Unconditional Love

"You cannot unconditionally love someone. You can only be unconditional love. It is not a dualistic emotion. It is a state of oneness with all that is."

-- Stephen Levine

I'm tempted to say that Stephen has said it all -- no commentary or explanation is needed. And yet, if love is just that simple, why is it the subject of such monumental misunderstanding?

Love, true love, is not about romance, or sex, or even relationship -- it's about identity. To love truly, deeply, and unconditionally we must identify ourselves as love, nothing less. It's not me over here and you over there and somehow we conjure up some emotional resonance between us. It is, as Stephen says, about unity, about recognizing our oneness not just with each other but with all others, with the entire universe.

I know, that's a tall order. Sometimes I don't even like my partner. Hell, sometimes I don't even like myself! How can I experience love for the entire universe? Only through Being, not through doing. Letting go of your limited identity, not trying to expand upon it.

Falling in love is a pretty accurate description, even though the phrase is almost entirely misused. To truly be unconditional love, we must let go, we must fall into it because it is the pure ground of being, the substratum of all our existence.

Falling in love with another person is a step. In its purest sense this type of romantic love is you and another free falling into that space of love together. Where we get confused, though, is in our attachment to the other person. As beautiful, nice, sexy, and wonderful as they are, they are neither necessary nor sufficient to our experience of love. At best they are a catalyst that helps us recognize that the state of love is always there patiently waiting to be discovered.

Attachment is the enemy of unconditional love. By becoming attached we attempt to put conditions upon love. Love will have none of it. Your attachments will only lead to your demise. Love is completely unfettered and for you to be love, you must be, too.

It's both the simplest thing and the hardest thing in life -- to love unconditionally. It is our primal nature, our true calling, and yet it is obscured beneath a gobzillion layers of conditioning. Today, see if you can at least put a small crack, a fissure, in that conditioning. Love for no reason. Be what you are.

You're Not Fine

"Because I know myself very well, it is difficult to say who I am."

-- Taiso Eko (Second Zen Patriarch)

Walking down the street you encounter a friend.

"How are you? they ask.

"Fine," you say, "how about you?"

"Fine," they reply.

And the conversation moves on to other topics. Or you both walk on with barely a hitch in your stride.

Harmless social banter, you say. Perhaps. But beneath the surface there maybe a whole lot more going on. In fact you may not feel "fine" at all at that moment, but you know that nobody really wants to hear a play-by-play description of your lousy day. "How are you?" is not meant to be taken literally.

But what if you did take it literally and deeply, how would you answer? If you know yourself as well as Taiso knew himself, the question "How are you?" might be as difficult to answer as "Who are you?" They both call upon you to boil down a massive amount of information into a short, verbal description.

We say we are "fine." We say we are a mother or a father, a student or an attorney, a blogger or a singer. We have all kinds of words to label and describe ourselves, but the better we know ourselves the more inadequate they all seem.

Sometimes when people ask me "How are you?" I want to say "I don't have the foggiest idea." Or when I'm at a networking event and a new acquaintance asks me "What do you do?" I want to say "Just a bunch of random crazy shit."

The fault really lies in the questions themselves. They really are not rational. They ask us to put into words what can only be experienced. Sure, they're well meaning, or at least semi-functional, but in reality they're meaning-less. And, worst of all, they condition us to think that we really can describe ourselves or our current state of consciousness with a well chosen assortment of nouns or adjectives.

Face it -- the better you know yourself, the less you can describe yourself. The more you understand the changing nature of thoughts, felling, and emotions, the less willing you are to describe your current state because you know that at any given moment it can change.

Who are you?

Hell if I know.

How are you?

Don't have a clue.

Welcome to reality.

You -- The One and Only

"There is no other, only you at war."

-- Alice Walker

Where is the seat of your identity? Is it in your body? Do you think, consciously or subconsciously, this body is who I am?

Or maybe you've narrowed your identity down even further. Maybe you're really smart, and so you believe that you are your brain. Sort of like a post modern Descartes -- you think therefore you am.

Or maybe your identity has to do with your beauty or your profession or your family or your possessions or your disease.

No matter. Anytime you have created a limited identity for yourself, you have also created the other. The other is whatever you aren't. The other is whatever is outside of your body, or not in your realm of thought, or in someway different from you as you define yourself.

The thing is, all definitions of the self are pure fiction, all demarcations between you and other are as unreal as lines on a map. The Universe is one body, one being. A simple, single song -- a true uni-verse. The Earth is one planet, though most of the time we identify with just one small portion of it -- my neighborhood, town, state, or nation. And you see how well limited identification works -- we are always at war with other limited territories.

Today is a great day to begin letting go of the concept of other. It ain't easy. The evidence of your senses, the conditioning of your mind, and the mores of your culture will conspire to keep you stuck in the self versus other dichotomy. But you have stronger ally on your side -- Truth, yeh, the BIG ONE, the one with the capital "T."

No other. Unity. You, the One and only. Welcome to Reality.