Love vs. egoism
What is the first step that you should take in order to be able to love?
In order to love it is necessary to be self-aware, and in order to be self-
aware it is necessary to know yourself. If you wish to love others, first
learn to love yourself, through knowing yourself. Those who do not love
themselves cannot love others.
But I was under the impression that you have to renounce yourself in
order to love others!
Certainly not. What you must do is renounce your egoism, but not your
feelings. The fact is that you have a misconstrued concept of what
love is, because you confuse love with egoism. To love ourselves is not
to believe that we are better than others and that for this reason we
have to dedicate ourselves to satisfying egoistic whims, but rather to
recognise our own emotional needs and feelings and develop them,
so that they are the driving force of our life. That is why I have said that
in order to truly love it is so important to know ourselves. To know
ourselves implies knowing how to distinguish between what we feel
and what we think, to recognise the difference between what comes
from our feeling and what comes from our egoism.
So, how do we distinguish between what is love from what is not?
Love in its maximum expression must be unconditional. Whoever truly
loves does not expect anything in exchange and whoever acts out of
personal interest, does not truly love. Love must be free, if not, it is not
love. Nobody can be forced to love.
Whoever wants to love must also want to renounce egoism. Love and
egoism are opposing concepts, incompatible within themselves,
antagonistic. You cannot love without renouncing egoism, as egoism is
in reality the absence of love.
To learn how to love is the same as learning how to become detached
from egoism. When you increase your capacity to love, you diminish
your egoism at the same time, and vice-versa.
And how does the spirit learn to love?
It is a continual process, which requires a very long time to evolve. The
spirit begins before initiating the human phase and never finishes, as
there is always something new to learn regarding love. Just like
learning to speak, there is no other way of developing love other than
through constant interaction with other beings. In the first stages, when
spiritual beings are scarcely developed, they experience the love that