The way to love

Your negative feelings are caused by your programming, your attachments.
Every belief that you hold, every conclusion you have reached about persons and things, every habit and every attachment, were programmed by society.
Attachment first comes the contact with something that gives you pleasure: a car, an attractively advertised modern appliance, a word of praise, a person’s company.
Then comes the desire to hold on to it, to repeat the gratifying sensation that this thing or person caused you.
Finally comes the conviction that you will not be happy without this person or thing.
Most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are.
False beliefs:

• You cannot be happy without the things that you are attached to and that you consider so precious. False. There is not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy.
• Happiness is in the future. Not true. Right here and now you are happy and you do not know it because your false beliefs and your distorted perceptions have got you caught up in fears, anxieties, attachments, conflicts, guilt and a host of games that you are programmed to play.
• Happiness will come if you manage to change the situation you are in and the people around you. Not true. You stupidly squander so much energy trying to rearrange the world … What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head.
• If all your desires are fulfilled you will be happy. Not true. In fact it is these very desires and attachments that make you tense, frustrated, nervous, insecure and fearful.

True tolerance only arises from a keen awareness of the abysmal ignorance of everyone as far as truth is concerned.
It is almost never the concrete reality of this person or thing that you are responding to. You are responding to principles, ideologies, belief systems: to preconceived ideas and prejudices, whether positive or negative.
What is needed is not learning but unlearning, not talent but courage.
You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.
Each time you are in the presence of a person, any person, or with nature or with any particular situation, you have all sorts of reactions, positive and negative. Study those reactions, observe what exactly they are and where they come from, without any sermonizing or guilt or even any desire, much less effort to change them.
Effort may change the behavior but it does not change the person.
Happy events make life delightful but they do not lead to self-discovery and growth and freedom. That privilege is reserved to the things and persons and situations that cause us pain.
Resisting death is resisting life.
All things change and pass away and die.