Werner Erhard once called our families’ attitudes of opposition and neglect “a bound expression of love.”
I’ve puzzled over that for years, but now I’m beginning to see some things in my own behavior (the only laboratory I have) that shine light on it for me.
Anger, hatred, and resentment are all bound expressions of love, I think.
I’m watching myself, penetrating below irritability to the levels of anger and hatred that lie hidden beneath them.
And I keep coming upon this same statement when I think of anyone I’m angry at or hate: “I hate you because I think that you don’t love me and I want you to.”
Therefore my wish to be loved is the source of my hatred and resentment. Being denied what I want brings anger if I’m attached to something. But the desire for some people’s love is so great that our anger at seeming to be denied is also great.
I look deeper.
All I want from other people is to be loved and respected by them. Isn’t that what the gangstahs say? R-E-S-P-E-C-T? I assume that’s all anyone wants from any of us.
But then issues intervene and our ways of solving them largely fail. At best residue is created; at worst the house catches fire.
Of what value is it to me to learn that my anger, hatred, and resentment is a bound expression of love? What difference does it make?
It depends on what dimension you want to limit the answer to. The answer is interdimensional, as AAM might say, and it isn’t necessarily reachable by logical steps.
Awareness of this trap I fall into allows me to see it plainly when I’m about to fall into it again. I see that I’m angry at you because I think you don’t love me. I’m now at a choicepoint. I could fall forward into the same anger I always do (Third-Dimensional). Or I could look at the matter more probingly.
And here we take that non-logical, interdimensional step. Ordinarily you’d think that I’d be looking for some better way of “getting” love from you or, barring that, from someone else.
But by and large I don’t get my love from other people. For the most part, I get my love from my own heart. Boy, I guess the implications of that statement will put the somebody-done-somebody-wrong song folks out of business.
So what am I doing seeking it from other people in the first place? I now stop seeking it from outside and turn again to my heart. The love flows and eighty percent of my dilemma lifts.
I realize for myself that, if everyone was able to have what they wished – that is, if the law of freewill were honored by all parties – then there would never be this withdrawing from each other.
The one would ask and the other would grant and that’d be the end of it. There’d be no need to draw apart from each other. Such is Fifth-Dimensional life.
Another way of saying that is that the ideal will be realized when everyone is “above the line” that separates conscious from unconscious awareness – or in the transformed space. Only transformative love is powerful enough to sweep away feelings like anger, hatred and resentment and reveal the truth of the matter. And that truth is that our love predominantly comes from the heart.
As Brian Ramsell can tell you, I write a lot of articles that never get posted. But I’d like to take a piece on transformative love from one of them and insert it here:
“Ordinary love is very much like skim milk. It’s love but it’s so weak, you’d hardly know it was love. Fondness, affection, attraction – none of these holds a candle to transformative love.
“Transformative love is like Devon cream. But it doesn’t give you a heart attack; instead, it opens the heart. No, not open-heart surgery, but open-hearted ecstacy.
“Transformative love alters everything it touches. It’s worse than Midas and his gold. Ordinary love is altered by that which it touches. It has no staying power and seldom nourishes.
“All those people blaming their husbands or wives for not loving them, etc.? What’s missing from their lives is their own transformative love and, until they experience it, they’ll be perennially dissatisfied with whomever sits across the table from them.
“Prince Charming won’t stay Prince Charming for long in an atmosphere of ordinary love. Only in an atmosphere of transformative love. But … everyone becomes Prince Charming then.”
There’s a world of difference between ordinary love and transformative.
I’m not saying that the transformed space is 5D, but it’s a powerful enough space to weed anger and hatred out.
Seeing that it’s essential to allow others their free will, even if that free will means we stay apart, frees up another ten percent of the space for me.
The ten percent of my dilemma that’s left is my complaint against the universe that I can’t have things my own way. It’s my disgruntled little Dennis the Menace of entitlement, what Buddhists call the “wanting mind” and the “hungry ghost.” That part of me is dissolved in stillness and transforming love.
I’m going to need these things handled when the real action begins because I’ll be thrust from inaction to action at lightning speed. That pace will only accelerate at a pace sure to create residue unless my awareness is very high and my heart is maximally open.