Punishments are someone else’s decision that one has done wrong. Consequences are
one’s own experience that something does not work. That is, it did not produce an intended
result.
In other words, we do not learn quickly from punishments, because we see them as
something that someone else is doing to us. We learn more readily from consequences,
because we see them as something that we are doing to ourselves.
Precisely. You have it exactly.
But can’t a punishment be a consequence? Isn’t that the point?
Punishments are artificially created outcomes, not naturally occurring results. The attempt to
convert a punishment into a consequence by simply calling it that does not make it that. Only
the most immature being can be fooled by such a verbal contrivance, and, even that being,
not for very long.
This has not stopped many of those among you who have parented offspring to use the
contrivance. And the biggest punishment that you have devised is the withholding of your
love. You have shown your offspring that if they behave in a certain way, you will withhold
your love. It is by the granting and the withholding of your love that you have sought to
regulate and modify, to control and to create, your children’s behaviors.
This is something that God would never do.
Yet you have told your children that I do it, too—no doubt to justify your own actions. But I tell
you this: true love never withdraws itself. And that is what loving fully means. It means your
love is full enough to hold the biggest wrong behavior. It means more than that. It means that
no behavior is even called “wrong.”
Erich Segal had it right. Love means not having to say you’re sorry.
That is exactly correct. Yet it is a very high principle, not practiced by many human beings.
Most human beings cannot even imagine it being practiced by God.
And they are right. I do not practice it.
I beg Your pardon?
I am it. One does not have to practice what one is, one simply is it.
I am the love that knows no condition, nor limitation of any kind.