Evolution can involve increasing our ability to be loving, caring, compassionate, and kind, in addition to increasing knowledge, understanding, and power.
Evolving your lovingness is how you become “big,” as though you are life itself. If you don’t evolve the second group of traits, however, you’ll get a little too soft. This doesn’t mean that you’re too kind, or anything like that. Rather, it means that you’re a little too at oneness with the world, such that you have come into noneness. You exist, but you don’t really experience yourself as your self. A strain is put on your positive relationships because you are stagnating. It becomes more difficult for you to share love with others when you are not evolving.
Love Without Awareness
Truth, love, and power ultimately must evolve together. That is the simplest way to state it. Love run amok creates dysfunctional connections. Maybe you interact with others quite a bit, and you are very kind to them, but your life feels a bit pale. There is a lot available to you. But none of the options seem all that exciting. Nothing challenges you very much. Nothing really gets you thinking or learning new things or taking a whole lot of action. Love run amok basically becomes routine. Without truth, you get fun, but no seriousness. Without power, you get affection, but no growth.
Before long, love isn’t really love anymore. You hit a point where, in order to become more loving, putting all of your attention on love won’t work anymore. It can produce, on its own, no more progress. Now, you must upgrade truth and power as well, in order to become more loving. You must engage in introspection. You must take a serious look at your life, and see where you could do with some changes. You must gain new knowledge and release ideas that do not serve you any longer. You must re-examine your most fundamental assumptions about life, and see if they hold true for you still. You must consider a re-imagination of what is possible.
You must cultivate convictions. You must set goals. You must challenge yourself. You must take risks. You must set yourself up for failure. You must take responsibility for all that you do and all that you experience. You must discipline and devote yourself.
Find people who don’t just love you, but who uplift you. Find people who inspire you. Find people who think about the world differently than you do.
Essentially what you need to do when you find yourself in a love-glut is to shake things up. Talk to people you normally don’t. Say things you normally don’t. Spend more time alone than usual. Go somewhere new. Do something you’ve never done before. Force yourself to think in ways you normally don’t think. Imagine something as possible that you have never considered before.
People in a love-glut may feel drawn to go on retreats of some sort. This could be a silent meditation retreat with a group of others, a vacation alone, or a long hike through the woods. Whatever it may be, the point is to reclaim independence.
Love unfettered can become dependence and much taking for granted. Fewer and fewer things get appreciated as it becomes more and more assumed that they will simply be there. This beckons, again, to unchecked love turning into routine. You do much the same day after day, and people enjoy this of you.
But it starts to feel like a life that is not yours. You aren’t really making decisions deliberately. You go with the flow, but it isn’t your flow. It isn’t an enjoyable one. You get sucked into the surrounding status quo, and you stay there.
The Power to Be Free
When you inject much-needed truth and power into your life, you find that love that has been curled up into a tight ball can at last unfurl itself. Love can at last let its hair down, after acting so long out of expectation and familiarity.
This may sound counterintuitive. You would think that seriously rethinking your life and becoming more powerful would lead love to be more pent up. But this is not the case. What happens, instead, is that love gains the ability to branch out. Its roots can drink new water. Its branches can host new life. Its leaves can feed new beings, for there now are more of them—and they are healthier, too.
When you reward yourself with truth and power, you do not become a cunning dictator. Instead, you are able to love anew. You are able to live now in ways you could not before. You have liberated yourself from your previous limitations.
Love is freedom. Truth and Power are the enablers of this freedom. By Truth, you may know your Power. By your Power, you may express love in a way that is true to yourself. When you can know and execute your desires, you are demonstrating the freedom of your being. You are being true to your loving nature.
To preserve the flow of this article, I’ve put the sources here at the bottom.
The personal growth principles of Truth, Love, and Power are from Steve Pavlina’s book, Personal Development for Smart People.
The idea that we can involve our capacity to love, in addition to our power, is from Steve Pavlina’s article, Surviving Superintelligence.
Lastly, the idea of oneness turning into noneness is from Neale Donald Walsch’s book Communion with God.
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