Earlier in this book I gave you some quick cheats regarding self-help. I left out one of the most powerful tools: Experiencing 100% true and pure love.
I left it out deliberately. I did so because I didn’t want you to incorrectly perceive what I wanted to say about the matter. I didn’t want you to hear what I’m not saying. I didn’t want you to become obsessed with finding a partner or a mate, and I didn’t want you to confuse sex for love.
Love is something that needs to be experienced to be understood. It initially comes from outside of ourselves, then we feel it, and then the love is transformative to our chemistry. We need for love to be the primary emotion that comes from our mother, and we need to experience it before anything else, with the possible exception of milk. At birth, milk and love are the “dynamic duo.”
After milk we need touch. After touch we need eye contact. We then need to hear pleasant sounds. We need to hear the soft voice of the person feeding us. Perhaps there are things that we could replace those things with if they weren’t available to us, but I’m not sure what they are. We are adaptive as a species, though. For example, if a child doesn’t have hearing, a clever mother can find other ways to soothe that child.
If we have addictions, self-love can help us heal. We can find love for the stories of our lives, even though those stories may contain tragic chapters. A lot of us don’t realize that we’ve loathed ourselves for many years because of negative messages we received or positive messages we didn’t receive over time. And it is up to us to recover our lost self-love.
It’s a mistake to think that we can use objects such as expensive cars, big houses, fancy clothes, expensive watches, and relationships based only on physical or sexual attraction to fill us up with love. Those things might help temporarily, but they are vapid if we do not love ourselves.
If you were to experience your true nature, even if you were an angry bastard, you would probably find some self-love. That is because if you express your true nature you are enlightened to a degree. I use the word enlightened in its literal meeting, and I think that seeing your higher nature is similar to experiencing the divine. The true nature of who you are is philosophical, mathematical, and mysterious beyond anything you can imagine.
What is the source of your consciousness? Is it just electricity and forces of nature working together with matter? If it’s just that, then what is the source of those things? The source that I could describe to you is something too mysterious to put into words and it must be felt. The source embodies creation, intelligence, creativity, love, compassion, and many, many other things. It is dynamic, fluid, resourceful, profound, and infinite.
Our consciousness is a part of that. You could spend your lifetime trying to figure out what the hell all of this means. Or you could just say something such as the following to yourself: “Whatever I came from originally is perfect. Unfortunately causes and effects have made it so that I am imperfect. I get confused, I struggle, and I suffer at times. But I can make important adjustments to change for the better.”
Some say that the source of all creation is love. I can’t verify that that’s the truth, but I can say without doubt that love is definitely one of the main ingredients. Whatever or whoever created all of this existence is not self-loathing but is self-loving. That’s apparent in the things that were created.
I believe that whoever or whatever created flowers and bees, beautiful colors, and intriguing patterns was inventive and was happy. But it would be foolish of me to tell you that I know that for certain. I just strongly believe it. It’s a beautiful story to me. When I look at all the vivid colors in the universe the only words that come to my mind that weren't placed there by someone else are, “Look at all that love! Look at all that excitement! Look at all that positivity!”
I don’t see destruction as always being something negative. I see it as something that’s likely. If there’s a universe of this magnitude out there doing things and creating, it’s likely that something will get destroyed. But most of what’s going on out there is creation.
This is relevant to recovery. It is because ultimately as we begin to put out our addiction(s) we’re also recovering at some point some consciousness of our creator. It’s embedded in our consciousness in the same way that information about our species is embedded in our DNA. But science cannot necessarily explain how the knowledge of all things is deeply embedded in our consciousness.
And this matters because you have the ability to tap into the universe through your body. You have incredible powers. Those powers may not enable you to defy the laws of the physical world we live in, but they can enable you to rise above your lower self.
I need to get up and do my work and my chores. I must call upon my higher self that participates in life. I’ve got to get up and get it to action in spite of my natural laziness. I’ve got to remind myself that I am a creator.
We are all little bitty creators. And I believe that all of us have a degree of divinity within us. I might not be able to create a universe, but I am contributing to the creation on this earth. We are creatures with intellect and free will seeking to bring ourselves from places of suffering back to creating and giving and experiencing love.
A contradiction presents itself. Can I love my wife and still be an alcoholic? Can I love my children and still be a workaholic? I could love my job, I could feel loved by my children and my wife, and I might still be behaving compulsively in other areas of my life. So it isn’t just that love is the answer. One shouldn’t just expect that if they have love in their life that they won’t have other problems.
Love has to be taken and given in its proper context. We must learn to love the self—but that cannot be done from an egotistical perspective of worshiping the self. Rather it means embracing and loving the self in such a way that we aren’t unhappy and in pain because of self-loathing.
But even self-love in its proper context is not enough to set us free. We have to deal with the emotional issues behind our anxieties. Those emotional issues stem from our childhood. We have to go back to the pain they caused, feel it, process it, let it go, and move on. That’s difficult. But it must be done if we want to be people who embrace health and wellness, give and receive love, become happy, and achieve our full potential in life.