Someone once said, "Life is a mystery and death is forever" If you see this is true, then you may also see that expressing love, pursuing truth, and experiencing beauty are timeless keys to making ordinary life internally meaningful. We often act as if we believe the cliché that the person who dies with the most toys wins, but the truth is that the person who lives with the most meaning dies the most complete and fulfilled. In this book, you will learn how to build self-worth, create intimacy, define conscious purposes, feed internal needs, and fulfill internal potentials. These are the universal prerequisites to making any human life profoundly satisfying and internally meaningful.

EXPRESSING Love PURSUING Truth EXPERIENCING Beauty

Timeless Steps to the Ultimate Satisfaction—A Meaningful LifeBy PAUL HATHERLEY

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2011 Dr. Paul Hatherley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-3584-5

Contents

Foreword......................................................................viiPart 1 Introduction to Love, Truth & Beauty...................................1Expressing Love...............................................................3Pursuing Truth................................................................19Experiencing Beauty...........................................................39Part 2 Integrating the Experience Of Love, Truth & Beauty.....................61Exploring Life, Self, & Other People..........................................63Developing a "Conscious" Identity.............................................81Building Emotional Bonds......................................................97Identity & Meaning............................................................109

Chapter One

Expressing Love

Love is a complicated human need and experience. There are few things in everyday life that cause more intense feelings of longing, insecurity, and desire than our hunger to be loved. At the same time, there are also few experiences that cause more confusion, disillusion, or even bitterness. Ask anyone about his/her experience with love and you will hear a story about excitement, hope, pain, longing, fear, insecurity, fulfillment, and very often, disappointment.

Normally, people assume that love is something they are supposed to feel, or want to receive from another person. Rarely are we consciously aware that love is something we need to experience and express. If we do think about expressing love it is usually in terms of what we can offer externally (money, food or services), rather than something we need to give internally (energy, interest and understanding).

The first step toward becoming competent to express love is to think about and explore ordinary events from past and present until we understand the experience of love. With normal training, love is often seen as a mysterious reaction. For instance, when we react to someone by feeling a vague and mysterious chemistry, desire, lust, etc., we sometimes characterize this reaction by saying, "I have fallen in love!"

On the other hand, less mysterious is when we react to a gratifying object or experience and describe our reaction by saying, "l just love my car, house, steak, movie, etc." Often, we define love as the feeling of attachment we experience toward a person or object that has pleased us, or we anticipate might please or fulfill us. Love at first sight is an experience that happens when at a glance we anticipate an object or person will be especially gratifying. So when a person is really hot looking, or appears to be introspective, kindly, or even dangerous (depending on our preferences), we can react instantly and mysteriously by falling in love.

I know the first time I saw a little two engine private jet taking off from the airstrip so fast, sleek, maneuverable, and elegant that in one transcendent moment of ecstatic rapture, I was hopelessly and forever in love! Unfortunately, I could only express my love by an increase in salivation and a painful longing in my "heart". It was all very touching! While slightly silly, this example is not far from how simplistically we often define the complex experience of love.

Love as a Response to Being Alive

Has there ever been a time when for one unguarded and startlingly clear moment you stood outside yourself and observed you really are alive, and terrifyingly enough, really are going to die? I have had these moments. The first was on the shores of Lake Michigan at a family picnic with grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. I was about seven, and was sitting alone on the shore as the sun went down. I was mesmerized by the gentle lapping of the small waves, and by the fading light reflecting off the sand making it appear flecked with thousands of tiny grains of glittering gold.

In that moment, I was acutely aware of being alive and alone, and it became terrifyingly clear that I too would go through a lifespan and die. This experience was the first of many where my awareness of being alive was so palpable that it frightened me. At times, I have tried to hang onto this awareness but have discovered that it too passes, like every other experience. The lesson is that life is in constant motion and we can cling to nothing, and if we try to stop the flow with judgments, opinions or beliefs, we make it impossible to experience the mystery and wonder of just being alive.

We can easily miss life by never allowing ourselves to engage the mystery and feel the fear an acute awareness of being alive has the power to create. Protecting ourselves from seeing reality and feeling fear only leads to reacting to life as if we are immortal. One consequence of feeling immortal is that we act as if we have an infinite amount of time, so we never feel a sense of urgency, and nothing really matters. While we all know intellectually we are mortal, we often form our daily priorities as if we are never going to die.

Acting as if our time is unlimited is just one of countless ways we routinely avoid reality and choose fantasy. This choice is so common that it is a normal response to being alive. One problem with choosing fantasy over reality is that we kill curiosity, and make love impossible. On the other hand, if we choose to acknowledge that we really are alive, and also the proud possessors of a lifespan that is never guaranteed beyond the current breath, we have sound reasons to respond to life determined to love every moment.

To make love our primary response to everyday life, we must first define the experience, and then identify the precise purposes, priorities, and actions necessary to express love. If you remember, we first defined love in the Foreword:

Love—is a caring response to being alive—not a reaction to the excitement stimulated by lust, greed, or desire. Love requires total commitment and complete surrender—it is never half-hearted or divided. Each day, love demands we give our whole-hearted energy and attention with a desire to learn, change and even suffer for the innocent purpose of becoming competent to understand and nurture everything we love.

How to put this definition into practice in ordinary life? A good place to start is by identifying priorities. In normal life it is common for security, success, entertainment and approval to be our primary priorities. The energy for these priorities is created and maintained by believing they will make us happy. However, if we observe everyday life, we quickly see that security is not possible for a mortal being, success does not feed internal needs, approval can never build self-worth, and entertainment may work fine as a way to pass time, but it does not provide satisfaction or meaning.

On the other hand, if we become whole-hearted about mastering self-awareness, life-awareness and other-awareness, we build bridges of understanding that connect us to life and other people. At the same time that we develop consciousness and caring, we also master the ability to nurture. A loving response to life can be defined as a...