Making a Living on Love

Correspondence with David Truman

 

On Tuesday, August 2, 2011 12:43 PM, G.F. sent an email from the Heart of Spirituality website. Here is their message:

Dear beloveds,

Just finished reading kinds words of David over Self Knowledge and living life with Love.

This brings a Question within me that I believe is common to others I know:

Why is it so hard to make a living out of giving and receiving love???

Some beautiful souls I know, including myself, would love to earn our living in sharing love but eventually can't make a living out of it which brings us to enslave (work) our selves in various occupations.

Please enlighten me

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Dear G.F.,

There's nothing wrong with work in itself. Work is actually an expression of love -- when it is done for love. A father and mother work to support their children. A friend gives another a massage -- that's work too, and yet that is love. So, we can't say all work was enslavement, although in a larger sense we can say that man has made work more difficult by his own selfishness exerted over time.

For example, humanity's greed has caused overpopulation and exploitation of natural resources. And between the two, economic conditions have gotten considerably worse. So, take a family who has eight children in Africa: they used to have to walk a quarter mile to get the firewood for cooking, now they have to walk five miles. That's because they decided to have so many children. And so did many of their neighbors! The more people there are, the more the demand on resources. The more the demand on resources, the more the resources disappear. It takes much more work to get much less result in a world in which selfishness has caused scarcity.

But in any case, you must work to survive. Why can't you survive on love? Because love doesn't feed you and love doesn't pay the rent. At least, not the amount and quality of love most people are willing to give.

It takes a lot more love than what most people are willing to give to secure the loyalty and cooperation of friends. You absolutely can live on love if you have so much love within you that you can inspire people to support you as a lover alone. That's my situation; but realistically, there aren't too many people in our group or anywhere in the world who are self-surrendered enough and committed enough to inspire such a strong sense of mutual commitment.

So people want to live on love, but they're not very loving. And if you asked their associates, they probably would agree. So, they are not going to be supported simply by loving.

And besides, surviving on love is not so easy. All the people like myself, who seem to be supported simply by loving, do all kinds of very hard work, and make all kinds of sacrifices, more than what most people would really want to do. So in that sense, if you think that love is the easy way, you might be in for a surprise.

There was a story of a Zen master who was eating meat and his disciple was eating vegetables, and the disciple said, "Why can't I eat what you eat?" The master replied, "Sure, be my guest. Go ahead." And he reached into a bucket of roofing nails and swallowed a handful of them.

Most people don't have much idea what the master really eats. They just think that master's living an easy life on the strength of being known as a loving person. That's really very far from the truth.

A person who was really loving wouldn't have too much objection to hard work.

Love,

David