We confuse, and even lose, our spiritual path to wholeness and integration, when we equate the need for our own legitimacy with our need for love.

Legitimacy has its founding in law, in ethics, in moral codes. Love has its founding in our universal context.

To the extent we insist on receiving a sort of legitimacy from others, to that extent we are incapable of receiving love. We must choose whether we will embrace love for our soul, or legitimacy.

None of us are legitimate. We all are so far from a state of wholeness that any notion of us being lawful, that is, moral, or legitimate, must be completely thrown out, in favor of the reality that we all are significantly damaged goods. Our humanity is broken. Our functionality as human beings is ruined.

Let’s be done with our protests to the contrary, which can only result in the sabotaging of our spiritual journey toward wholeness and integration.

What we really need is to be loved with our flaws and dysfunctions, really loved, thoroughly loved, and that implies absolute forgiveness. If we turn up our nose at the suggestion of forgiveness, it is because we are still invested in a search for legitimacy.

If you still are not inclined to leave your quest for legitimacy, for the better quest for love, then perhaps the following observation will help. A quest for legitimacy will never be realized, in fact it cannot possibly be realized (even accepting as real the insane premise that you actually are legal in all things, or in anything, completely), in as much as this quest is, and always will be, directed at the people who have failed to accept your legitimacy up to this point, and no two of these, or any, people will ever agree on what the law, on what moral integrity, is.

Your quest for legitimacy is screwed from the outset. It is a thirsty soul’s maddening pursuit of a mirage.

So much of what passes for psychology, or social progress, today is a pandering to this reactionary impulse in mankind to seek legitimacy. We should not be fooled. Legitimacy is not what we want; love is. And all of the skillfully tailored psychological or political gimmicks, complete with slick, intellectual, or political, or spiritual-sounding, jargon will not change this human equation.

So what if someone does not think your sexual orientation, or your culture, or your religion, or your ideas or beliefs, etc. are moral or natural or correct, and you do? Changing their mind, changing everyone’s mind, will not get you what you want, what you really deeply need; that is, to be loved.

I have a suggestion for a practical course of action. The next time someone gives you a hard time with your particular legitimacy issue, agree with them about whatever they are suggesting is unlawful, or unnatural, or wrong, and then ask them if they will forgive you.

You won’t lose the use of those functional parts of you, just because you act this little pageant out, and if you truly are legitimate in whatever aspect of you that is being wrongfully judged, you will still be free to be you. The thing that will change is that you will begin to travel down the road that is the quest for love. Traveling down this road is what transforms us, from the wounded, dysfunctional, souls, who are busy earnestly licking our own wounds, into people would can love themselves and thus can turn their attention outward in love for those around them.

What do you have to lose? You have been trying the other path your whole life, and what has it gotten you? Look for love, and live, really live.

You may protest that if people truly do love you they will embrace the legitimacy of your significant issue. That is true, of course (assuming you are in fact whole), but love from other people is not the love I am suggesting you go in search of. Look for love from the spiritual force underlying your human existence. If you get love from this factor, you will be able to love your self, and that is all you need in order thrive, to fully, proactively, live out your life as a human being.

Of course, everything I have been trying to sell you on here depends on one thing; that the spiritual force underlying the unfolding material universe does, in fact, love you. I can tell you from my own actual, enormously illegitimate, human experience, that it does.

Whether you see the point I am making here, or not, I want to love you perfectly, so I will be continuing to quest for love, and reject my impulse to seek legitimacy. I hope I see you on this Road.