I have said many things about love up to this point. I have also mentioned about how true love is a love that gives, an unconditional love. The next true teaching of love that I must address is the developmental stages of love. Truly, love also has developmental stages. Even so, I’m sure not many people on earth have realized this.
The first stage is fundamental love. This stage can be said to be love in its simplest form. This would be the parental love for children and children’s love for their parents; a man’s love for a woman or a woman’s love for a man; and the love for friends and neighbors. In its broadest form, fundamental love would include the love for the community and society as a whole.
Fundamental love is, of course, a form of giving love. It means the basis of this love comes from the feeling that you have for people you naturally care about. Having goodwill toward someone you naturally have concern toward is what fundamental love is. This is the most basic and common form of love, and is actually fairly difficult to practice.
This world on earth will surely become Heaven by simply filling it with fundamental love. Fundamental love is a form of love that everyone is expected to practice and it is possible for everyone to innately appreciate the beauty of it. This is because humans are by nature designed to feel happiness in giving love.
The question here is not only about how much you appreciate fundamental love, but also how you practice this love. If this fundamental love is practiced genuinely, this world on earth, while still being the third dimension, would turn into the fifth dimensional Goodness Realm of the Real World. Therefore, the prevalence of fundamental love is the first step to creating Heaven on Earth.
The second of the developmental stages of love is nurturing love. While fundamental love can be practiced by anyone, let alone the question of how you practice it, not everyone can practice nurturing love. That is because only capable people are able to nurture others. Unless you, with your own innate abilities and through effort, have firmly developed yourself to a degree where you can guide others, you will not be able to truly nurture others. What this means is, nurturing love is the love that can guide people. Therefore, before you can practice this love, you need to have first developed a distinguished character, for the blind cannot lead the blind.
Just as the water in a river flows from upstream to downstream, nurturing love also flows downward from the top. Nurturing love is an intellectual love, a rational love. You cannot truly guide others unless you have high intelligence to penetrate the true nature of people and society, and can take action to treat the main causes of existing problems by using a greater power of reasoning. At times, these practitioners of nurturing love must show “leader’s anger” to those who are about to regress spiritually, and lead them in the right direction. Without doing
so, people cannot truly be nurtured. In this sense, nurturing love can be said to be the love of the sixth dimensional Light Realm of the Real World. There are of course leaders on earth who are capable of practicing this love, and their minds are already attuned to the sixth dimension.
Fundamental love is the act of expressing goodwill toward someone you naturally care for, while nurturing love is the act of guiding others after having developed a distinguished character. Both are wonderful forms of love. However, nurturing love is still not enough. Anyone who has abilities or intelligence higher than that of others can practice it, but there is yet another stage of love that transcends ability, intellect, or putting in effort. Namely, it is the third stage of love: forgiving love.
The practitioners of forgiving love would have already taken a giant leap to attain a religious state of mind because this state can only be reached by those who have transcended good and evil and have devoted themselves to fulfill their individual mission. What this means is, people who attain this state have awakened and realized that those living in the third dimensional material world are spiritually blind, feeling their way with no sense of direction in the darkness. To have attained this, you need to have gone through a spiritual awakening in which you realized your own foolishness and repented. Only people who have found light through their own suffering can see the scales that are covering other people’s eyes and love their Buddha- nature that lies within. This state of forgiving love can appear
only after you have developed generosity and broad-mindedness, a virtue that surpasses abilities.
Only people who have truly understood and can see the true nature of human beings as children of Buddha or a part of God will be able to see the Buddha-nature that lies within, even of those who appear to be their enemies. This ability is called transcendental wisdom. In fact, this state of forgiving love is the state of bodhisattvas. The practitioners of this forgiving love are messengers from the seventh dimension, and their minds are attuned to the Bodhisattva Realm of the Real World.
This being said, however, forgiving love or the love of bodhisattva must never be mistakenly understood as a love that tolerates the workings of devils or aids them in their activities. Devils hinder and block the love that God gives to humans and their very existence is the antithesis of love. Bodhisattvas engage with devils using faith and egoless anger, or selfless wrath, as weapons. Indeed, some devils enter the gate of forgiveness only when they realize that they can never win against Buddha or God. For this reason, forgiving love would sometimes require a proactive approach.
In the next section, I will talk about yet a higher state of love.
