Thank you again guys. No question that the impetus to love seems to be the natural state of all. And that it's our selfish egotistical urges that seem to obscure this.
I'm less sanguine that it's slam dunk easy peasy to live from love so to speak, and as a result been driving more at the question of what practically is expected of us. Maybe I'm just making something simple complicated, i probably need to relax and just go with the flow, do what comes naturally.
It's fairly clearly the case anyway that we can only express love at the level of our consciousness, so perhaps all is revealed so to speak as we progress.
I'm a little cautious though that conditioning perhaps means I'm not seeing the wood for the trees. The questions are kind of implicit in what you guys have to say - especially Kathy, Alysia, and Dave.
I tend towards your view that first off we need to follow our heart, and that if we can do this (easier said than done with ego blocking all the way) life will bring us what we need to do our bit. One size pretty clearly does not fit all.
We pretty much have to trust in this anyway I guess - we can never truly know the import of our actions: what seems trivial can ultimately have earth changing implications, while what we're conditioned to regard as a big deal or important can be inconsequential.
But there's still hard questions in there. Your point about self denial, about the need to have compassion for ourselves as much as others is central Kathy. But just where does this balance lie?
The spiritual traditions teach unconditional love. Here's a page of Buddhist teachings on love, compassion, equanimity and so on:
http://buddhism.kalachakranet.org/immeasurables_love_compassion_equanimity_rejoi... (there's a link to a page on attachment too Kathy - there's another way to look at it, it's a blocker to loving behaviours when seen this way)
There's opposing sides on the issue. Overcommitment to others that destroys one's health, wealth and happiness clearly can become counterproductive. If you are ill, dead, exhausted, penniless or depressed your ability top help is clearly very limited. Walking away from your family to pursue a life of Bhakti Yoga is clearly not an option for everybody, yet it's probably very important that some few pursue this or other paths to enable spiritual leadership.
On the other hand we face very serious circumstances in the world. Yet most of us tutting about it just get on with living as comfortable a life as we can. We take the odd token action here and there, but studiously ignore many other issues. How many people for example spoke up publicly when the war rhetoric was at its height and to do so was likely to result in pretty unpleasant responses from others prior to the Iraq invasion? (if 10% of the population had stood up to really be counted it very possibly would have stopped the invasion) How many have ditched their auto (or even their second auto) given the climate issue? How many have dumped their aircon? How many refuse to buy cheap imported products which are the result of sweatshop labour?
Even if we are motivated enough to act how do we know the right thing to do?
There are people like say Martin Luther King who laid it all on the line. Or who from this distance seem to have done, and were turning points in terms of influencing the issues they engaged on. The spiritual traditions are full of people having devoted their entire lives to practice and teaching.
An alternative view is to say that it's all rolling out exactly the way it's meant to. That we should trust.
My personal sense of the whole issue seems somewhere around here:
Our task is to become able to live unconditional love. (not the egotistical attachment based variety that is selective and has an agenda)
Unconditional love does not imply a lack of care for oneself.
Living love entails skill and right intuition as well as a loving intention - we can do a lot of harm while attempting to do good. Or can expose ourselves to unnecessary harm which in the end will prevent us from fulfilling our role.
We're guided in terms of life direction, although we may not always listen or hear that well.
Depending on our life we may be required to make enormous commitments to others, or may seem to live relatively ordinary lives.
It's basically about going with the flow - what's needed will happen.
We're not all required to be martyrs, and our love should be natural and real - not some act of will that suppresses egotistical urges that have not been worked off.
Its a learning experience and a moving target - with time we become more and more able to live from love, and presumably as this happens our role and responsibility increase.
Justin may have something to say on this as I know he's a fan of Edgar Cayce who had a lot to say about finding our life path. (see 'Soul Purpose' by mark Thurston. Harper and Row/St. Martin's Paperbacks)
I've been slightly tongue in cheek in posing this question as I guess it's in truth what our entire journey is about. We're probably not going to have the whole answer until we return to Source.
But I can't help thinking that we're individually and collectively quite limited in our ability to live from love right now. My personal experience though is that the spiritual path can produce quite definite opening of the heart. And that with opening we get better at it - we increasingly both see what's needed, and find ourselves less able to ignore it/more motivated to act....
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