There are no limits on true self-giving. It is not just to those one likes that one makes the offering. This involves a love that issues from the very CENTER of the person's being, directed to the CENTER of the other person's being, a love that gives ALL that the person is in order to foster the other person's life, a love that is offered to EVERYONE, without exception and without condition. The love is not offered to people because they are one's friends; people become "friends" because one loves them.
We human beings are in search of meaning, in search of our selves. Very little of what we already are and already have brings us deeper meaning or happiness. We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning. And we are born as well for suffering, not the suffering that leads to madness but the suffering that leads to joy: the struggle with ourselves and our illusions. We are born to overcome ourselves, and through that overcoming to find an inner condition of great harmony and being. We are born for that—we are not yet that. We are searchers; that is the essence of our present humanness.
The need is for the connection to nature within ourselves; only then can we understand how to act toward nature outside ourselves. Along with the obvious crimes our culture is committing against the natural world, we would be wise to remember that the main crimes are the crimes against our inner nature. From these inner crimes all the outer evil arises. This is the teaching of wisdom.
