Unconditional Love
by Patrik Horváth
Everybody is dreaming about falling in love one day. You, me and everyone else. We are just so thrilled about the fact that there is somebody on this planet who seems to like us as we are and who we like as they are both spiritually and physically. We go everywhere together, we experience nothing without the other and probably we just can’t imagine if there is any reason why not being together most of the time.
Since the day we fall in love we feel like we are not the same person as we were the day before. We feel we are complete now. We feel we make the other one being complete as well. We somehow forget what our life was before we had these strange, but quite uplifting feelings in us. We are unconsciously starting to be attached to these feelings and therefore to the person who helps us gaining them. We’re getting to depend on love. It’s obvious because who would like to be poor after being rich at last really?
“I don’t want to lose the feeling of being loved anymore.”
We are so in the middle of the pink cloud to realize that what we actually feel is not love, but the opposite of it. We feel that it is love because there is a problem with our understanding. We confuse love with desire. Love knows no expectations, desire is based mainly on them. When we think we are in love, pause for a second and think about this question: “Am I doing anything for the other because I want something in return?” If the answer is yes you must have a suspicion that what you feel is rather a kind of desire than love.
Desire is a form of ego, the center of I Am. This is one of the main reasons why there could be jealousy in relationships. The underlying ego does his job and always aware if there are any reasons for fear or comparision. If there is a sense of fear it’s mainly because a comparision, a process of verifying if we are superior is continuously making in the background. “Am I good enough for her as that guy would be who was smiling at her while he was making our coffee?” The fear of not being enough is equal to the feeling of the possibility of losing the source of “love” which is the source is desires in reality.
That is why enlightened or highly spiritual people often speak about the changes of the quality of our relationships when we get closer and closer to know ourselves, the person who we really are — the soul who lives within. When we burn down the layers of the thoughts who we think we are and stop meeting the need of others’ expectations somehow we start to accept ourselves — that is to love the human Being who we are. It’s only a matter of time when we’ll feel we are already complete as we are and have everything we need.
We’re going to realize that another person is not the requirement of love, not the human Being who we should rely on, but moreover the one who we could spread our love to without the hunger for need anything in return. We won’t have conditions anymore. We won’t have assumptions when to give love and when not. We’re just simply starting to give no matter what.
It’s interesting how the lack of conditions and expectations can free you up. If you start to give love for the sake of giving love and not for the sake of being your desires completed, it could change everything. As David Cain wrote in What Love Is Not:
It takes practice to give up “good for me” in the name of “good.” In the grand scale of evolutionary time, human beings are only at the beginning of experimenting with this — working with something bigger and more important than personal desire.
But love is already everywhere, at least in the background. It’s too conspicuous to be marginalized, even among a population largely driven insane by mismanaged desire. We need to learn to navigate our desires better in order to love fully. We’re working on it.
It’s an interesting time to be alive. We’re graduating from a culture of desire-driven lives to one of love-driven lives. The solution to the world’s problems will look more and more obvious as more people begin to understand that and make that transformation. The first step is knowing the difference.
Defining it is impossible. You can throw words at it but never pin it down. Nothing is misidentified more often than love. But for now, we can know what it’s not. If it hurts, it’s not love.
It would be magical if more and more people start to realize that difference and therefore make the necessary transformation to feel what love really is. If I hadn’t been able to make that change I would probably lose a woman who is really important to me by now. I was confused, because I thought I love her, but it was rather a kind of attraction combined with some desires. I made many things in order to make herself being interested in me more and therefore it couldn’t be labeled as love what I felt back then. As spring passed and I realized what has really happened — that I didn’t really know myself, therefore my feelings — and made that change inside, it turned out that we can get so much closer to each other spiritually than before and the quality of our relationship could also change a lot. Although we are still not a couple and probably we shall never be, she got to be one of the most important people in my life.
The appearance of unconditional love is one of the most beautiful and most important signs of your spiritual growth. Eckhart Tolle wrote that if you resist pain it creates even more pain. So we can say that the more you want in return by giving “love” the less love you share with others in reality. Therefore if you dispose all your needs and desires and just simply give love for the sake of giving love it will be the most authentic feeling you can share with the people around you.
Love is bigger than you. To love someone is for their happiness to be the same as your own.
References:
David Cain: What Love Is Not
http://www.raptitude.com/2012/11/what-love-is-not/
