Love and Lust – The Deluded You
Man is designed for both these things:
1) To seek the good of self.
2) To seek the good of another.
The environment we are living in is designed thus, that when we seek good of self we do it by using another.
Somebody/something else, is being taken advantage of for our benefit, or good.
The environment similarly, has also made it impossible for us to seek the good of another without paying a price for it in ourselves. The only way to seek the good of another is by willingly accepting a disadvantage for the self.
To differentiate between these realities, two simple words were created: – Lust and Love.
Lust seeks your good but at the cost of someone else’s. Love seeks another’s good but at the cost of self.
A man of love therefore does not fight, or assert his rights to seek his own benefit. A man of love will instead, die willingly fighting for someone else’s right.
A man of lust in contrast will always exercise his right, demand his rights, fight for his rights, sulk, separate, isolate himself etc.
Our education and upbringing is all about how we should fight for our rights. How we should assert ourselves and display the force and muscle that we possess.
We are, unknowingly perhaps, championing lust, and constantly rewarding the greater exercise of lust and punishing the possession of love.
It is not that love does not exist as much as that we have little or no use for it.
If a person believes that he has this one life only, why would he in his right mind sacrifice this life and all the pleasures that it offers for anybody/anything else?
Yet to not be in a constant state of conflict and indeed to even manage and satisfy his lust satisfactorily, he has learnt to restrain and subjugate (sacrifice) his passions and needs appropriately.
This appropriate behaviour of restraint, man terms as love. He points to all the millions of tiny such “sacrifices” he has made and says “See is there any further proof you need of how much I love you?”
Yet had he not made that modicum of restraint, investment, sacrifice, the object of his affections would have fled and not allowed or permitted itself to be taken advantage of. It needed that modicum of restraint to continue to delude the other…to remain primed for use.
The priming of an object so that it can be steadily available and made use of, for one’s enjoyment is not love. It is the expertise of lust.
The priming of an object is done in a billion different ways – the prime rule to remember is this: if you wish to gift someone something, find out what it is the other person wants or needs, and satisfy that! Don’t gift something you like to gift and imagine that you have loved the other. That form of gifting – or doing- is in the category of ‘priming’ for your lust.
When you are gifting, visiting, meeting, communicating to satisfy your need,… you are priming.
Don’t forget, we have all learnt, been taught, in many different insidious ways to master the art of hiding our lust and displaying it as love.
Every display of love is priming.
True love is a cost that you pay and accept in yourself. It does not want display. It does not survive display.
We know we are deluded when we cannot identify our lust. It remains so well hidden within us that we can see only our loving selves being misunderstood, abused and attacked by others.
We know that we have escaped this delusion when we are able to identify our lust, consciously fight against it, see ourselves failing and know that we are too weak to overpower this strange, unnatural, unwanted force that works within us.
It is easier for you to over come death and live forever on your own efforts, as it is to overcome your desire, and need, to use others for your own benefit.
Lust is the venom in the sting of death.
Love is Life itself.