Why should I love my neighbor like I love myself? The answer is simple: Because it’s the most sensible thing to do. Loving your neighbor is the first and best choice among the three choices you have. The first choice is love. The second choice is hate and the third is indifference.
Let’s examine each choice, beginning with the third choice. Perhaps, you don’t want to love your neighbor, because he is bad; but yet you wouldn’t want to hate him because you are a good person and you avoid negative emotions. So, you are indifferent to your neighbor. But indifference or apathy is cold emotion. Apathy is as negative as hatred. The line between hatred and apathy is very fine. If you meet your neighbor on the street and you ignore him, it doesn’t seem like a good and decent thing to do. The second choice — hatred — will harm you as much as it hurts your neighbor which leaves you with the first and the best choice — to love your neighbor.
Honestly, loving an irksome neighbor is not as hard as it seems. It simply means respecting the person and thinking of his needs and desires as much as you would your own. You won’t be able to love yourself until you first love your neighbor. Whether we like it or not, a major part of our life will always center on that of our neighbors. Ask yourself some questions and you’ll see from the answers how important your neighbor is for your own peace and happiness. You can’t just stop at loving your own neighbor. You’ve got to love your neighbor’s neighbor too and so on. The circle of love gets wider, subsuming differences of community, state, nation, continents — encompassing the whole universe and beyond.
Your heart is so big and so full of love; it’s capacity to love is infinite; it’s divine. Inversely, your heart capacity to hate is limited. Try applying the Golden Rule of of infinite love to hate and you’ll find yourself shattered. That’s because you don’t have a limitless capacity to hate like you have to love for. For love gives you joy and power and victory and hate brings in sorrow and powerlessness and defeat. Jesus said in the Bible ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’.
The Bible verses on loving your neighbor find echoes. They are free from attachment to possessions and egotism, equipoised in happiness and distress, and ever-forgiving. They are ever content, steadily united with Me in devotion, self-controlled, of firm resolve, and dedicated to Me in mind and intellect.
