"Isn’t it dangerous to strengthen someone’s love connections to a dog? Is it ecological? Doesn’t it make bereavement much worse when the dog dies? Won’t they become ever so upset if they lose the dog or if it is ill?"
These questions come from the presupposition that love makes us vulnerable to terrible suffering and pain and it might be better to not love at all, or at least keep a lid on how much we love, so we need not experiences these awful feelings.
This is a classic Harmony Program style dilemma, only it isn’t a dilemma at all, we were just and once again, taught and entrained to believe that it is. George Harrison had a point when he said, "All you need is love." Oh, for sure, that line has been beaten to death and heard so many times that it has become hardly more than "Coca Cola is The Real Thing" in our neurologies but the fact is that it’s true.
All you need is love. The more you have of it, the more powerful you become, the more centred within yourself, the more unassailable you are to doubt, fear and panic; the more you are able to cope with anything at all the universe can possibly throw at you.
From a place of love, you can do things that you thought were beyond you. You can stand pain, unbelievable suffering and in the end, if you just love enough, you can quite happily allow yourself to be nailed onto a cross, drink from the hemlock chalice or walk voluntarily to the bonfire for burning – this truly is the only way to overcome and find strength, courage, perseverance, dedication, and every single human attribute that’s worth having at all.
Love truly does reach across time and space and it is truly, in that sense, eternal. It is not love that causes pain, it is backing away from it, holding back from it and disturbing its absolutely pure energies with entrained power games, domination games, possession games, punishment games and all the other kinds of games that people play.
Therefore, anything at all that you might do or contribute to strengthen love connections and the flow of this energy form – between dogs, between dogs and owners, between dog, owners and you, between you and the universe, the land, the earth itself - is a holy pursuit of the highest order.
