Applying the Definition of Love to Everyday Life

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Applying the Definition of Love to Everyday Life

There is an ancient piece of wisdom that says: “If we fully understand one thing, we can understand everything.”  I would like to re-state this wisdom in the negative to offer a contrast, in the hope of making the meaning even more clear.  So I would add:  “If we fail to fully understand one internal need, potential or developmental task—then we will never understand a single significant thing about internal human life.”

The fate of most people is to move through an entire lifespan and never understand even one internal dimension of human life.  Instead, people float thru existence relying on vaguely defined good intentions and fragile feelings trying to get success, security, approval and entertainment, and never understand one internally significant thing about life, themselves, or other people.

This is one reason that real love and genuine wisdom are so rare.  It is also why in a previous blog, I defined love in objective and experiential terms: that is, it was my purpose to create a working definition necessary to explore the experience of real love. 

Previously, I defined Real Love as giving energy, interest and attention for the innocent purpose of first understanding, and then nurturing all that we love.

It is not my intent to hold myself out as an authority on love.  All I have done is to observe and ask questions with the innocent purpose of wanting to understand whether or not there are universal human needs that make it possible to define love in clearly objective and experiential terms everyone can understand and apply. 

What I have found is that most people agree that if someone gave them energy, interest, and attention motivated by an innocent purpose to understand and nurture, then they would confirm this as a bona fide experience of real Love.  How about you, if someone consistently offered you energy, interest and attention, with an innocent purpose to understand and nurture, would you feel loved?

If we accept that while not perfect, my description of love does provide a working definition that we can use to explore experience, then we can move on and define the experience of understanding.

The two most significant internal potentials, and critical to fulfilling all other human potentials, is the capacity to Understand and Love.  Of the two, Understanding is the most important, simply because without Understanding, Love can’t exist.  I can almost hear the howls of indignation objecting to this last sentence. 

For most people, love is assumed to be based on feelings, while understanding can be viewed as an empty explanation or simplistic conclusion with no emotional warmth or real-world effectiveness.

Also, sacred beliefs are often challenged when we discover that real love requires enough internal development to give our whole-hearted energy, interest and attention with an innocent purpose to understand and nurture. Without understanding we cannot nurture, and as a result, cannot love.

True understanding requires we build a detailed mental, emotional and sensual picture of reality, ourselves, and other people that we use to feed needs—internal and external—first in ourselves, then other people and Nature.  

All understanding begins with learning how to accurately observe and vulnerably receive the information ordinary life is always offering.  So to understand my definition of love, we must paint a complete picture of six dimensions of ordinary experience. (See the blog titled: How One Sentence Can Change Not Only Every Individual Life—But  the Whole World!  www.paulhatherley.com)

One way to learn about love is to memorize my definition, study the six dimensions of experience contained in that one sentence, and then measure to what extent you can accurately observe and clearly define your own experience with love. 

I put the last sentence in bold italics because it serves to also describe the process for learning how to learn.  One thing I discovered from a lifetime of observing people is that our education does not teach us the process for how to learn.  Instead, even the best education primarily teaches us how to memorize and regurgitate external facts or ideas that reveal nothing about our internal needs and potentials, or developmental tasks.  

Even in science, when we want understanding our purpose is often to exploit to acquire advantage or entertainment, rather than feed real needs.   Essentially, we adopt the same purposes for learning—as we do for living and loving.

Learning how to learn is required if we want to master internal needs, potentials and developmental tasks, beginning with our internal potential to understand and love. Learning how to learn is required not only for our individual happiness, but also for the internal evolution now essential to the survival of our species.

It is not often that we have an opportunity to work on our own individual happiness, and at the same time make a contribution to the evolution and long-term survival of the human species. Becoming competent to understand and love offers a rare opportunity to combine selfish personal fulfillment with a meaningful and loving gift.  This is the best life has to offer—it would be a tragic shame to let it pass you by!

The Need for Real Love In Long-term Romantic Relationships

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The Need for Real Love
In Long-term Romantic Relationships

We are all familiar with the standard beliefs and feelings about romantic love.  For instance, we think we are in love when we feel “chemistry”, or “…have never before felt this way about anyone!”

The Eskimos have nearly 180 words for “snow”, while we have only one word for the complex experience we call “love.”  I think it is time to expand our understanding by identifying a few of the many different experiences that fall under the auspices of one overused word: Love.

To begin, “chemistry” is just a euphemism for a combination of lust, trust, and comfort.  If we feel comfortable with someone, and believe we can trust them, at least a little, and are physically attracted, then voila! we are in love!

This level of love can be renamed lust-based love. We are lusting after sexual pleasure, as well as feeling emotionally safe.  This version of love is often expressed in romantic novels and movies: i.e., chick flicks.

Another version of “love” is when a woman decides it’s time to find a mate and start a family, and she chooses a man who can provide external security.  Often, she is willing to forego chemistry for reliability and ambition.  This can be called security-based love.

For a man, love is usually lust-based accompanied by a desire that the woman also take care of him physically and emotionally.  While they are rarely aware of it, most men are looking for a sexy mom—and if they find one, tend to cling to her like a new-born baby!

There are more variations in the experience of romantic love, but these three provide a foundation for understanding normal love.  What all the normal variations of romantic love share in common is they are externally-based, and motivated by what men and women want to Get from each other.  Normal love is an external quid-pro-quo contract.

For contrast, Real Love is internally-based and motivated by a conscious purpose to Grow in understanding life, each other and Nature—Share purposes, accomplishments and experiences—and Give energy, interest and attention.  Real love is also innocent, and internally-based on what couples want to Give and Share, rather than Get.

Take a moment, and think about the long-term romantic couples you know, have seen in the news, or in books and movies, and how many even seem to have a conscious, emotionally connected, internally growing, and passionate response to life and each other? 

Make it less complicated, and ask how many individuals do you see whose path through life fits the above description?  How about you?  Does either your individual life or romantic relationship fit the above description—or do they look like something else?

In twenty-five years as a psychologist, and the last ten teaching internal development, my experience is that the best normal relationships are defined by couples who like each other, agree on the external terms of their contract, and accept that without internal development their lives and romantic relationships will be dramatically limited.

However, the most common story is a couple will acquire every external success and luxury, but still feel incomplete, or unhappy.  The problem is that lasting happiness requires internal nurturing provided in part, by genuine understanding.

Since no culture has ever had the information necessary to train people in how to understand and truly love each other—it is normal for people to be internally unhappy.

Typically, we react to being unhappy by pursuing approval, security and pleasure, which leaves no room in our schedules, hearts, or minds to pursue a deep understanding of anything internal—and as we have seen in the last two blogs, without understanding we cannot offer real love.

So why would anyone want to work for the experience of understanding and love?  One reason is because in learning how to express love and develop wisdom, we connect to life in the most intensely satisfying and genuinely meaningful way possible.

On the other hand, one reason we are prone to destructive habits and romantic fantasies, is because we get bored by ordinary life and seek intensity.  The easiest ways to create intensity are through destructive behavior, or sexual encounters and romantic fantasies.  In normal life, we are not trained in how to engage the most intensely satisfying activities life offers—expressing love and developing wisdom.

Developing the ability to understand, which is the pre-requisite for love and wisdom, takes us into an open-ended adventure exploring new avenues of thought and caring that push the edge of the developmental envelope, and often takes us where no human has ever gone before.

The pursuit of understanding is exhilarating beyond imagination, raises the low ceiling of expectations that restricts our lives, and provides internal fulfillment above and beyond what we normally even hope is possible for human life. 

The journey toward internal development takes work and courage.  Work is needed because there is so much to learn, and courage is required because many assumptions, beliefs and feelings are replaced with accurate observations.

One undeniable joy in this sometimes difficult process is that the information CMED provides is objective and experiential, and is easily verified by each interested student.

Another joy of CMED training is that couples share a conscious purpose to develop their minds and emotions, which in turn creates an intense experience of life and love they could not duplicate through any other pursuit.

Internal development creates a lifetime adventure where every day couples can bring the energy of discovery and newness into their individual lives, and their relationship.

This is how long-term romantic relationships can retain not only the initial passion, but build lasting intimacy and a genuine emotional bond.

If you want to experience truly significant adventures that take you to new places in yourself with someone you love, and where you travel through new avenues of thought, caring, understanding, love and wisdom—then you will want to check out the training in internal development provided by CMED.

Contrasting Licensed Psychotherapy & Unlicensed Coaching With Education In Mental & Emotional Development

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Contrasting Licensed Psychotherapy &
Unlicensed Coaching With Education In
Mental & Emotional Development

Since the middle of the twentieth century “therapy” has become a staple of normal American life.  It may be a surprise to people outside the field that in fact there is no agreed upon definition for what constitutes “psychotherapy.”  In fact, once a person has a state issued license—whether as a Marriage & Family therapist, Clinical Psychologist, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, or Psychiatrist (MD licensed in Psychiatry)—whatever he or she decides to do, is now legally “psychotherapy”.

This means there is no agreed-upon protocol for treatment, and no objective criteria for measuring effectiveness.  As a result, in this highly-regulated profession pretending to be scientific, in real-life practice it is in effect the wild-west where almost anything goes.

So if a therapist believes in reincarnation, and that we carry inside ourselves memories of past lives, then he can offer “past life regressions” where the client is induced into a hypnotic state to help her remember who she was in the past.  The theory is that our experience in past lives affects our mental/emotional states in the present, and that connecting the two will help us understand ourselves and make needed changes.

Less fanciful but no more substantiated are more traditional forms of therapy that range from Behavior to Reality therapy, from Psychoanalysis and Ego-psychology to Neuro-linguistic programming and Positive Psychology, to advice giving and problem solving that we could get from an insightful friend.  To date, there is no therapy style that can experientially define and objectively measure precisely what it offers, or even define specifically what is gained if the therapy is successful. 

The consequence is that as a healing profession, “psychotherapy” is strictly a faith-based enterprise—just like religion.  Of course, in our feeling-based world, for most people, this is not a problem.  Often, all we want is a therapist who makes us feel good, so real-life effectiveness is not a consciously defined criteria.

Mostly, we are hungry for energy and attention offered in a context of real or feigned interest by someone who at least pretends to know more about life, living and intimate relationships than we do, and mostly that is exactly what we get!  Feigned interest, and the pretense our therapist knows more than we do.

Coaching, in a sense is more honest.  It is un-regulated, and anyone who has the balls to pretend they know more than other people, or who simply offers some level of warm interest and undivided attention, or perhaps is a charismatic “know-it-all” who makes people feel special just because they know him/her—much like Jim Jones who got nine hundred people to “drink the Kool-Aid” based solely on his personality and say-so—can virtually, literally, or figuratively “hang-out his shingle” and be a coach.

The problem is that as individuals, and as a species, we need objective training in all the “internal” dimensions of real-life human experience so we can fulfill our potential to become consciously content ourselves, and developmentally competent to first understand, and then effectively respond to the complex problems of modern human existence.

Anyone can review the major issues of modern life—whether the personal happiness of each individual, or the well-being and even survival of our species—and see that the global problems of resource depletion, climate change, economic inequality, political strife, religious conflict, species extinction, etc. etc., are far beyond our developmental capacity to either understand, or resolve.

Clearly, as individuals and as a species, we need the mental and emotional development necessary to think through complex problems until we understand what is both true and needed—for ourselves, mates and children, as well as the global healing of Nature, and the well-being of all people.

We need an objective and measurable level of training that clearly defines our own and everyone else’s universal internal needs and potentials, as well as developmental tasks, so we can embark on an educational process to acquire the skills and awareness necessary to think for understanding, build emotional bonds, and master the ability to express love, pursue truth, experience beauty and develop wisdom.

Neither therapy or coaching can offer a single step toward objective internal development, and while each may feel good emotionally, like a body massage can feel good physically, if we observe the objective results there is no real change in our ability to think for understanding, or master internal needs, potentials, and developmental tasks that occurs because of a mental and emotional massage, i.e., psychotherapy or coaching.

The Conscious Purpose & Thought Process Necessary To Understand Ourselves, Life, and Other People

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The Conscious Purpose & Thought Process Necessary
To Understand Ourselves, Life, and Other People

Perhaps surprisingly, the skills and awareness necessary for mental and emotional development begin with learning how to understand ourselves, life, and other people.  This first step is literally, learning how to learn.  The problem is that even the best normal education does not teach us how to understand ourselves, life, and other people!

Instead, in normal life we are taught external facts, ideas, and points of view with little or no connection to real-life issues—internal or external—so we learn how to read, write and do arithmetic, but acquire zero understanding of our internal needs, potentials, and developmental tasks.

As a result, people today are still not able to understand how to create lasting happiness for themselves, build intimacy in long-term romantic relationships, raise children with their self-worth complete, or create satisfaction and meaning in their professional lives.  The underlying problem is the normal purpose and thought process makes accurate observations, conscious exploring and discovering, and all real learning impossible.

The normal purpose for life and education is to create success and security, get approval, and acquire pleasant entertainments in a context of luxury.  With a normal purpose, we do not want understanding—we want control over our goals.  All by itself, a normal purpose insures we will never grow in understanding our internal lives, or other people.

In addition, a normal thought process makes it certain we never learn a single significant thing about our internal needs, potentials, or developmental tasks. One reason is that in normal life we just assume that if we get every external thing we want, then internal fulfillment and happiness will follow—automatically.  This is how we can pass through a lifetime and never clearly define or understand a single significant internal reality.

Another aspect of a normal thought process that kills any possibility of understanding, is that we are taught in school to first reduce complex realities to simple conclusions, or judgments—and then we explain and justify our simplistic conclusions and judgments.  We learn to apply this constrictive process to every issue in life—external and internal.

One consequence of normal thought is that in reducing the complexity of real-life to fit our simplistic process, we distort and pervert reality, which makes it impossible to even understand the complexity of our external tasks and problems, much less the more subtle internal needs, potentials, and developmental tasks.

In stark contrast, a conscious purpose and thought process expands our minds, so now we can take-in and understand the complexity of real life—both internal and external.  With a conscious purpose we want to understand, rather than control. Even without mastering the conscious thought process, this alone changes everything.

For instance, with a normal purpose to control, we inevitably want to avoid pain and insure pleasantness.  By contrast, with a conscious purpose to understand, we want to learn from pain and pleasure.  Once we want to learn, we have something to gain from both pain and pleasure, so now we no longer want control—we want understanding.

A conscious purpose, or desire to understand provides the emotional source for all mental and emotional development.  A conscious thought process provides the mental tools we need to fulfill this purpose and acquire a deep understanding of ourselves and life.

The heart of a conscious thought process is the same as the scientific method—that is, we first learn how to accurately observe the facts underlying each event, thought, feeling, pain or pleasure. Then, we ask questions to explore the facts to determine what they mean.  Finally, we form a hypothesis about what is true and needed and experiment to see if our hypothesis is true, needs to be revised, or just thrown out so we can start over.

Following a conscious thought process we learn to expand our understanding to fit the complexity of real-life, rather than constrict life to fit the narrow funnel created by a normal thought process. 

A conscious purpose to understand, backed-up by a conscious thought process, prepares us to acquire the information and develop the skills and awareness necessary to master every need, potential, and developmental task.  In the process, we learn how to express love, pursue truth, experience and create beauty, and develop wisdom.   

Changing from the normal to a conscious purpose and thought process is just the first step—then we need to work, and sometimes be willing to suffer, to clearly define each and every need, potential and developmental task.  Clear definitions that are specific, experiential, and consciously memorized are needed as a foundation for learning how to feed, fulfill, and complete our internal needs, potentials, and developmental tasks.

Thirty years of experience has taught me that without changing from a normal to conscious purpose and thought process it is impossible to take even one significant step down the road toward mental and emotional development—so this first step is critical.

While this first step is critical—it is still just the first step!  Then, we must pursue the truth of ordinary human life, no matter how painful, frightening, happy or sad.  To get started—my books, videos, workshops and individual sessions offer a clearly lit path, but each person must walk the path alone, and verify for herself thru daily experience the definitions, insights, skills and awareness that I provide.

It is important to observe that normal life is externally-based. This means the best we can get with a normal purpose and thought process is a materially successful and pleasant life, but we cannot acquire the internal development necessary to create lasting happiness, build intimate long-term romantic relationships, raise a child with a complete self-worth, or create an internally satisfying and meaningful professional life.

It is also important to notice, by simply observing the millions of people who clearly have external success without internal development, that we need to master internal and external needs and potentials if we want to understand life’s mysteries, and become complete within the space provided by one small lifespan.

In these first seven blogs, I offer a true gateway to mental and emotional development. Now, you have enough information to determine if internal development is something that appeals to you, or if you are already all that you need to be, just the way you are!  Either choice is fine, it has simply been my job to give you an option that heretofore in human history has not been offered.  Take care. PH