Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they needed your approval. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again. There is no greater existence than the life that gives more than it takes.
If you are in love it will show. In your eyes, your face, the way you walk, the way you sit, everything will show it, because you are not the same person. You have been touched. The desiring mind is not there. And here is a big problem.
If you are only happy when you find a lover to fall in love with, your life and relationship will be a mess. Before you fell in love there was not the same experience, so basically you were walking around incomplete without a lover. It's like that song "You're nobody till somebody loves you", in reality, that headspace causes all our suffering .
It should read, "You're somebody, whether anybody loves you". If you are one person before you fall in love, and then you are somebody else after you fall in love, there is dependency on this great experience, and that is the beginning of relationship problems. This is the first or second level of love, where there is significant confusion between love, need, rescue and an anti-depressant.
There are four substitutes for love. They are sex, food, religion and material greed. Many people can't discern the difference between love and substitutes. They feel in love because of great sex, or because their lover has lots of wealth. This is because the same chemicals that are produced in the body when love is there, are produced when we experience hope. So chemically, love hormones are secreted when we experience other forms of happiness, such as infatuation, but hope is also a powerful aphrodisiac.
This is the motive that attracts people together in the first, second and third levels of love. Their hormones are racing; they can't tell if it is love, infatuation or hope. The chemistry of their body changes and they feel every experience of "In LOVE". But they are not in love. They are in solution. Solution to a problem is a substitute for love. This substitution is unsustainable. The attachment to their lover is highly emotional, highly conditional, it's the relationship made in hell, because there is a heightened hope that love is there, but it is not really love, and it fails. They were just not ready to be in love, because they were not in love before they met their lover.
