Love Your Family

Loving all begins with loving oneself, and if we can love ourselves, then we will advance to love neighbors. To love all humans is nothing more than ideal thought itself. Concretely, objects for us to love emerge as neighbors. When we recognize objects as humans, they appear in front of us, within our reach, in relation to us, as perpetual succession of neighbors, not to say all human beings. That is, to love all is present in continuous series of loving neighbors. Only through loving neighbors can we reach to love all. But who are neighbors? People who have the closest relationship to us are the most intimate neighbors. They are people who are here in front of us now.  They are a wife and a husband and children, a father and a mother, brothers and sisters, relatives, friends and colleagues and so on. That is, love family first. And love friends. It is again a little different to religious spirit which preaches indiscriminate equal love of all human beings, but how can one love other humans who cannot love family? How can one love humans who cannot love one's wife and husband, children and parents? If you ignore the base of human love which consists in love for yourself, love for family and love for friends, and pursue ideal thought of love for all notionally, you will after all embody yourself that saying, "To love all is to love nothing."  While preaching people to love all, you cannot but hate humans so hard. In oder not to be so, don't make light of love for family as the first step to love neighbors. I admit that religion sometimes preaches to abandon self or family, but it has profound meaning and we will consider it another time. But briefly speaking, to desert them once is to find real value of them. Negation is an inevitable way to affirmation. In this way we dive from total negation into total affirmation. To tell the truth, one may desert oneself and one's family in order to love oneself and love one's family really. One may love God rather than humans in order to love humans truly. Anyway,

"Only one who loves one's family can love humans."

So folks! Take care of your family!