How to Establish a Love for Life "Deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." -- Lao Tsu As a person characterized as a dark-minded, cold-blooded and sharp-tongued lone wolf, it would be my humblest attempt to have a say in regard of a positive subject as love, especially a love for life, since having a piquant interest in evil and death is more in my character. But, also as a person of a humor sense of corpse and wretched sarcasm, I herein admit, willy-nilly, that I do have a shred of expectation in the pursuit of beauty, love and truth, given the unfortunate fact that beneath this macabre and cadaverous gloomy face, there still beats a human heart of flesh and blood, as well as a soul, if there is one. It is truly beyond dispute that the world is overflowing with the events we don't want to accept, and in our daily life we encounter vulgarity and violence, prejudice and perversion, schemes and sabotages, betrayal and bewilderment, and those are the treaturous shadow that devours ourselves from within. The weakness in our souls, the fear of darkness, surrender to desire, are the very sustenance of the negative power that clings to us, whispers inside our skulls, manipulates our behaviors and veils our sight from seeing the beautiful and benevolent part of who we truly are. We first of all must put aside our ego before embracing love. Love is not an obsession with or a drowsy fantasy of any particular person, nor is it a spell of emotion one transiently feel or vicariously presume. It is more alike to a stable and persistent condition, but far more latent than its opponent which appears in various forms, namely, anger, hatred, depression and so forth. By eliminating ego, we also disrobe the tags we unconsciously impose on other people due to the necessity of simplifying the process of recognizing who should be pigeonholed into which tribe. Through this tribe affiliation we search not only for a sense of belonging, but also a superiority to other tribes. Thus, without abating the ego, we are more prone to be subjugated to the roles we play on the world stage, acting like buffons, puppets and marionettes. It suddenly occurs to me that someone once told me about his understanding of Jihad—— The real Jihad is a war against your ego. [to be continued...]