枕邊閱讀: Love and Fear

閱讀筆記: Conversations with God I

All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by one of two emotions - fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions - only two words in the language of the soul.

Every human thought, and every human action, is based in either love or fear.

And here is how human behaviour produces repeat experience after repeat experience; it is why humans love, then destroy, then love again: always there is the swing from one emotion to the other. Love sponsors fear sponsors love sponsors fear...

And so it is that in the moment you pledge your highest love, you greet your greatest fear.
For the first thing you worry about after saying "I love you" is whether you'll hear it back. And if you hear it back, then you begin immediately to worry that the love you have just found, you will lose. And so all action becomes a reaction - defense against loss.

This fear-based love reality dominates your experience of love; indeed, actually creates it. For not only do you see yourself receiving love which is conditional, you also watch yourself giving it in the same way. And even while you withhold and retreat and set your conditions, a part of you knows this is not what love really is. Still, you seem powerless to change the way you dispense it. You've learned the hard way, you tell yourself, and you'll be damned if you're going to leave yourself vulnerable again. Yet the truth is, you'll be damned if you don't.