Loving Others

It’s easy to interpret the verse in the Bible, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” to mean love others as much as you love yourself. We automatically insert “as much” even though there is nothing that implies that we are talking about quantity. Maybe our brains are trying to interpret the phrase in a way we are used to thinking about the world, where I am me first and then there is everyone else.

Loving others as yourself means when you look at the person in front of you, you see yourself in them. There is a blurring between the two. What the other person is feeling, you are feeling. What you are feeling, the other person is feeling. How much value that person has in your eyes, that is exactly the same value that you hold toward yourself and everything else. We share the same happiness, desires, and burden, even if they might take on different shapes externally.

We care for one another because there is no difference between the one and the other. We do not measure out different portions of love for different people. This kind of love is much more difficult than loving others as much as you love yourself, but there is more joy in it because somehow you feel freed from trying to save yourself at the expense of others. Every encounter is a chance to recognize that here, right now, you can judge, calculate, and draw boundaries, or you can give yourself to another and realize that we are one.