The path to making yourself more loving is the path to God.
- Understanding of love's deep aspects : Love is the opposite of rejection, hate, judgment, and other negative behaviors. Loving properly involves accepting reality and not wanting it to be different. The hindrance to extending love to other people is bias.
- Concept of God is love : The core realization in spirituality is recognizing God as love where God acts selflessly for the collective good of existence. This selflessness gradually expands as God awakens to the consciousness that it is infinite love.
- Practicing love : One should practice love without setting unreachable standards of perfection for oneself. The goal is to be a little more loving each day, leading to less conflict, fear, and anxiety, and more happiness.
- Practical application : Practicing love includes setting boundaries where necessary, leaving abusive situations, and respecting your sovereignty and values. Loving an abuser does not mean staying with them; it means holding compassion and empathy for them from a distance.
- Navigating love vs. selfish needs : As you fulfill your own needs, life becomes more about helping others satisfy their needs, until eventually you reach a point of selflessness, then your life just becomes about being of service to others. Understanding one's limitations and practicing self-respect is important.
- View on relationships : If you're in an abusive situation, you must prioritize your safety and well-being. You can continue to have compassion and empathy for your abuser, but it is advisable to do so from a safe distance.
- Applying love to life ambitions : The Life Purpose Course is a blueprint on how to develop a career you love. It aligns one's life with their values and shows them how to follow through on that alignment. It fits into the concept of falling in love with your life.
- Self-awareness and growth : Acknowledging personal imperfections is vital while practicing love. Like others, no one can be perfectly loving. Recognizing personal selfishness can be challenging but necessary for growth and understanding others' selfishness.
- Balancing ideals with reality : Although the aim is to become more loving, it's crucial to remember that everyone, including oneself, is a finite form of consciousness and cannot always meet the highest standards of love. Patience, understanding, and self-compassion are essential on the journey towards becoming a better lover.
- Loyalty within relationships : Having a friend or partner's unwavering support, known as 'having your back,' is a determinant of loyalty and trust—key components of love. Skepticism often arises if a person does not seem reliable, indicating less love or connection.
- Avoiding impositions of personal agendas : A common mistake in attempting to love others is imposing personal goals onto them rather than understanding and supporting their unique aspirations, which hinders the expression of true love.
- Extension of self through love : Real love involves expanding one's sense of self to include the loved one, thereby making their survival, happiness, and pain profoundly personal. This can lead to vulnerability, especially as one must accept that they cannot always protect the loved one without stifling their growth.
- Reciprocity and empathy in celebrating success : The golden rule in love suggests feeling genuine happiness for others' achievements as if they were one's own. A lack of emotional response or a sense of resentment can reflect a deficiency in love and a failure to see the loved one as an extension of the self.
- Championing loved ones' aspirations : True love entails advocating for and taking joy in achieving what the loved ones desire for themselves, even if it diverges from one's personal wishes or values.
- Sacrifice as an expression of love : Genuine love often requires willingness to sacrifice and work on behalf of a loved one. This contrasts with toxic attitudes that reject mutual support and encourage a selfish mindset within relationships.
- Encouragement and cheerleading for self-actualization : Love motivates encouragement for loved ones to pursue their passions and self-actualization, aligned with their interests, rather than projecting personal ambitions onto them.
- Respect for individual sovereignty : Essential to love is the respect for the loved one's sovereignty, treating them as equal in authority and autonomy, and refraining from attempts at manipulation, control, or exploitation.
- Acceptance without judgment : A profound aspect of love is the total acceptance of loved ones as they are, without a wish for them to change or conform to one's idea of who they should be.
- Accepting Reality : To truly love, you must accept things as they are, not as you prefer them to be. This is challenging as we often desire things to fit our own agenda and survival needs, which can prevent us from seeing and loving them for their true nature.
- Parental Love Challenges : Good parenting demands surrendering fantasies and ideals of what a "good child" should be, to foster a genuine connection based on the child's actual reality, not a constructed fantasy.
- Value and Appreciation : Genuine love is an appreciation of the other, valuing their existence for its own sake, not for what it brings to your own needs. This involves recognizing the intrinsic beauty in all of consciousness, which is a deeper existential concept.
- Conceptualizing Beauty : Beauty is inherent in all aspects of consciousness. People's biases and selfishness often obscure the recognition of this universal beauty. Deeper appreciation and connection can reveal the beauty in even the most mundane or disliked objects.
- Deep Connection with Reality : Enhancing connection with loved entities leads to more profound experiences. The depth of connection can vary from a casual encounter to deep, focused appreciation, as seen in the contrast between a casual observer of art and an art connoisseur studying a Van Gogh painting.
- Loving Without Needing : True love does not treat the loved one as a tool to satisfy your own needs. Instead, it cherishes their existence independently of your personal gains.
- Respecting Differing Perspectives : Loving another person involves respecting their point of view and striving to understand their unique experiences. This respect acknowledges the diverse subjective realities individuals have due to their unique physiology, psychology, and life experiences.
- Understanding and Validating Others : Deep love requires taking the time to understand someone's deepest fears, dreams, passions, and aspirations. This understanding goes beyond superficial knowledge and requires listening and genuinely caring about their interests.
- Difficulty in Loving with Differing Views : One of the challenges in loving humans is managing differing viewpoints. Love necessitates mental flexibility to accommodate these perspectives without imposing one's own, thereby avoiding epistemic domination and forming a genuine bond.
- The Basis of Connection through Shared Interests : Building connections and fostering love often rely on sharing interests, which facilitates a sense of togetherness and collaboration. Genuine love cannot be faked; it needs to be felt and lived with a sense of true commitment.
- Being Present During Hard Times : A measure of love is being present and supportive when someone is at their lowest. Love is tested not in the easy moments but at times when the person is despairing or in crisis.
- Validating the Loved One's Feelings : Love encompasses validating and empathizing with someone's feelings, which builds emotional connection. Acknowledging the other's emotions is essential for a loving relationship, and understanding those feelings is a cornerstone of genuine connection.
- Empathy and Emotional Connection : Leo highlights the importance of empathy and emotional connection in relationships, with the "magic phrase" to ask being, "How are you feeling?" This not only applies to romantic relationships but also to parental bonding. It suggests the need to genuinely care and listen after asking the question.
- Validation of Feelings : Validating feelings, even when they seem irrational or nonsensical, is crucial in building emotional connections. Dismissing or minimizing another's feelings can invalidate them, and it's necessary to recognize and respect their emotional state regardless of personal views.
- Meeting People Where They Are : To effectively connect with someone, especially those less conscious or developed, Leo advises meeting them on their level. The example given is how an adult must communicate with a child, using language and concepts they understand, fostering better understanding and connection.
- Understanding and Forgiveness : Encouraging understanding and forgiveness when people make mistakes instead of demonizing or moralizing their actions. Practicing these qualities can deepen love, as it shows acceptance and support even in difficulties.
- Patience in Love : Demonstrating patience is a sign of love; being impatient suggests a lack of love. The greater the love for a person, the more patience one is willing to extend to them.
- Seeing Goodness in Others : One powerful way to express love is by recognizing and appreciating the goodness in others, even when they can't see it in themselves. This can be transformative and is considered an advanced form of love.
- Recognition of Uniqueness : Showing love by acknowledging and respecting an individual’s uniqueness, avoiding trying to change them to fit personal ideals or diminish their distinctiveness. It's about honoring the individuality of the person loved.
- Expressing Uniqueness : Giving compliments focused on a person's uniqueness can rapidly deepen love, as it affirms their value and singularity. This applies not just in personal relationships but also in professional settings like praising employees.
- Generosity, Kindness, and Verbal Affirmation : Demonstrating generosity, and kindness, and giving verbal approval and compliments, especially to those who value words of affirmation. These actions contribute to a loving environment and strengthen emotional bonds.
- Keeping Promises and Maintaining Peace : Trust is nurtured by keeping promises and striving for peaceful interactions. Conflict damages love, so maintaining peace is a vital expression of love, and it's compared to deflecting conflict like a martial artist avoiding a fight.
- Honesty as the Basis of Love : Telling the truth is fundamental in love relationships, though it might sometimes involve complex decisions about honesty. Love can't be built on deception, as there's a profound link between love and truth.
- Safety and Trust in Love : Establishing safety and trust in relationships is a priority; love involves creating a reliable and permanent sense of trust rather than exploiting it for personal gain. This sense of safety and trust is particularly pivotal in nurturing love with children.
- Parental Reliability : Children's trust in their parents is crucial for their development into functional adults. A child who can't trust at least one person in the world fundamentally learns that no one is trustworthy.
- Reality and Truth in Love : Love requires appreciating an object or person's realness, flaws, and all, without desire for future improvement. Thus, love is intricately linked to truth; it is about seeing and accepting things as they are without fantasies or rejections.
- Appreciation of Finite Consciousness : True love involves recognizing and valuing the finite form of another's consciousness, despite its inherent limitations. It's a profound appreciation for the unique manifestation of consciousness in its present form.
- Acceptance of Selfishness : Loving a finite consciousness such as another person involves accepting their natural tendency towards selfishness. The ultimate test of love is the ability to love people who act selfishly, without a desire to change that inherent aspect of their being.
- Simplification of Love : The essence of love lies in selflessness; the lengthy list of love’s expressions is fundamentally about ways to be selfless. Loving others is challenging because inherent selfishness often conflicts with the acts of selflessness that constitute love.
- Heart of Human Experience : The core of human existence is learning how to love by becoming more selfless. Spirituality aids in expanding this capacity to love by aligning us with the concept of God, who is seen as infinite selflessness, synonymous with love.
- Love versus Selfish Behaviors : Love is broken by violence, abuse, judgment, control, manipulation, and above all, selfishness. Understanding that selflessness fosters love while selfishness destroys it is key to embodying genuine love.
- Visualization Exercise for Love : Leo guides through a visualization contrasting how love feels when one experiences negative actions versus caring ones. The exercise highlights the vast difference in feelings of love based on whether one is subject to kindness or maltreatment.
- Understanding Love through Childhood Experiences : Reflecting on personal childhood experiences and pinpointing what made one feel loved can clarify how to extend love to others. Identifying specific actions or words from family and friends aids in deriving general principles of love.
- Love as an Assignment : Leo assigns the task of noting down specific memories and actions that made one feel loved as a child and analyzing them to extract broader lessons on how to love, reinforcing the concept that love is rooted in personal experiences and expressions.
- Reflecting on childhood experiences of love : Leo discusses analyzing one's childhood experiences to understand actions that felt like love—such as receiving attention, support, or sharing intellectual interests—and encourages creating a list based on these memories to recognize patterns of feeling loved.
- Understanding through contrast : He suggests making a contrasting list of actions that made one feel unloved during childhood. This exercise can help in understanding love by inverting the negative experiences (being yelled at or feeling neglected) to comprehend what should be done to make someone feel loved.
- Turning negative experiences into positive motivation : For those who didn't receive much love in childhood, Leo empathizes with their difficulty but encourages using their experiences of feeling unloved as motivation to be more loving towards their children or partner.
- Self-assessment of one's ability to love : Leo challenges viewers to compare themselves against the ideal form of love he outlined and to consider how well they embody these loving behaviors in various relationships, suggesting many people fall short due to inherent selfishness.
- Dilemma of intimate and all relationships : He discusses Peter Ralston's insight about the challenge of relationships, where people enter into them with selfish intentions, trying to mold their partners into their own ideals to satisfy personal needs, which leads to conflict and potential relationship failure.
- Preview of future discussions on conscious relationships : Leo indicates a future video will focus entirely on conscious relationships—how to form genuine connections, something he claims isn't taught but is crucial to life.
- Hardest challenge—love : He emphasizes that love is the most challenging endeavor as it tests one's capacity to be selfless. A truly loving person must be highly emotionally, cognitively, morally, and spiritually developed.
- Seeking developed individuals for relationships : Leo advises seeking out emotionally and spiritually mature partners, acknowledging that such individuals are rare and suggesting spending time in communities where these individuals are likely to be found.
- Love in parenting and marriage : He stresses the importance of love in childrearing and marriage, asserting that love is the most fundamental need of children and a key component of a successful marriage.
- The duality of mastering love : Leo introduces the dual process of learning to love, which includes both accessing absolute love through awakening and god realization (potentially with the help of psychedelics), and practicing love in daily life with real relationships.
- Love as the purpose of life : He concludes by suggesting that learning to love through personal development and connecting with others is perhaps the ultimate point and purpose of existence, transcending materialistic or nihilistic pursuits.
- Love as an ongoing journey : Emphasizing that being good at relationships does not equate to understanding existential love. Love is identified as a continuous journey that takes serious effort and decades to master.
- The organizational challenge of love : Loving in all aspects of life, including family, work, and personal relationships, is complex and requires discernment in balancing autonomy and unity.
- Love's practical advice : The advice to practice love by seeking deeper connections in life, which spans beyond the romantic, extending to all interests and passions.
- Concept of love as a training ground : Life is presented as a training ground for becoming a good lover, where every experience is an opportunity to deepen connections and learn to love more profoundly.
- Application of love in daily life : Leo provides a universal blueprint for applying love to various aspects of life like work, relationships, and personal interests.
- Existential perspective on love : Love is described as a connection between parts of consciousness that seek unity, with spirituality being a pathway to deepen this connection with reality.
- Investment in connections : Stressing the importance of willingness to invest in and deepen connections to things a person loves, whether it's a hobby or a person.
- Love stimulating personal growth : Leo elaborates on how love can motivate personal development, with genuine care and appreciation for others serving as fuel for growth and expansion.
- Love as acceptance and appreciation : Reiterating that love means accepting and appreciating the inherent perfection and beauty in all aspects of reality, and recognizing this is essential for developing deep connections.
- Understanding Love's Diversity : Love is infinite in its expression, manifesting in countless finite ways and opposites such as rejection, hate, and judgment. It's about accepting reality, recognizing its inherent beauty, and extending that acceptance universally, unimpeded by personal biases.
- The Metaphysics of Love : Love, at its core, is the act of selflessly ensuring the highest good for all of existence, which is seen as the behavior of an awakened God. Since we are all God, but dreaming finitely, our journey towards love is an awakening to our true nature as infinite love.
- Progressing Toward Love : It's unrealistic to expect perfection in one's capacity to love as a finite being; the existential trade-off is the risk to personal survival. The goal is to become a little more loving each day, which enhances personal happiness and reduces conflict and fear.
- Inch Toward Higher Love : As we meet our own needs, life becomes less about us and more about serving and helping others. While complete selflessness is ideal, realistically, the aim is to strive toward it, knowing full accomplishment may never be reached.
- Leaving Abusive Situations : Leo advises that loving others should not come at the cost of self-love and respect. Leaving an abusive situation is not an act of hatred but one of self-care. It's important to establish boundaries, prioritize personal safety, and practice love from a safe distance if needed.
- Practical Love through Life Purpose : Leo's Life Purpose Course aligns with the concept of love by helping individuals to develop careers and lives that they love, showing how to align life with values and passions.
- Self-awareness in Practicing Love : Acknowledging imperfections and selfish tendencies is essential. Leo admits his own journey towards being a more loving person is ongoing, and he encourages patience with oneself and others as we all strive to better practice love.
- Love as a Lifelong Project : Implementing love is challenging and requires work, as seen through Leo’s introspective journey. He stresses the importance of empathy, understanding others' selfishness based on personal struggle, and the avoidance of judging others harshly.