What is LOVE?
listening carefully, thinking relentlessly, and dying for the Truth
Love is the complete opposite of what this young girl did; she never listened, didn’t think twice, and killed the Truth.
If you gather any group of people and ask them what they can agree on, they will likely provide a reasonable and logical answer: Love. The same is true for the question of what is most important in life.
Love is the most important thing, the church fathers would agree, and they often preach about love. If so many agree on this topic, where is the love? The Black Eyed Peas asked for a reason more than two decades ago.
Something is missing; it is evident that there are too many definitions of love, but rarely the one that is truly accurate.
The kind of love that the Hollywood industry promotes serves as the basis for too many minds. Smart people will agree that love is not merely a feeling, but rather a willingness to seek the good of the other, whatever that may mean. When the subject of love arises, everyone assumes that common ground has been established. However, this could not be further from the truth. Let’s explore what the common ground of love really is.
Jesus said not to call me good, yet we all strive to do good things, and we’ll see how this ends, in death.
To love means to listen first, pay attention, and only after thinking, perform the act of love: either do what the person asks or explain why not, and offer a better solution. It is a full circle through our personality.
Without listening, no love even begins. This is why the censorship we have seen over the past four years has nothing to do with love. It is the complete opposite of love; making a heart-to-heart connection with God means listening to every word He said. This is the triangle upward. If you cannot listen to your neighbor, you do not love him or her, even if you share gifts. Bribing is a good example of that "love." And by definition, a neighbor is anyone who comes within your reach; it is not just those whom you have known forever or whom you trust.
Loving your neighbor means listening to what the other person says without questioning who they are first. That is our obligation if we love the Truth. After reflecting on what we heard, we take action, and our neighbor decides what to do with our gifts—accept or reject. The process repeats based on our love. This is exactly what God does when we continue to reject His love; He waits for another chance.
Listening to your neighbor means engaging with your Mind first (open-minded). Listening and understanding are the keys to love. Giving feedback is part of the process; if someone is lying, we should bring that to light. If we mostly remain silent because it’s an easier way to manage people, then we have nothing in common with love. Lies are often done in silence, which is a sin of omission. So when we love our neighbor, we listen to him or her just as we listen to ourselves. Now it becomes clearer why it is not easy to love: it requires listening carefully and observing the world around you within your reach.
And there is another problem. If we do not love ourselves, we will frequently feed our Souls with lies, and those will be our gifts to our neighbors as well. Just as we listen to our Minds, we listen to the other minds around us. The same applies to God and the Truth. We are so lazy and prone to taking shortcuts; that is a fact of our nature. So every time you speak of love, be aware that we have fallen in that test before. Why do you think we are born to get it right this time? We have to practice and learn it first. Calling upon love is like calling upon wisdom that you have never tested before. Blind trust in humans is a recipe for disaster.
TO LOVE means TO LISTEN first:
We sat and spoke with the women who had gathered there.
One of them, a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth,
from the city of Thyatira, a worshiper of God, listened,
and the Lord opened her heart to pay attention
to what Paul was saying. (Acts 16:11-15)
You cannot love what you do not understand or know. Therefore, saying the most important thing in life is love means absolutely nothing, just like willing the good of the other, because we are not capable of any of these by nature; our hearts are corrupt. We have a problem.
Houston, we have a problem: wicked hearts. For many people, it is much easier to overlook the issue because then they don't have to find a solution. Yes, of course, I know what it means to love. It means willing the good of the other, which is impossible without truly listening. How can you help a patient if you dismiss them from the start, claiming their complaints aren't real? Where is the love in that?
Taking shortcuts to love is what we truly love, not the neighbor. Determining whether the neighbor is telling the truth or a lie requires considerable engagement, especially mental effort, among other factors. Since we know mental energy is limited, it's much easier to impose a protocol on him: silence or a phrase we repeat in such circumstances.
Admitting the problem that we cannot listen, not even to God, let alone ourselves or our neighbors, is the first obstacle to a two-step solution. We love to play mini-gods because it's a great shortcut to saving our mental energy. Sometimes we use this to preserve our sanity because the truth is not as light as lies; it is heavy and substantial, and our souls are too weak to handle it.
Here is a great case and example of how lies lead to death, and it all started because of “love.”
This young girl, unfortunately lacking the ability to think and listen, believed that love is merely sexual attraction, as did her boyfriend (who helped her act on this belief out of love), and Pierce Morgan, who questions a serial killer about love.
We see that people’s definitions of love are quite different, yet there is certainly a common ground for everyone. Just as E=mc² is not a self-evident law of physics, if love is the most desirable virtue, why do you think everyone commonly practices it?
Love requires hard work and patience: listening, thinking, and giving feedback. This is a reasonable approach, not merely emotional!
Her parents rejected two of her boyfriends, and she could not handle that, believing she had the right to love and orchestrated their deaths most horrifically. She explains lies so well: a small lie leads to another lie, and it never stops; she is not making it look banal, but real, and we should trust her on that because it is her expertise. When Morgan asked her what she thought at that moment, she also spoke the truth: “I guess I wasn’t thinking….”
It is interesting to observe how Morgan is “adding” his own words, i.e. opinion, to help her come up with answers, just to prove his opinion right. This is another great example of poor listening habits.
He doesn’t listen carefully but speaks for her, almost putting words in her mouth, while she keeps her mouth shut most of the time, wisely. We all do this when we want to see the world as we think it is, rather than discovering the Truth.
The essence of lying is the unwillingness to think at the moment, to listen carefully, or to pay attention. It reflects a complete lack of wisdom — a total absence of mind — and simply doing the “heart” thing, pursuing whatever you wish to execute without a second thought. This is a recurring pattern in all human interactions.
This may seem like LOVE to such people, and it is a selfish love, with the triangle upside down, rather than true love. We can observe a world filled with upside-down triangles and selfish love, concealed beneath grand facades, but we simply cannot accept this as truth; it feels too ugly to tolerate, like a young girl with such emptiness in her heart. Therefore, we make assumptions, as we are unable to confront the Truth.
We often share our opinions and suggest ways to do things better, smarter, and more efficiently, yet we rarely listen to what our neighbor is saying. We avoid the ugly truth because we prefer to believe that everyone is capable of love. Why?
Here is another example of a person who committed five murders. When asked what he was thinking, he said, “I was not doing my best thinking.” There is no logic, while love is pure logic. Evil comes from a wicked heart in a person whose brain is silenced. As a side note, three women got away just by talking to the murderer and keeping his mind active. Without mind, there is absolutely no love.
Not listening to what a neighbor has to say because you’ve decided they are not good enough (rich, educated, qualified, etc.) to be heard, or not speaking up when confronted with lies, or not engaging in the conversation seriously with all your heart, mind, and soul, but dismissing it on the basis of “feelings,” is playing mini-God and rejecting the second rule of the Law of Love. To maintain our false peace of mind, we continuously determine what is true and what is not, relying on our corrupted gut feelings and neglecting the serious, mindful process. We cannot imagine that behind an empty mind is an empty heart as well. We prefer “Hollywood reality” because it temporarily makes our lives easier.
So much abuse occurs in doctor-patient relationships, where doctors accept payment without even listening, let alone solving the problem. Understanding the issue is halfway to the solution, and it is impossible to respond with love if you have not genuinely considered what the other person is saying with all your heart and mind:…” listen to your patient”….
Love begins in the mind, and the heart should obey, listen to, and not lead the person. This is the only way to love; every other way is lies and selfish love. It forms a full circle through our personality: to listen, to think, and to act with wisdom, fortitude, and counsel. An empty person cannot give what they do not have. To love means to love your soul first and to give the gifts you possess. If you have nothing, you will be giving nothing for something, which is a lie and not love.