Compassion without boundaries is toxic.
Enabling toxic, ungrateful, or abusive behavior is not love. Whether they are abusing themselves or you, or both, enabling it is not love.
Abuse is not love.
Granted, giving out of unconditional love means that you don't have the condition or expectation of gratitude or non-squandering by the recipient of the gift. However, nonetheless, take a big note of this important fact: Whether the gifts and handouts are bestowed by you or luck to the recipient, giving an ungrateful person more only makes them even more ungrateful (a.k.a. miserable). It's almost always an act toxic enabling on your part, which itself is you caving to your own comfort addiction, by choosing the comfort for you of enabling instead of giving a firm loving loud, "No." Period. Full stop. When saying "no" would be the loving thing to do, but you enable out of comfort addiction, then that enabling is a miserable act on your part of killing to wonderful birds with one stone. Comfort addicts fail to say "no" where a free-spirited person who is no longer a slave to temptation and addiction will say a firm strong loud, "NO!"
Projection is funny especially when combined with judgementalism or blaming. It's hilariously amazing the degree to which a judgemental and/or unhappy person blames others for doing exactly what they are doing to themselves. For example, the one enabling an alcoholic might judge and blame the alcoholic for not saying "no" to alcohol when the enabler doesn't say "no" to the alcoholic. If you judgmentally see folly or sin in others, remember that you are only seeing the folly in yourself. Generally speaking, all judgementalism is always just hypocrisy in disguise, because the world is a mirror and fundamentally the dualism between self versus other is an illusion. In terms of judgementalism versus mere accepting observation (i.e. judging versus simply noticing), you can only ever judge yourself. Most truly, you can only ever hate yourself. Most truly, you can only ever resent yourself. Most truly, you can only ever engage in unforgiveness towards yourself. But addicts find comfort in pointing their judgemental fingers at the illusionary sin, hatefulness, and blameworthiness of others. Blame is a superstition; it's an imaginary phantom that can torment you. The scapegoats one might see to blame are always hallucinations. Blaming is always wrong, not morally but factually, but addicts find comfort in blaming, especially in blaming others, or even the whole outer world for simply being the way it is. A comfort-addicted enabler blaming the one they enable instead of choosing to not enable is just an example, just one of infinite.
In contrast, a free-spirited loving person is effectively in practice not an addict anymore, meaning they are about as close as one can come to not being an addict while in human form (because all humans are on the addiction spectrum), enough that we can just say they are not an addict anymore. They aren't a slave to temptation anymore. They aren't a slave to feelings like fear, comfort, desire, hunger, and pain anymore; these feeling don't pull them around like a puppet anymore. They aren't slave or puppet anymore; they are free. The free-spirited person is not addicted to comfort anymore. Instead of caving to temptation, even when it would be much more comfortable to cave and say "yes", the free-spirited person says firmly, loudly, and lovingly, "NO!"
It's not said with hate but rather with love, love for the self as much as any other. A free-spirited person loves all, but combines that with deep respect and understanding of self-responsibility (a.k.a. freedom), including their own and others. As two different humans (so-called others in relation to each other), I love you, but my self-responsibility (a.k.a. freedom) and your self-responsibility (a.k.a. freedom) are two different things. Insofar as we are two different people, meaning in a rough sense that our two selves are two different selves, which is not the case in some respects, your responsibility (a.k.a. freedom) is not mine. My choices are mine, and yours and yours. I control my inner peace, not yours. I am responsible for my inner peace and freedom (a.k.a. self-responsible). I love you and I equally, but I understand the principle of cleaning my backyard first, never trespassing on yours, and letting you choose to keep yours however you want. With literal backyards you can invade with guns and force with violence; political freedom can be infringed upon. With the figurative backyard of which I speak, you physically cannot invade; Deep down, you are always spiritually free whether you like or not, meaning your choices are yours and mine are mine. We are each in 100% control of our own choices and only are own choices. It's the only thing we control and we control them completely. You cannot force another person to wake up and be happy. In practice, this means that, for example, if you are the enabler of the addict (e.g. alcoholic, 600lb bed-ridden overeater, etc.), you cannot choose whatever they decide to remain an addict or choose to have the wonderful happiness of realizing spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline), but you and only you can choose whether you remain a comfort addict (i.e. an enabler) who doesn't say "no" because you are addicted to comfort.
A spiritually free person is generally not ashamed to set healthy boundaries and not only say "NO!", but say it firmly, and mean it, and stick to it. (If they do feel some shame, they are to that shame what a brave person is to fear; it's just another of many uncontrollable feelings they happen to notice and experience but don't act on.)
An interesting thing is that when you stop being a slave to temptation and to feelings like fear, shame, discomfort, and pain, suddenly those feelings drastically lessen in strength, frequency, and duration. When you simply happily notice them and look at them with simple acceptance as if they were clouds in the sky, they act like clouds in the sky, and just float by. But the vice versa is true too: Like children throwing a temper-tantrum, fighting it or caving to it only prolongs and reinforces, both presently and as a habit. Notice it quietly with a little smirk, and it goes away on its own. Giving it false potency strengths and prolongs it, but letting its own true impotence reveal itself causes it to quickly float away like a cloud.
Keep in mind, especially when reading the next paragraph, that the 'happiness' of which I speak is the true happiness that is unwavering consistent free-spirited inner peace.
While the unhappy typically live in denial of this truth, and thus instead invent superstition of blames and shoulds to incorrectly explain their unhappiness, it is true nonetheless: Your true happiness (a.k.a. inner peace) is always 100% in your control. The self-deceiving denial of that truth had by unhappy people is much like having a non-lucid nightmare at night while sleeping. This is why for thousands and thousands of years in very different cultures all over the world the same analogy of waking up, spiritual awakening, or becoming lucid is used for this wildly empowering process of achieving consistent unwavering invincible inner peace, often also called true happiness or enlightenment or even nirvana or god-realization or heaven-realization. In this dreamy life that is hellish nightmare for some, you can choose to become lucid anytime you want, and then you will indeed see your god-like power over your own choices and happiness and lucidity. Many people who remain non-lucid do so simply because they don't even ask themselves while in the dream, "Am I dreaming?" Many people don't realize how much power they have over something because they don't even take a quiet meditative moment to honestly ask themselves, "Do I control this?" Find any addict, and they will have a laundry list of uncontrollable scapegoats to blame for their misery. But you can become lucid and happy any moment you choose. Even if you are in the worst nightmare ever, you can instantly become lucid and happy the moment you so choose. Your happiness--i.e. the true happiness that is free-spirited inner peace--is 100% in your control.
Sacrificing your happiness--your true happiness--in your present for another (a.k.a. an other you) is not love. If it's not abuse of the so-called other, then it's abuse of the self. Usually, it's both.
This goes both for when the 'other' is your so-called future self or when the so-called 'other' is an other in space (e.g. a child, a parent, a sibling, a neighbor, a coworker, a romantic partner, etc.).
Whatever it is, if doing it won't make you and/or keep you happy right now in your unique present, meaning in the sense of the real true happiness that is consistent unwavering invincible free-spirited inner peace and unconditional love, then don't do it. Because not only will doing it make you unhappy, but doing it isn't even the loving thing to do.
- True love is being happy to sacrifice.
Post Topics: #Freedom #Liberation #FreeSpirit #SelfDetermination #SelfDetermined #YourOwnBoss #InnerPeace #SpiritualFreedom #TrueHappiness
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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program, both for the free option and the paid option.
