A Message to My Fellow Teachers Concerning the Love They Must Feel for Their Students >>>>> The Meaning of--- and Developmental Context for --- True Love

What is Love, and why is the felt emotion and expression of True Love so hard to achieve?

 

Love is a deep and genuine Caring that ever wants the best for the one Loved. 

 

Love entails listening with real interest, trying to understand and getting as close as possible to full comprehension concerning the stances, ideas, emotional fabric, spiritual or ethical framework, present concerns, and Life goals of the one Loved.  Love entails refined and heightened empathy and committed action to express one’s Caring on a daily basis to abet the efforts of the one Loved to attain the deepest life satisfaction and reach her or his Life aims.  Love looks beyond the merely apparent, the behavior of the moment, to seek the source of manifest emotions, verbal expressions, and actions.  Love seeks to understand the real emotions felt by the one Loved and to move those emotions toward inner peace and rewarding action in ways consistent both with the Loved’s best ideals and in ways consonant with those ideals that add to, enhance, and enrich those ideals and their associated goals and values.

 

Once Loved, the one loved is always Loved:

 

Love abides through disruptions of physical interaction, catastrophic occurrences, and dramatically changed Life circumstances.  Love never forgets, always forgives, never dwells in or on the petty.  Love is constant.  Love never goes away.  Love endures whether or not the one Loved seems to care, even when the one Loved seems hostile, resentful, envious, or angry to the one who Loves. 

 

Love is extended to all of those with whom the Loving has been close in family, friendship, or significant association. 

 

Love is the reason for Being and the only way to Be.

 

Loving is difficult because Ego and Environment often work against feeling and expressing Love.  Human beings are ever focused on the effort to find a suitable self-definition and to project the suitable image into the world.  Because for most human beings a suitable definition is never attained, and attainment varies from one person to another on a wide continuum stretching from enormous personal insecurity to the most security of which humanity is capable, conversations, rewarding relationships, and commitment to the best interests of the Other is difficult in the extreme.

 

Listening for most human beings is either not a true aspiration or an aspiration faintly attained.

 

Caring is a received ideal that rarely attains the status of real.

 

Further impeding the attainment of the Spirit of Love are the unsupportive environments in which most people dwell.  To feel Love, one must exist is an environment in which one has satisfied the biological imperatives and the strivings of the Ego, so that empathy and compassion for others may be felt.  On a societal scale, Love will never be possible for most people until the society-wide environment satisfies the biological imperatives and Ego satisfaction pertinent to the physiology and psyche of all people.  Love may come only to those for whom sustaining Environment has provided satisfaction of physiology and psyche so as to make possible the empathy and altruism necessary for True Love.

 

These thoughts are my own, built upon a synthesis of the penetrating insights of Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, Jesus, St. Paul, Siddhartha Gautama, Laozi, Paul Tillich, and Erich Fromm.  The latter wrote a small book, The Art of Loving, of enormous insight that deserves wide reading and the status of classic for posterity.

A Teacher must attain the Spirit of Love---  and feel and express that Love for her or his students at a height approaching that felt for the Teacher's own child, or children, and family members.