It is not just that the glow of love is catching. Love truly heals wounds, promotes personal growth, and connects us to our higher awareness.
Brotherly love is the manifestation of this healing force between peoples and nations. By cultivating love within ourselves as individuals, we are better able to bring this into our relationships with "others."
With deeper levels of love, we come to experience "others" as mirrors and extensions of ourselves in spiritual dimensions.
The following suggestions for inviting love into the world come from Ghandi.
We
must either let the Law of Love rule us through and through or not at
all. Love among ourselves based on hatred of others breaks down under
the slightest pressure. The fact is such love is never real love. It is
an armed peace. And so it will be in this great movement in the West against
war. War will only be stopped when the conscience of mankind has become
sufficiently elevated to recognize the undisputed supremacy of the Law
of Love in all the walks of life. Some say this will never come to pass.
I shall retain the faith till the end of my earthly existence that this
shall come to pass . . .
.. . . Non-violence is a weapon of the strong. With the weak, it might
easily be hypocrisy. Fear and love are contradictory terms. Love is reckless
in giving away, oblivious as to what it gets in return. Love wrestles
with the world as with itself and ultimately gains a mastery over all
other feelings. My daily experience, as of those who are working with
me, is that every problem would lend itself to solution if we are determined
to make the law of truth and non-violence the law of life. For truth and
non-violence are, to me, faces of the same coin.
The
person who discovered for us the law of love was a far greater scientist
than any of our modern scientists. Only our explorations have not gone
far enough and so it is not possible for everyone to see all its workings.
Such, at any rate, is the hallucination, if it is one, under which I am
laboring. The more I work at this law, the more I feel the delight in
life, the delight in the scheme of this universe. It gives me a peace
and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.
From the Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi
(Forwarded by Joel & Michelle Levey)
9-11 is truly a challenge to our capacity to love others as ourselves.