Love Your Neighbor - Commandment or Gauge?

"Love your neighbor" is the center of Christian teachings. The idea is obvious: If you love somebody, you do not use or abuse them, but treat them nicely, you are kind to them, and help and support them.

If everybody would love their neighbor there would be no crime, no war, and we all could live in peace and freedom.

However, love is an emotion - just like sadness, anger, fear, and hate. Emotions motivate you to act and behave in a certain way. The problem is, you can not fake an emotion. You can try to act as if you had the emotion; however, that becomes very exhausting and is sometimes quite impossible in the first place.

There's a causal relationship between emotion and action. Obvioulsy, it's a one-way street - i.e. emotion triggers action, but action as if there was a particular emotion doesn't trigger that emotion.

But, luckily, there's something that causes emotions. And that, we can impact!

For example: It made me sad when my grandmother died. On first thought, one might think that the event triggered the emotion.

But that is not so: I was sad about my grandmother no longer being here many times after she died.

So, is it the knowledge of her having passed? No, that isn't it either: I know she is gone form many years now, but I haven't been sad all the time for all these years.

I become sad whenever somethign reminds me of her and I become aware of the fact again that she's gone.

The event of her passing provided me with certain pieces of knowledge: She is gone, I won't be able to talk to her again. Of all the things that I know, when I focus on that aprticular piece of information, it triggers the emotion of sadness in me.

So, the question then is, how can I trigger the emotion of love whenever I am interacting with another person - or with anything else in this world?

I'd like to encourage you to find yourself answers to this question that work for you.

So far, all I mentioned was pretty objective. No matter what spiritual ideas you choose to believe, the above is not impacted by it. It simply is what it is.

Your ability to find an answer to the question and to develop a working strategy to implement it, I think, depends a lot on your spiritual believe system.

If you choose ot believe that all of us came to this world on a mission to make it a better place, as a conduit for devine guidance to help improve the situation, as tools used by the Universe to continue the development of this creation, well, then it is relatively easy to see the potential for good in every person. You cannot help but love your fellow soul, and try to be of assistance to them so they can fulfill their mission better.

Once you get away from the idea that it is all about you, and you understand that it is all about the unfolding of this magical creation, you automatically try to find a way to differentiate between a person and their actions - i.e. you may not like what a person does, but you still love them as a fellow soul.

When you enounter a difficult to take person, instead of lamenting your bad luck, you might see it as the Universe hoping that through you that person will get a chance to improve.

Instead of hating the person and feeling the urge to hurt them, you might try to help them find a way to have more of a positve impact on the world.

You see, with this believe-system the notion of "Love your neighbor" turns from a never achievable commandment into a gauge. A measuring stick that informs you of your progress on the path towards enlightenment...