You have to give love first to receive love

Wednesday, Jan 30, 2019 2238 words 9 mins 56 secs
An A Course in Miracles Blog  © 2019 Paul West

YOU HAVE TO GIVE LOVE FIRST TO RECEIVE LOVE

Love is in you, it is you, it is God given. God put love and light and power into you. You did not put it there and cannot produce it on your own. But if you believe love is not in you, you are unlovable, unworthy, are denying your real self, etc, love will be blocked. Love does not enter where it is not welcome.

Believing the love is not in you, you will see yourself as lacking love, and "in need". You will believe the love is separate from you and external to you. So you will go seeking for it. You will try to GET IT from anywhere other than inside yourself. That is, you'll try to acquire it, without undoing your belief that you don't have it.

The problem is even IF people give it, you will not allow yourself to truly receive it. Openness to receiving love requires that you NOT believe you're lacking it, and requires to TO believe that love IS IN YOU ALREADY.

It's not that you need to find a way to get the love you are lacking, it's that you need to learn that unless you GIVE or EXTEND it, you WILL NOT receive it. And this also means, no-one else can give you the love that you are unwilling to give yourself or to others.

If you fail to give love to others, ie you deny them love, what happens is you deny yourself love. In other words, if you find that you cannot love or aren't willing to, your "unloving attitude" towards others will also be experienced by yourself. You will find yourself lacking and needy and dependent on external sources.

How love really works, is that it must extend. It must be given. In order to have the love, you have to give the love. In order to receive the love, you must express the love. You must flow it, extend it. It's given to you BY GOD, and your natural function (when sane) is to extend it or "pass it on" to everyone else (and God).

When you do that, you acknowledge the love is in you, it's already being supplied to you, you are NOT lacking it, and therefore you HAVE it to give. If you feel like you're lacking it, you will also feel like you cannot give any more. The remedy for that is not to try to get more love from others, but to become more willing TO love. To give more love.

When you give more love, YOUR lack is supplied from within, and by giving your love away to others you RECEIVE it from God. This is the only way it works. This is how you love naturally. And that also means you MUST acknowledge that God loves you in order for you to be willing and able to love yourself and others. If you can't acknowledge God as the source of ALL love, it is impossible to experience real love at all. Sorry atheists but if you deny God you deny love.

Unless you are choosing to express love, you will not receive it. What applies to you applies to others. This is the Golden Rule in action. Love others to love yourself. If you unlove them you will unlove yourself. If you attack them you will attack yourself. If you are unforgiving in your attitude towards them you will find yourself guilty. If you love them you will love yourself. It's a rule of equality.

This also does not mean sacrifice. By giving love, you should not aim to only cause others to receive love, and omit yourself from receiving it. That too is egocentric. It's a form of sacrifice in which you believe others deserve love and you do not, so you try to give love but only in a way or form that ensures you do not receive or experience it yourself. You "burn out" that way because you are not getting fresh love input from God. You're trying to give yourself away and actually get rid of yourself. It's suicidal.

People who SEEM very giving and selfless can be the most denying of self love and unwilling to receive. This is the ego's illusion of love. Appearing to be loving or sacrificial in an attempt to look loving, when in fact all you're doing is creating a hole in yourself and denying yourself what little you have. This happens when you try to be the SOURCE of love, as an ego, rather than getting the love from God. Sacrificial selflessness is NOT unconditionally loving.

Similarly, if you are afraid, it is because you are failing to love. You are not fulfilling your function of extending God's being. Fear is what you experience as the absence of love. All suffering comes from that sense of lack or denial. You'll think, you are too afraid to love, you have nothing to give, you are empty, and this is terrifying you because you have no strength, nothing to stand up to others with, people are walking all over you and you have no confidence.

But what happens is, surprisingly, if you can will yourself to love, to express and extend genuine love, unconditional love, it immediately dissolves that fear. It gives you strength, it empowers you, it sets you up in the correct arrangement of being an extender of God's power in which He takes care of you, it protects you, it makes you sane, and it shines away all darkness. The ONLY way to make that happen is to extend love.

By giving it, even if you don't THINK you have it TO give, you INCREASE how much you HAVE and find yourself in a better position. It seems counterintuitive because you think you can only give what you seem to have already. But if you give and extend willingly, it simultaneously instantly increases your supply. You can ride that wave and become much "higher" on that love. But you must initiate the giving of the love in order to break out of the sense of lacking it. As soon as you get into the flowing of it, your situation improves.

To love everyone equally and fully is the goal. EVERYONE. And that means no exceptions. And that is not easy for us ego people. People who are conditional in their love. Who don't want to love everyone. And who find some people to be sinful. This also indicates that you are unwilling to love because you are unwilling to love yourself. If you reach the limits of how much you can love someone and you feel like you just can't love them anymore, or enough, it's because you do not love yourself. You are blocking love from being received because you don't think you deserve or want it. And that makes it impossible to give it.

Yet you have to move past those blocks, those beliefs in negativity towards yourself, so that you can come to recognize that you DESERVE God's love. And this is what forgiveness and the atonement are around. Learning to recognize the truth about you, that you never sinned and all is forgiven, such that you utterly deserve God's total undivided love forever. Accepting that you are innocent and there is no reason NOT to love yourself. Or others.

You can only give the love you have received. You can only give the miracles you have received. But once you receive it and accept it as true of you, you accept it as true of others, and become willing to love BOTH you and others all the more. Which also means willing to give miracles to others. That's the path towards enlightenment. Towards the recognition that there is only love. And that nothing else exists to block it. Nor would you want to. In your right mind, there is no reason to do anything other than love fully and maximally. All expressions of true love are maximal.

Give to receive. Give first, receive next. If you receive first before giving, that is conditional and blocks the receiving, leaving you empty handed, especially if you fail to get it from someone. You must "give away" the love that you want to keep, then it will increase, and you will not lose it. This breaks all the ego's laws of lack. Ideas are increased by being given away. Miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver. If you want more love, love more. Find out the barriers you've placed against love and remove them. Become willing to love everyone, all the time, without exception. Then you're ready for God.

When everyone is willing to extend God's love, they share in that love together, but you don't give love due to other people lacking it, nor do you seek for people to love you on the basis that you lack the love yourself. Imagine if everyone already is full of love and everyone is extending love to everyone. The extension isn't done at this point in order to uplift those who are lacking (which is what miracles are for) but simply as a communication, an expression, a natural way of existing. You love the love that is already in everyone, not because it's not there, but because you acknowledge everyone is already love. Love then moves beyond its healing function and become simply a way of relating forever.

It is not your task to necessarily learn to "love more", however, because God has already in fact created you WITH love and AS love. Extending love is totally natural to you as a son of God and you are unlimited in your ability to do so. The only issue are your blocks to the awareness of love, your denial, which stops you from receiving unlimited love and stops you from expressing it. You should not be trying to KEEP your blocks and INCREASE the love. That will not really work. Keeping blocks while "trying to love more" will reach a limit fast. Instead, your job is to seek out the blocks you've made AGAINST love, remove them, and then love NATURALLY will flow at an increased rate. Effortlessly.

Because the fact is, if you didn't have insanity or blocks or denials, love would NATURALLY go out on its own because of what it is. "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin." If you don't interfere with it, love maximally extends through you all the time and its so natural and joyful that it's all you want to do. But when you erect barriers against it, in preventing yourself from being loved by God, you block the receipt, and try to cut off your mind from spirit. That SEEMS to reduce the love. It doesn't reduce love at its SOURCE (God), it only reduces your willingness to RECEIVE and flow it.

That's similar to the idea that you have a pipe, and God is flowing maximum love through the pipe, through you, and your tap is fully switched on so that the love just flows right through you and on to others (extension of creation). But when you turn the tap OFF, you reduce the flow to a trickle. Not because the source is limited but because YOU are limiting it. All you have to do is OPEN UP the flow and let love in and through you and be willing to love. Because actually it takes effort to not love. It takes effort to be unwilling. To resist. To deny. It takes deliberate belief and energy to PREVENT love. So when you stop all that effort (ego doing), you open up and the love just flows full-force on its own and it is effortless and very natural.

Be a channel for God, basically. Let him move through you. Let the Holy Spirit perform miracles through you. "What the holy spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world" "Do his works". Obviously you cannot do his works on your own, you do his works by working with him to extend HIS healing power THROUGH you TO others. Which means cooperating in not resisting, not getting in the way of, not putting up blocks against, His power through you. This is a miracle working principle. This doesn't mean you become uninvolved and "sit on the sidelines" in your ego. It means you become an EXTENDER OF LOVE, a relay, a device which forwards the love through WILL, and in that you and the Holy Spirit team up and you become part of the machinery of miracle working. You MUST ACTIVELY EXPRESS LOVE YOURSELF in order to perform miracles, but you get that love from God.

You're basically learning to plug yourself back into God. Plug yourself into love. Allow yourself to depend on God as the SOURCE of everything you are and have. By being willing to extend what you are given (your inheritance) to others, to share it equally with everyone. This entails learning to TRUST the Holy Spirit, learning to DEPEND on God, learning to make decisions WITH him (not just him, and not just you). Letting go and letting God. And fulfilling your function as spirit. "The only function of spirit is to extend God's being." Then you are being your natural self. You're being as God created you. And God created you to be an extender and expresser of miraculous powerful unconditional love all the time.

Read more on: Giving and receivingLove


Link to: https://www.miraculousliving.com/blogs/a-course-in-miracles-blog/you-have-to-give-love-first-to-receive-love

Comments

Add your comment...





For updates, subscribe to RSS using: https://www.miraculousliving.com/blogs/a-course-in-miracles-blog.atom

Recent articles about Giving and receiving


Recent articles about Love

MiraculousLiving.com ©2024 Paul West / OmniLogic Arts