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!