Is Peace, Love & Enlightenment Boring?

Is peace, love and enlightenment boring?

Well, let’s get real and to the point: it isn’t generally considered to be cool, that’s for sure.

Indeed, the general perception of the population – that peace, love and enlightenment is so very, very uncool – can make the question itself feel frivolous, nutty and irrelevant.

Ah, me, oh my...what a funny bunch we are. We hate suffering, we hate injustice, we hate violence and poverty and terrorism and corporate corruption; we hate so very many things. We hate hatred itself. And if asked if we would like to see a world in which the entire human race was filled with love, for itself and the world it lives on, most of us would feel compelled to say, Yes.

And compelled is the word, for we’ve put so much energy into hating all of that other stuff that we have compelled ourselves to answer the question with, Yes, of course I would like to see the human race filled with love. Of course. Of course.

But is there really any, Of course, about it?

There’s a profound difference between hating hate and loving love. And so many of us love, with a tremendous and inspiring passion, to hate hatred. It’s such a beautiful and twisted addiction. And, if you are in the mood for getting real with yourself, how will you answer this question: How much time in your life to date have you spent loving love compared to the amount of time you have spent hating hatred?

Hating hatred is sexy, no? It’s thrilling. It’s exciting. It’s passionate. It’s relatable. And it’s so very easy.

And it’s so very popular!

Would you care to be accepted – approved of – by the people around you: your peers, your friends, your family and community? Would you like them to think of you as cool and righteous? Hating the things that hurt them and get them down can feel like the most obvious and natural thing you can do to show that you love them...even more so, sometimes, than just… actually… feeling your love for them, no strings attached.

Yes, we’re a funny bunch.

So, what can a guy like myself propose, who proclaims himself in all sincerity to be a love activist? Is it time, perhaps, for some myth busting?

Being a hater - hating hatred – is not cool and sexy in the least. It is boring and limiting and self-reducing. It is all manner of things that we do not in the least wish for ourselves.

But that’s just me hating on hate again. And for sure, I can hate on hatred with the best of them.

The real myth that could do with being busted is that loving love is uncool.

For the human species is a species that, like most, loves to flock and herd. We have seen the beautiful, shifting three dimensional shapes that flocks of starlings and schools of fish create when the individuals that comprise them fall under the sway of their collective movements. The human being, magnificent entity that it is, is massively sensitive to the pressure of the human collective it is a part of. What kind of a person can resist the huge pull of popular opinion when the global population starts getting off on hating hate?

Why, we must be talking about somebody who has such a mighty trust in love that they are able to swim against the pull of the rest and forego the invitation to hate hatred. To me this is a stupendously sexy and cool character – a role model indeed. And the more of these role models I discover the sexier and cooler I feel.

There is a very simple and very powerful principle at the heart of all this: we become like the thing that we put most of our attention on. So, when most of our attention is spent on fighting hate, we become haters, propagating the very thing we are fighting. When most of our attention is spent on loving something – even if that thing is hate – we propagate the thing we are loving, because we are being like that thing and, therefore, bringing more of it into the world.

The collective belief in the coolness of hating hatred, and the uncoolness of loving love, can feel like an overwhelmingly persuasive consensus. And it takes a spectacularly beautiful and sexily cool entity to walk through that current of popular misconception with their love of love only growing stronger and shining more brightly.

Have you ever been in the presence of somebody who has worked that out, and simply walks through their day loving and Loving and LOVING? If you have then you know that they were the most utterly cool and sexy and remarkable person in the room in that moment. Regardless of their looks or their age or their clothes or their weight or whatever, their charisma was a force of nature to be awed by. Such a person does not need to win, or persuade, or fight. Such a person does not need, full stop. And they look at you – at YOU – and they only love. And there is not the atom of a whisper of condescension in their love, for while you may see yourself as being dimmed by the “superior” light of their love, they see no shade of inequality at all. What they see when they look into your eyes IS the very thing that causes their love to spring forth.

Are there people who walk about like this all day, everyday? I don’t know. I sincerely doubt it. We all have our moments of pain and doubt. But, equally so, we have all had our moments of being that very person. And if you don’t think you have, then just take a moment to imagine it. It is accessible to every single person on the planet. And the moment in which every single person on the planet feels like that simultaneously, with each other, will be a moment so cool and sexy that we will probably be annihilated by the ensuing, explosive, chain eruption of multiple orgasms. But, hey...what a way to go.

I suspect there may be a day or three before we’re ready for that.

This piece is just a loving reminder, to myself and to you, that loving love is a powerful option. It’s not that it is more powerful than loving to hate hatred – hating hate is gigantically powerful! - it’s just that the loving option is the one that actually brings about the result that you say you wish for.

So think on, lover x