"Love your neighbor" is the center of Christian teachings. The idea is obvious: If you love somebody, you do not use or abuse them, but treat them nicely, you are kind to them, and help and support them.

If everybody would love their neighbor there would be no crime, no war, and we all could live in peace and freedom.

However, love is an emotion - just like sadness, anger, fear, and hate. Emotions motivate you to act and behave in a certain way. The problem is, you can not fake an emotion. You can try to act as if you had the emotion; however, that becomes very exhausting and is sometimes quite impossible in the first place.

There's a causal relationship between emotion and action. Obvioulsy, it's a one-way street - i.e. emotion triggers action, but acting as if there was a particular emotion doesn't trigger that emotion.

But, luckily, there's something that causes emotions. And that, we can impact!

For example: It made me sad when my grandmother died. On first thought, one might think that the event triggered the emotion.



But that is not so: I was sad about my grandmother no longer being here many times after she died.

So, is it the knowledge of her having passed? No, that isn't it either: I know she is gone form many years now, but I haven't been sad all the time for all these years.

I become sad whenever somethign reminds me of her and I become aware of the fact again that she's gone.

The event of her passing provided me with certain pieces of knowledge: She is gone, I won't be able to talk to her again. Of all the things that I know, when I focus on that aprticular piece of information, it triggers the emotion of sadness in me.


So, the question then is, how can I trigger the emotion of love whenever I am interacting with another person - or with anything else in this world?


I'd like to encourage you to find yourself answers to this question that work for you.


So far, all I mentioned was pretty objective. No matter what spiritual ideas you choose to believe, the above is not impacted by it. It simply is what it is.


Your ability to find an answer to the question and to develop a working strategy to implement it, I think, depends a lot on your spiritual believe system.