Here I've been writing all this time about "How I Am: Being Human" and I haven't directly addressed the topic of Love. Then again, I've been talking about both the presence and absence of Love all along. I say this because I define Love as partly emotion that results in safe behavior but mostly I think Love is behavior that results in safe emotions.
What does this mean? It means that when one is Experiencing positive emotions it's easy to behave in a loving manner. But, more importantly, Love also means that when one is Experiencing negative emotions he or she still has the capacity to behave in ways that don't threaten the emotional safety of others. And considering the covert and overt violence of so many Experiences, along with the normalized responses of withdrawal, manipulation, rebellion and compliance in so many Relationships (e.g., self-family-community), it seems to me that the meaning of Love in this society (like so many of our heralded beliefs and values) has been desecrated by falsehoods.
The heart of the matter - Internity - is that all the energies of emotion (conscious and unconscious) are formed, conformed, deformed, informed, reformed and transformed in a constant behavioral Experience of and psychological Relationship with the powerful nurture and nature of Love! The Internity of Love's formulations then has the very human task of discovering, expressing, connecting and creating meaning for the spiritual conduit between ego and calling. This conduit is both informed by the Experiences of ego but also transformed by the Relationships of calling (and all otherness takes part in one's calling). The ease or dis-ease of this conduit, therefore, determines every individual's Perceptions, internal motivations and purposeful behaviors.
Love is conditional! This is why I think we all need to quit giving mere sing-song lip service to the abstractions of Love and instead take a good hard look at our own emotional behaviors of Love. To truly Love someone means to have ego's wild emotions with the result being safe behavior toward others nonetheless. To truly understand Love in the context of calling means that one behaves in ways where the emotions of others remain safe, which then simultaneously inform and transform one's own emotional reality. The nurtured behavioral Experiences of Love, after all, reveal to oneself and reflect to the world healthy or unhealthy emotional Relationships with the nature of Love's calling. This Perception, that Love is partly emotion resulting in safe behavior but mostly behavior resulting in safe emotions, makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the conditions of "How I Am: Being Human."
