So what is real love? Well, for one thing, it does not tempt. A recent TV ad for a chemical sweetener sells its product by saying, “It isn’t fattening, it isn’t bad for your teeth—it’s just plain satisfying,” and true love is a lot like that.

You can get to be a wise old fish if you can learn to identify the bait with the hook, and leave it alone. Just let it wiggle in its provocative, ego-tantalizing way, the way that turns on all the ego-hungry fools, and know that you don’t need it.

It has nothing to offer you once you realize that true love lies within you, trying to tell you what love is not.

As I started out to say, love, whether pure or false, is need. Need is a prerequisite to fulfillment. No need, no appetite. No fulfillment, no love. Using need as a measurement of love, it’s fair to say that the greater the need, the greater the capacity to appreciate and experience love’s fulfillment—the blessed kind or the other.

Love from within sustains the real person. Love from without appeals to the ego and sustains the pride. It also exacts a price: life itself.

A big tree has a greater need for sunlight, its life source, than it had as a seedling.

A little tree fulfills itself with small amounts of light that slowly transform it into a giant plant, a beautiful, light-dependent form. The solid mass of the plant is, in effect, light, manifested as a living creation.

The plant’s cry, its hunger, is the yearning need of the created thing for its creator-source. In this case, it is the light from the sun. In the highest, purest sense, need is the only love a living being is capable of knowing.

Just as the tree is required to stand in the light, soaking up rays of sunshine, so ought we to walk and live in the light of our conscience.

But what if we fall from the True Light? What if we are corrupted—altered by seduction to need seduction’s love?

We should already know the answer to that question, for we are all fallen beings, existing in a reversed state of consciousness, on a diet of false love. In his carnal condition, man mistakes the offerings of a woman for the assurance he needs from his Creator.

As he wallows in the “light” of woman’s love, nurtured by her presence, he cuts himself off from the True Light, and in his weakened condition, soon earns the contempt of the very woman to whom he has fallen.

Ancient people worshipped the sun, for they saw how it seemed to give life to everything. There it was: ever present, giving, never taking, life. Surely, they thought, the sun is the source of all creation. But just as the sunlight causes plants and bodies to grow, evil can become a source of false life to rebellious selfish egos—so much so that if they were to be cut off from the evil growth factor, their ego selves would cease to exist.

It is written that the serpent was the most subtle of all the creatures in the garden, for he carefully avoided direct contact with the first man. He sensed that his enslaving motive would have been too easily observed and resisted by the light that shone through Adam. So he seduced Eve, planting his guile in her and altering, ever so subtly, the form of her love, and Adam was deceived by it.

To this day, that love lurking in the uncorrected (therefore, unloved) form, scans the horizon for Adams, seeking to find the same hairline crack in their natures that existed in Adam’s—the same susceptibility to the notion that they have a right to aspire to the forbidden role of the Godhead, supported by what appears to be Eve’s loving agreement.

Such a man draws so much strength for his ambition to be God from the woman’s deceitfulness that gradually a strange change of focus begins to take place in his nature, and he begins to see her as the center of his existence, the god that he himself had aspired to be.

The uncorrected woman that he should have brought to the Light becomes the “light” of his own life, his god. Most men love women more than they love God—they love them as God.

Evil love has no life of its own, so it must live on the life it tempts from others. The warmth men feel in the company of women is the miasma of their own decay. The “love” they feel is the ecstasy of their soul’s dying.

Men are so egotistical that they take little notice of how their bodies are deteriorating. What matters more than anything else to them is the fleeting illusion of worth, of glowing like a glorious light, but they fail to see that the light is from the spontaneous combustion of their souls.

Like drug addicts who sacrifice their earthly lives to the pusher for a “high,” men die to women. Man’s wretched essence ascends to woman’s soul as a love sacrifice in exchange for her glorification of him.

Beware of instant acceptance, “love at first sight.” You tend to believe in such love only because it sustains your willfulness and rebellion against Reality. In your rebellion against Reality, you fall prey to illusion and evil looks like love.

Transcending this terrible ego love requires so much dedication, such a deep yearning to know and understand our ultimate purpose, that you may fall many times before the sheer pain of falling drives you to seek higher ground.

Until you find salvation, you cannot resist love’s tyranny. The conniving woman sees your efforts to hang onto some shred of common sense and reason as her mortal enemy.

Deep down, she knows that her man has failed her, and that her “loving” has had something to do with the failure of both of them. She loathes having to love. All she wants to do now is punish and hurt the man for having fed his life to her ego and making it ugly and wicked.

"Love from within sustains the real person. Love from without appeals to the ego and sustains the pride."

It is written that the serpent was the most subtle of all the creatures in the garden, for he carefully avoided direct contact with the first man. He sensed that his enslaving motive would have been too easily observed and resisted by the light that shone through Adam. So he seduced Eve, planting his guile in her and altering, ever so subtly, the form of her love, and Adam was deceived by it.

To this day, that love lurking in the uncorrected (therefore, unloved) form, scans the horizon for Adams, seeking to find the same hairline crack in their natures that existed in Adam’s—the same susceptibility to the notion that they have a right to aspire to the forbidden role of the Godhead, supported by what appears to be Eve’s loving agreement.

Such a man draws so much strength for his ambition to be God from the woman’s deceitfulness that gradually a strange change of focus begins to take place in his nature, and he begins to see her as the center of his existence, the god that he himself had aspired to be.

The uncorrected woman that he should have brought to the Light becomes the “light” of his own life, his god. Most men love women more than they love God—they love them as God.

Evil love has no life of its own, so it must live on the life it tempts from others. The warmth men feel in the company of women is the miasma of their own decay. The “love” they feel is the ecstasy of their soul’s dying.

Men are so egotistical that they take little notice of how their bodies are deteriorating. What matters more than anything else to them is the fleeting illusion of worth, of glowing like a glorious light, but they fail to see that the light is from the spontaneous combustion of their souls.

Like drug addicts who sacrifice their earthly lives to the pusher for a “high,” men die to women. Man’s wretched essence ascends to woman’s soul as a love sacrifice in exchange for her glorification of him.

Beware of instant acceptance, “love at first sight.” You tend to believe in such love only because it sustains your willfulness and rebellion against Reality. In your rebellion against Reality, you fall prey to illusion and evil looks like love.

Transcending this terrible ego love requires so much dedication, such a deep yearning to know and understand our ultimate purpose, that you may fall many times before the sheer pain of falling drives you to seek higher ground.

Until you find salvation, you cannot resist love’s tyranny. The conniving woman sees your efforts to hang onto some shred of common sense and reason as her mortal enemy.

Deep down, she knows that her man has failed her, and that her “loving” has had something to do with the failure of both of them. She loathes having to love. All she wants to do now is punish and hurt the man for having fed his life to her ego and making it ugly and wicked.