What is Love? A Spiritual Perspective

Speaking Spirit

Are you dealing with any of this?

1. You feel you'll never be able to truly love yourself

2. You can never be able to fully love yourself if you don't accept all aspects of yourself.

3. You're confused about what real love is

In this episode you will learn:

1. The definition of love as complete acceptance, and how this can be applied to self love and to love for others.

2. The difference between love and hate, and how hate is often based on dehumanization.

3. The dangers of propaganda, and how it can be used to promote hatred and bigotry.

"When you have self acceptance, when you have self love, what you have, what you get out of that is you get a sense of discrimination about your motivations for doing certain things."

I was raised hearing a lot of hateful rhetoric. Things like "What is wrong with you?" or "You're not as human as I am." I never wanted to use words like that. To me, love is complete acceptance. And hatred is complete rejection. I try to practice love in my everyday life, but sometimes it's hard. Especially when I see the hate that's happening in the world. There's a movement right now that's trying to program empathy out of people. And I think it's because they want to be able to treat others as less than human. This is a dangerous thing, and I hope that more people can learn to love instead of hate.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. The definition of love as complete acceptance and how this can be applied to self-love and to love for others.

2. The difference between love and hate and how hate is often based on dehumanization.

3. The dangers of propaganda and how it can be used to promote hatred and bigotry.

Chapter Summaries:

[00:00:28] - John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. He is going to talk about love from a spiritual perspective. As someone who practices shamanism today, john usually defines his terms when he's talking about something, and he doesn't try to impose his definitions on others.

[00:02:19] - One definition of love is complete acceptance. Self-love is a form of self-acceptance. It's not motivated by hatred or self-loathing. It's motivated by accepting yourself and not beating yourself up. There is a fine line between external validation and conditional love. We don't have to be in a specific relationship to love somebody. I can love someone I'm no longer in a relationship with because the relationship was unhealthy. But that doesn't mean I don't love them.

[00:12:02] - Shamanism is about exploring the core of who we are and the connection that we have to divinity, to spirit, and to everything in the universe. When my daughter was four, I said something to her that I had told myself for years I would never say to my children. Now, if I ever use that phrase again, I want people to call me on it.

[00:16:52] - Hate is the opposite of love. It's the rejection of the person based on some perceived quality. A movement in the US is trying to program empathy out of people. This is coming from a religious organization that is politically active and gives money to politicians. In the political rhetoric in the United States, people talk about globalism, the global elite, etc. These are white supremacist dog whistles for Jews. Neonazi talking points here. This is all part of this antiJewish conspiracy theory. It's all a part of spreading hatred by making a threat that doesn't exist.

[00:33:13] - Patriarchy has nothing to do with the divine masculine. Patriarchy is all about putting one guy in charge. Shamanism is egalitarian, and there's no hierarchy. As a shamanic practitioner, I view myself as a servant. I'm not taking orders from people.

[00:43:44] - The final frontier for us spiritually is to explore inward. Formlessness is at the very core of your being, meaning not your body, not even your mind. Out of this void is where our experience arises, our physicality, and our thoughts and feelings arise. Hermetic philosophy talks about gnosis becoming aware of us, being a part of the one thing. At its core, it's love. Because it accepts everything, it's difficult to conceptualize, so we anthropomorphize it. A lot of our imagery of Deity comes from that.

[00:54:00] - John ends the conversation on love with a self-exploration on loving Yourself. John recommends subscribing to this podcast if you're not already subscribed.

Connect with me:

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ShamansTent

Website: https://www.MaineShaman.com