If you believe that humans are by nature non-trustworthy and evil, you will create a society that supports that view, then enact laws, approve rules, adopt regulations, and impose restraints that are justified by it.
If you believe that humans are by nature trustworthy and good, you will create an entirely different kind of society, in which laws, rules, regulations, and restraints are rarely required. The first society will be freedom limiting, the second, freedom giving.
God is fully loving because God is fully free. To be fully free is to be fully joyful, because full freedom creates the space for every joyful experience. Freedom is the basic nature of God. It is also the basic nature of the human soul. The degree to which you are not fully free is the degree to which you are not fully joyful and that is the degree to which you are not fully loving.
To be totally loving means to be fully free.
We should allow everyone to be able to do anything they want.
That is how God loves. God allows everyone to do anything they want.
It is normal in your society to punish. It is abnormal in your society to simply allow a consequence to assert itself to reveal itself.
Punishments are your announcement that you are too impatient to await a natural outcome. Punishments are someone else's decision that one has done wrong.
Consequences are one's own experience that something does not work. That is, it did not produce an intended result.
In other words, we do not learn quickly from punishments, because we see them as something that someone else is doing to us. We learn more readily from consequences, because we see them as something that we are doing to ourselves.
The biggest punishment that you have devised is the withholding of your love. You have shown your offspring that if they behave in a certain way, you will withhold your love. It is by the granting and the withholding of your love that you have sought to regulate and modify, to control and to create, your children's behaviors.
This is something that God would never do.
True love never withdraws itself. And that is what loving fully means.
I am love. One does not have to practice what one is, one simply is it.
I am the love that knows no condition, nor limitation of any kind.
I am totally loving, and to be totally loving means to be willing to give every mature sentient being total freedom to be, do, and have that which they wish.
Even if you know it will be bad for them?
It is not for you to decide that for them.
Not even for our children?
If they are mature sentient beings, no. If they are grown children, no. And if they are not yet mature, the fastest way to lead them to their own maturity is to allow them the freedom to make as many choices as possible as early as practical.
This is what love does. Love lets go. That which you call need, and which you often confuse with love, does the opposite. Need holds on. This is the way you can tell the difference between love and need. Love lets go, need holds on.
So to be totally loving, I let go?
Among other things, yes. Let go of expectation, let go of requirements and rules and regulations that you would impose on your loved ones. For they are not loved if they are restricted. Not totally.
Nor are you; you do not love yourself totally when you restrict yourself, when you grant yourself less than total freedom, in any matter.
Yet remember that choices are not restrictions. So do not call the choices you have made restrictions. And lovingly provide for your offspring, and all your loved ones, all the information that you feel you may have, to help them make good choices - "good" being defined here as those choices most likely to produce a particular desired result, as well as what you know to be their largest desired result: a happy life.
Share what you know about that. Offer what you have come to understand. Yet do not seek to impose your ideas, your rules, your choices upon another and do not withhold your love should another make choices you would not make. Indeed, if you believe their choices to have been poor ones, that is precisely the time to show your love.
That is compassion, and there is no higher expression.
What else does it mean to be totally loving?
It means to be fully present, in every single moment. To be fully aware. To be fully open, honest, transparent. It means to be fully willing, to express the love that is in your heart full out. To be fully loving means to be fully naked, without hidden agenda or hidden motive, without hidden anything.
And you say that it is possible for human beings, for regular people like me, to achieve such love? This is something of which we are all capable?
It is more than that of which you are capable. It is that which you are. This is the nature of Who You Are. The most difficult thing that you do is to deny that. And you are doing this difficult thing every day. It is why your life feels so difficult. Yet when you do the easy thing, when you decide to come from, to be, Who You Really Are - which is pure love, unlimited and unconditioned-then your life becomes easy again. All the turmoil disappears, all the struggle goes away.
This peace may be achieved in any given moment. The way to it may be found by asking a simple question:
What would love do now?
This is a marvelous question, because you will always know the answer. It is like magic. It is cleansing, like a soap. It takes the worry out of being close. It washes away all doubt, all fear. It bathes the mind with the wisdom of the soul.
What a good way of putting that.
It is true. When you ask this question, you will know instantly what to do. In any circumstance, under any condition, you will know. You will be given the answer. You are the answer, and asking the question brings forth that part of you.
Do not second-guess this answer when it instantly comes to you. When you second-guess is when you fool yourself - and can make a fool of yourself. Go into the heart of love, and come from that place in all your choices and decisions, and you will find peace.
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