What’s broken in this world, and always surprised me in real-time contact, is continuity. There seems to be none. Real continuity. Inner coherence, relational truth, integrity.
In its place, what appears as continuity is collective agreements, role stability, possessions. People seem to make impulsive decisions that only appear rational by agreement, that ensure power, not love. The continuity they need to protect is continuity for power.
It’s called “safety,” “security,” “survival,” but the blunt term is power. Love’s opposite. When emotions are feared, when the heart isn’t trusted, when natural life is violated, power prevents sight, discernment, choice.
Needing to be right rather than understand is a need for power.
Relying on contracts rather than honesty is a need for control, for power.
Betraying your self and/or who you love to keep your status or possessions is a need for power.
Power is not usually placed opposite love because it’s more convenient to see yourself as a victim than to face what you’re actually doing. But power is at the core of everything this civilization now calls safety, continuity, progress.
Power is tempting. Love isn’t. Love requires courage, honesty, undivided devotion.
One of the clearest forms of power appears in illness. It creates a structure people know how to enter. You can help, try to save, support—and all of it gives a person power. And on the other side, healing dissolves that structure. It removes roles, attention, and the quiet advantages it brings. So, unconsciously, many resist it—not because they don’t want to get well, but because they don’t know who they are without it.
But choice? To choose to walk away from convenience, from lying, from possessions? People don’t know what to do with that. Yet, love is all about choice, integrity. Who are you without all your possessions?
Betrayal is always self-betrayal first. No exception. And for most of us, it starts very early. With “little white lies,” with small self-deceptions. The temptation is power. It’s more convenient to call it survival.
Truth used to be coded in the past, protected, hidden. Now, this is not needed anymore. Every word has been hijacked; anything can mean anything. So truth can live in the open, can be spoken, can be lived right beside us, and we still wouldn’t recognize it. At best, we’d wave it away, like we would a fly that’s bothering us. I think no other civilization has played with words as much as this one has.
I hadn’t realized this aspect until now. But I guess it’s natural. Because we can’t recognize truth — or love, which is the same thing — externally. Only when we recognize it internally.
“Internally” doesn’t mean intellectually, in theory, or through accumulating more data.
“Know thyself” is not about flirting with theories and belief systems. It’s not about trying to feel better in a life that requires you to betray your self, to betray love for power.
You can succeed. You can be surrounded by acceptance and recognition. You can achieve everything you ever dreamed of. But that’s all about power—and the reason it’s never enough.
Every choice we make that’s not from love, we’re destined to regret.
To think we would have learned by now that power is temporary, no matter how high and mighty it seems at the time. But we don’t learn from the past, from history, from others.
Only love continues and can transcend time, space, and dimensions. I’m obviously not referring to the commercialized “love” of gifts, heart-shaped cards, contracts of ownership of any kind. Love cannot be caged, owned, or controlled.
