Are You Loving, Competent, Or Both?

We live in a world subjected to corruption. Perfection, experienced momentarily, is the outcome of untiring efforts.  Without conscious, constant effort to overcome corruption everything spoils, rots, or malfunctions. This corruption works within everyone, causing us to be our lesser selves. 

The average individual is aware of how the physical body is subjected to corruption. Many however, are not aware of how corruption works in our inner being, and unwittingly encourage this corruption, rather than resisting, fighting, and seeking to overcome it as we do with physical exercise, diet and medicine for our physical body.  

“I want to be me” is most important, yet what is the value of ‘being-me’ if you have been robbed or deluded to be your lesser, worse self, rather than your better best self?

I’m using these words, compromise, and corruption, to differentiate between two critical aspects of our individual selves. These two aspects are (a) competence and (b) love. Our education system focuses on our competent self. It trains us to be competitive and better than others, which in many ways is in direct opposition to our loving self, which needs us to sacrifice and seek the good of another over our own. 

Our loving and competent self can seem like they are opposites in many situations. Such situations then compel us to choose or lean towards one aspect of our being more than the other. Yet, life is about resolving opposites meaningfully in a manner that makes these opposites work for us. It is our weak, underdeveloped, un-evolved self that succumbs to the problem of opposites making us choose one over the other.

The need to survive produces the bias towards our competent, skilled, competitive self and reserves our loving self for those who are on our side, in the battle for identity, image, companionship and self-expression.  Unknowingly therefore we actively train, exercise, support, and build the muscles ONLY of our competent, competitive self. 

We rarely teach, train or work on our abilities to remain happy or loving. Success is equated too heavily with winning.

Family, friends, and our “near & dear ones” are those we feel we don’t need to be on guard with. We think we can invest our loving self here. Except that this falsity is where we experience the root of the problem.

In some relationships, we unknowingly seek approval and validation from that other person. Then, our skilled competent selves puts us in direct competition with the other, and we tend to reduce and compromise so as not to risk losing the approval, validation, and other rewards of dependance that the relationship offers.

We choose between our competent and loving self.  In a deluded endeavour to be “loving”, we compromise on our competent self and offer a self that is pleasing and non-competitive to the other. Perhaps the issue is because we have not yet learnt to be competent without being confrontational and competitive.

Yet reducing, forgetting, minimising to fit into someone else’s perspective of how we should be is not love. 

Or, we tend to feed our desire to be “ME”,  with such ferocity that we no longer care about anything or anyone around us except those willing to appreciate and support us. We compete with our siblings, parents, or spouse. When we cannot win, we blame them. Yet a competence that depends on us not caring; that needs us to dull our willingness to understand, and lock up our abilities to be compassionate, to produce a “winning” self is only our compromised self.

Therefore, when we refuse to be as competent as we can be, we become our compromised self and when we choose not to be as fully loving as we can be, we become our corrupted self.

Unknowingly we are constantly making a choice to reduce  our levels of competence to appear loving or to reduce love within us to seem competent.

Love is wanting and willing the good of another. Love is willing to pay the price, take the beating, suffer the pain of being and becoming. Love expands, grows, and develops us. Love never lowers standards. It patiently raises the bar as we progress. Love demands more from us and more from those we love.

It is hate, apathy, cowardice, false pride that sets barriers. These causes us to state: “so much and no more.” These place locks on our hearts, our purses in vaults, and our heads in the sand.

It is true, there will be many people in our lives who do not wish to be loved by us. It is true we cannot force our loving selves on everyone. Yet that gives us  no cause not to be our competent self. 

The richest person in the world faces the same identical struggle as the poorest man in the world – how to love and how to be our most loving self. The lie offers mankind a different paradigm – how to make money and how to live the most comfortable, untroubled, life possible.

Our natural self needs little work. Our evolved, developed, fully competent and loving self needs constant hard work.  The distance between our lesser and developed selves is a vast desert of pain and suffering that needs journeying.  To avoid suffering we choose our compromised self. To avoid pain, we choose our corrupted self.

Relationships hurt, but relationships heal too. “No pain, no gain” is an old saying. Don’t fear being hurt. Pay the price to be yourself. It may seem like you are losing opportunities or approvals now. Yet life is a circle that closes. Everything will come back to you. If you pretended and lived in compromise and corruption, then the ring closes on our hypocrisy. If you suffered and paid the price, the ring closes on the integral, genuine, successful you.

It's always your choice. You were made for love. You were made from love.

You can neither be loving by being incompetent, nor competent by being unloving.

It’s the fear of loss, pain and suffering that tempts and cheats us. Find joy in suffering and close that distance between who you are and who you are meant to be.

You are love. It’s all within you.