“Love thy neighbour” is a very good principle. The only problem is, I don’t! I don’t know if you love your neighbour, but I can not force my heart. My heart is what it is. It loves what it loves and I can not tell it what to love, it just does it on its own! I can not dictate it! So unless there is something in my neighbour that awakens love in me, it is hard. I can not just love on command, “Love!”Not happening! Nothing coming.
Love comes only when someone really does something that touches us; when someone does something and you say, “Wow! That’s really nice!” Then you get a soft spot for a person.
You can have some sort of universal love which is not connected to anything or anyone, but I don’t see that as real love. Of course, there may be a level of love which goes beyond the performance of people, a level of love where you say, “Well, I just want to be kind to everyone, even if they are not kind to me.”
You can have some sort of general sense of love. Let us say you have a classroom of kids – they are not from a privileged background and it is your job to bring these kids up. You do it out of idealism. You stand in front of the class and you really want to help, but still, there are some kids in the class that you like more than others. It is natural, because they did something that stood out or they have some special quality. So for love to go deeper, there has to be a personal element.
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So therefore, for real love to occur there has to be a relationship. you cannot relate to everyone on the same level because we all have individual natures that make us unique. otherwise we would just be programmed for generalised giving which is not the gift that God gave to us. We have the gift of free will. The challenge is to find the love within those who are more resistant to our loving. It is an interesting thought. All you need is Love, that idea is not really that simple.