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Mood, Food Gratitude

Healing From The Way We Think

Balboa Press

Love vs. Non-Love

The only force in the universe powerful enough to overcome fear is love.

Love

I wanted the world to be easy, fun, exciting, romantic, and loving. I wanted to be as good as other people or better — the best, even. I wanted to be worthy of love. I wanted to look good and feel good. I wanted to be capable, successful, and happy — the goals set by society and my parents. I wanted to look like I had my life together, as if I knew what I was doing and was doing it well. I wanted my life to feel complete in every way. But no matter what I did, no matter who I was intimately involved with, what friends I had, what job I had, or what stuff I bought, I could never get there — at least not with the way I thought about the world and definitely not with the way I thought about myself. Something had to change. Then one day it did. I learned the truth.

The truth is, there are only two motivating forces in life: love and fear. These emotions incite behaviors that provide us with two diametrically opposed and conflicting life experiences. In one realm exists love in all its glory, with peace, healing, and connective energy. Love is balance. In the other realm exists fear, or non-love. Created as an irrational program in the mind that we blindly follow, nonlove is completely disconnected from the heart and is full of fear, misperception, illness, and loneliness. We have been taught this irrational program and have grown up believing that the program is who we are. This is not true at all. We are not our beliefs or thoughts. We are not anything that is derived from the mind.

Everything that is expressed in a non-loving way is out of balance with everything that is authentic and loving within us. When we think and act in non-loving ways, we are clearly out of balance. So the derogatory words about a family member or co-worker are out of balance, as is consistently eating foods that are unsupportive of good health. These aren't things to feel bad about. That would just be more imbalance. These are merely things to recognize and correct. That's all.

Non-love, or fear, is not to be confused with our built-in primitive fear response called fight, flight, or freeze, which is a natural survival instinct. Mind-created fear is not natural and certainly does not help with our survival in any way. In fact, mind-created fear is responsible for the destruction of our relationships and most of our health issues. It is the reason for arguments, hatred, the killing of the planet, corporate and banking greed, and out-of-control governments. We can see the destruction wrought by mind-created fear in ourselves and in those around us, as well as on the world stage. It all originates from the same place — non-love.

Of the two, love is our natural state. Love is normal. Love is easy. There is no thinking involved with love. For instance, when you look at your children or your dog, you just know the love is there. You don't have to give it any consideration or analysis. Opinion polls among your friends aren't necessary, and you won't stay awake at night contemplating whether you really love your children or your dog. Another example could be when you look at your partner and feel a deep love connection, as if you have always known each other. You didn't think this up. You didn't decide to believe in this love because someone told you about it and it seemed like a good idea. You didn't force it or manipulate it into being. It just happened, as true love does. In our natural state of being, we love others purely, without distraction, restriction, questions, or attachment, because love isn't comprised of conditions and rules. It is not meant to pacify anything within us, solve our problems, or make us feel better about ourselves. Love just is. It is effortless, spontaneous, and genuine. Love is simple.

Love provides us with unmatched clarity to see the deeper dimension within people, rather than just looking at what's on the surface. With love, we know that what's on the surface doesn't define us. With love, we see beyond the anger, hatred, lack of compassion, confusion, and frustration that many of us exhibit when we are in a place of non-love. Instead, we focus on the love that exists beneath all of that. We know that color, religion, race, beliefs, job titles, money, and material possessions create worthless divisions that have no relevance where love exists.

With love, we trust that all is well. In this pure state of being, we are often unaware of the specific universal purpose behind our connections and experiences. But we don't mind, because we automatically know that everything works for our benefit, even if we can't see what that is just yet. Love doesn't create stress, as it knows nothing of regret, worry, or resistance to what is. In this natural state, we know we are not victims of life; we are in harmony with it. We know all situations and all people are working with us to create our life experiences, helping us to gain the greatest benefit from them. From this perspective, we become aware that we are one. All of life is connected, and each individual is an essential part. Everything is meant to help us to remember love. All is divine.

Love carries an energy that is invigorating and alive. Enveloped in love, we don't feel tired; everyday living isn't a chore. There is no complaining and moaning about the laundry. Getting up for work is more pleasant, as are all events of the day. An unexpected occurrence doesn't upset or scare us or make us spiral out of control. With love, we glide through the day in a calmer state, connected to the healing energy within us. Everything can be healed with love: relationships, our health, and our ecosystem. In fact, the power of love to heal everything is limitless.

What Is Non-Love?

Mind-created fear is the same as non-love. I have chosen the term non-love instead of ego, fear, or other similar terms because it is not always easy for us to recognize that our beliefs, thoughts, and actions arise out of our egos or from our fears, both of which come from our sense of lack. Our sense of lack is the foundation of the irrational, mind-based program we have been trained to believe in. Lack creates fear.

While we may not know we are operating through our egos much of the time or are acting out of fear, we all have the capacity to understand, know, and identify when we are being unloving to ourselves and others. It is certainly easy to recognize that we are being unloving when we demean other people, judge them as less valuable or less worthy than ourselves, call them names, deny them the same rights and quality of life, blame them as if they are the problem, or wish bad things would happen to them. We can also recognize when we are treating ourselves in the same non-loving ways.

Non-love is a state of being that is completely devoid of love. Of course, a system based on non-love knows nothing of love. It only hijacks the concept of love to further its agenda or as a means to hide true love from us. These are some of its signature moves that we are going to uncover so we are no longer tricked by them.

Non-love is unnatural to us. It is learned and contrived. It incites confusion, irrational thinking, unnecessary drama, stress, separation, and illness. It is highly limiting and often feels like a prison with no solutions to its relentless questions and quagmires.

Non-love creates uneasy feelings within the mind and body — unsettled, agitated, and anxious states of existence. Whenever we experience any of these, we know we are acting out our mind-created fears. Each time we identify with this state of mind, we suffer. This constant uneasiness is out of alignment with the natural peace of love, thereby creating most of the physical and mental illness we experience.

Non-love is an illusion, as are all fears that arise from this state of mind. Saying something is an illusion doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It means we don't see it as it truly is. Anything that is seen through non-love can't be seen in its authentic form because non-love is life expressed through distortion. We do, however, feel the effects of those illusions in our bodies and see them expressed in our lives. In fact, our bodies are the living manifestations of our beliefs and thoughts. That doesn't mean fears are real, though. It just means we believe they are. When we stop believing in them, they no longer exist and healing occurs.

Non-love is based on lack, so in this state of mind giving anything away makes us feel as though we have less, and having less makes us fearful. I have said before that lack creates fear. In this state of being where we believe we lack something, or many things, we are afraid we don't or won't have enough. This drives us to acquire and hoard beyond what we actually need for the sole purpose of attempting to fill a sense of lack that is nothing more than an illusion. This is why materialism has such a hold on us, as we continually focus our attention outside of ourselves to acquire more and more. This is one of the ways the irrational programming diminishes the significance of love.

The belief that we lack anything at all is not true, of course, but when we believe it is, that is what we experience. In reality, or in a place of love and balance, there is enough of everything. There is enough money, enough food, and enough time. In the mind-created fear state, the distribution of everything is out of balance. But that's what we get with non-love: lack and imbalance.

Non-love suppresses us and holds us back. How many times in your life have you wanted to do something only to have some thought in your mind tell you No? If we are willing to pay attention to our lives, to get out of autopilot mode and ask ourselves if our lives really look the way we want them to, we would see that, in general, they don't. Instead, our lives look like what our minds want them to look like, not our hearts, and our minds' ideas of us are not our own creations.

In non-love, the questions and quagmires created in the fearful mind are answered by a list of worst-case scenarios that leave us unhappy, in despair, and often depressed. Judgment, anger, guilt, resentment, and blame are partners in crime to this state of mind. Unhappy with our lives, we are stressed and on high alert as we manufacture any reason possible to attack others, further separating us from those we love. We are even separated from ourselves, unaware of the power we have to heal our lives. All separation creates weakness as it takes us further and further away from our natural state of love.

The life we live today is mainly out of balance. It is light on love and heavy on fear, or non-love. This unbalanced and unstable state creates so much pain and suffering in our lives that we find ourselves literally sick and tired. And there is no part of our lives that isn't affected by this unbalanced state of mind. Somewhere deep within, we know this, but we continue to do the same thing over and over, wishing for different results. Living this way is futile. It is time to uncover the truth about ourselves.

The Creation of the Thought Self

I have said before that our sense of lack is the foundation of an irrational, non-loving program we have been trained to believe in. Not only that, we have been conditioned to believe we are the program; that, somehow, this is who we were when we were born and this is who we have to be. Nothing could be further from the truth. I call this programmed thinker the Thought Self.

The Thought Self, or mind-created self, is not our true self, our authentic self, our heart-based, loving self, or our soul self. The Thought Self is, in fact, nothing more than an imposter. It's a façade, or mirage, that uses beliefs, stories, roles, ideas, and concepts to create a made-up person. There is no "you" or "me" in it. For these reasons, it is often called the false self. We can say the Thought Self is just a bunch of thoughts, hence the name.

The Thought Self is an entitlement program of storytelling. All of its stories are based on lack and fear which, by design, makes all of its stories lies for two reasons. One reason is that with love, nothing is lacking, so there is nothing to be afraid of. Any story involving lack or fear, then, must be untrue. The second reason is that anything that comes from what is already false can only be false. Whenever you hear the Thought Self talking, you will know it is lying to you.

To substantiate itself, the Thought Self often says things like, "I have a right to be angry", which suggests that what's untrue still has rights. This is another lie. You can replace the word "angry" with hurt, offended, prejudiced, or anything else that seems to give a voice to a collection of thoughts.

The Thought Self stays alive only when we keep telling its stories on its behalf. When I say the Thought Self stays alive, I mean you continue to believe it's you. In telling its stories, you are a prisoner to whatever it believes, whether you like it or not. This means you will suffer from its unhappiness, as we all do when we also tell its stories, and it is never really happy.

The Thought Self is programmed to make up stories about anything and everything, hoping to hook our attention — which it often gains easily. The stories are manufactured using a word, a thought, a belief, or an event as their base. They build from there, extracting pieces of information stored in our subconscious that are twisted and thrown together to make up a fairy tale to serve the continuation of the Thought Self. Stuck in our thoughts, we go around and around with them, like a hamster on a wheel. This is one of the ways we are kept in the dark about who we really are.

When challenged and broken down, the stories we tell would read like tales of madness as we experience a lapse in sanity and love. However, if we stop telling the stories, realizing what they are, a crack in the Thought Self begins to appear. This crack is the light of our authentic self, or soul self, shining through. Challenge enough of the Thought Self's stories and the light of our souls eventually shines through completely. The stories stop. Once that happens we disconnect from the Thought Self and our authentic, heart-based self is there, as it always has been. This is where love is. This is home for us.

Love and Contrast

The phrase, "What is love?" is one of the most searched phrases on the Internet. Although love is difficult to define — for it must be experienced in order to be fully understood — we can say that love is both an expression and an expansion. On the other hand, non-love is both suppression and limitation. There are always conditions in nonlove that create stress and insecurity. Love, being unconditional and in alignment with the truth of who we are at our core, creates serenity and a sense of being safe. The contrast between the two is obvious.

We express love through compassion, gratitude, kindness, understanding, and peace. These expressions of love allow us to easily feel a connection and companionship with people, animals, and nature. Loneliness is not an issue. When we lead with love, we automatically see the value in ourselves and in others. Judgment, superiority complexes, and hate are meaningless. These are replaced with acceptance, equality, and affection.

Love expands our lives, because the more we give love to others, the more love we have for ourselves simply by experiencing it. Each time you feel love for another, you feel it within. So, giving love means you get love. This is in contrast to what we are taught. We think if we love someone, they are supposed to love us back and that is how we get love. But when we are not motivated by pain, loneliness, and the expectations of believed inadequacy, there is no requirement for love to be returned in a specific way — or at all for that matter. Love is not conditional. This means we don't love someone just because they act the way we want them to, do what we think they should do, or dress how we decide they should dress. Love — true love, or love without fear — is given freely as much as possible, period. Love is abundant and without boundaries.

Love is also never-ending. We know this is true because we love the people in our lives independent of their physical location. They could be at work, in another country, or merely in the room next door; we still love them. Even when the people and pets we love pass away, the love we feel in our hearts goes on.

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Excerpted from Mood, Food Gratitude by Bo L. Arnold. Copyright © 2016 BO L. ARNOLD. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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