Excerpt from the article below: Love is not selflessness. It is the giving of one’s best self, giving one’s highest self unto the world. It is finding true selfhood. Selflessness is martyrdom, dying for a cause. Selfhood is living for a cause. It is choosing to create good in the world. To love another as one loves oneself is to love the universal self that unites us all..Posted on Feb 19, 2012
By Chris Hedges
Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the love between two people, between children and parents, between friends, between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns on the planet.
Those who cannot love—and I have seen these deformed human beings in the wars and conflicts I covered—are spiritually and emotionally dead. They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of themselves. Those incapable of love never live.
“Hell,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is the inability to love."
And yet, so much is written and said about love that at once diminishes its grandeur and trivializes its meaning. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, cautioned all of us about preaching on love, reminding us that any examination of love had to include, as Erich Fromm pointed out in “Selfishness and Self-Love,” the unmasking of pseudo-love. READ the rest here
Image above is a fractal found as SSCG.jpg
Let me add that sometimes people are selfless in offering Love positivia. We all have different meanings for the word love.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless Chris Hedges leaning toward Love, Life and Generosity is a crucial point if we are to arrive at peace within and with others.