talking to you, spending time with you. The focus is on you. You will see the attention, but not feel the intention.

Another component to confusing care and cruelty is that you have to lose yourself in the other person. This is something that can happen instantly, even in a casual encounter; it has to do with how you relate with others. Resonating—responding like a tuning fork when a vibration within you matches one within someone else—is one way of losing yourself. So, ironically, the quality of your attention to the other person allows them to be cruel to you.

Here is a fourchotomy that illustrates how we confuse cruelty with care and allow others to be cruel to us:

It is so easy for some of us to think of ourselves as adaptable, understanding, and accommodating, when in truth we allow ourselves to be held hostage by someone who is injuring us. We might also see ourselves as fighting for our freedom when we are pointlessly rebelling against people who are truly caring.

In order to free ourselves and see clearly, we have to get off the grid completely. If we call ourselves “loving” and “caring” without deep reflection, we fool ourselves. We are then cruel to ourselves and others. We have to be off the grid in order to really Love. Love is not on any grid.

To remain on the grid, we have to not love ourselves. There has to be a level of not loving ourselves in order to allow ourselves to be treated cruelly. Once we accept that, we can then change.

If Love is the bottom line and we don’t Love ourselves, we are totally uprooted. There is no care, no feeling. We are lost in our idea of the other person and ourselves—lost in a series of ideas that calls whatever is occurring something it isn’t. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel the emptiness, the hurt, and the sadness of this situation, then we will continue to call it care and love. When Love is an idea, there is no Love. It is impossible to perpetuate Love if we don’t want to be in the Heart.

If we summon the courage to face the vibrations we have always had and feel them fully, we then will be able to discern the difference between cruelty and care. We will be headed toward the Heart, and therefore toward Love.