Thread: Unconditional Love - How the Fuck?

Ah, so you're about moderation. That's pretty much where I'm at too really - I do talk about the Buddhist stuff because I find it interesting and I like it, but in my life I don't live that way. I tend to be moderate, probably leaning by nature toward detatchment from emotions and passions. In fact in my case in order to improve myself I might need to go the other way and work on being a bit more attached to them. It's always been the easiest thing in the world for me to be detatched, and it does allow me to see the follies of overly passionate people and all their endless reality-tv style dramas pretty easily. I have a natural calmness and acceptance that they seem to utterly lack and it gives me a tranquility they seem to almost never feel. But then I almost never feel the triumphs they do, as well as the tragedies. I suppose we all need to go with our nature for the most part, unless that's destructive to us or to others.

I think I have loved unconditionally. At first it started out of necessity. I was working with a difficult guy and it was tight space, we couldn't avoid each other being three feet away for eight hours.

On his first day at the job he was already being snide with me and insulting me, in a kind of intellectual emotionally abusive way without being vulgar. But what I was most upset about was, he was wrong! He didn't know me and at all! I hate it when people judge me when they don't even know me.

Since I couldn't ignore him I had two alternatives, quit or become his friend to somehow.

At the time I was practicing the philosophy of viewing everyone as a part of yourself, like everyone is your dream character and you are theirs. So I convinced myself that my relationship with him will always suck unless I can figure out what part of me he represents. When ever he ranted, even if he was sneaking in insults, I just listened. I just listened, I listened. This guy was seriously angry at well everything, lol.

Then finally one day he shared with me his most intimate story. He wasn't angry at me when shared it, he wasn't lecturing me or judging me in anyway, he was just sharing everything.

I did it!

After that, he was so much more chill and relaxed around me. Were such completely different people living completely different lives that I can't say we'll ever be friends in the traditional sense of the word friend, like friends who "hang out". But compared to everyone else I met at that job, one of which I think of as my best friend ----I think of him a little more. Not in a romantic way but more like - I wish him nothing but happiness.

In my most humble of opinions, I do not believe unconditional love has anything to do with oneself, with ego, with barriers, with any of that. Take yourself out of the equation. It just exists, has its own power, we just benefit from it. It's not a feeling, it's action.

I'm curious, but also lazy/don't really give enough of a fuck on this subject, as to what the original hebrew word was in this concept of unconditional love. Unconditional love seems like it might even be a bad thing, you shouldn't necessarily love all things, but you shouldn't run away from them or push them away from you. Meet them with compassion, that makes sense, but love seems like the wrong word. Love to me implies some kind of an embrace of something

for example, I have love for my friends but not really for total strangers. I don't see how you can truly love someone(romantically or ortherwise) without knowing them. Love seems to be a conditional emotion. I don't feel love for the guy who just kicked me in the nuts and I don't really see why it would make any sense to. But maybe I should have compassion for him. maybe, nut kicking is kinda fucked up. Maybe I should think about the fact that he is a human and humans inhabit all sorts of fucked up mental headspaces and try to reflect on things a moment before I react to the situation. Then again, maybe there are some situations where survival depends on just reacting and listening to the para-sympathetic nervous system instead of worrying about how the other person feels.

Originally Posted by notsharpenough

In my most humble of opinions, I do not believe unconditional love has anything to do with oneself, with ego, with barriers, with any of that. Take yourself out of the equation. It just exists, has its own power, we just benefit from it. It's not a feeling, it's action.

Prove it.

You deny its very existence?

Originally Posted by notsharpenough

You deny its very existence?

How can we know it exists at all?

Originally Posted by notsharpenough

you deny its very existence?

i do.

Originally Posted by tsiouz

i do.

Are you sure?

In regards to what it is, I think we can all agree that unconditional love is an idea.

So, where and when are ideas? Well, they are in the mind--in the now.

And how is the mind? Sometimes it's tired. Other times it's alert, proactive and calculating. Often it's remembering. But... how? This brings us back to notsharpenough's comment:

Originally Posted by notsharpenough

In my most humble of opinions, I do not believe unconditional love has anything to do with oneself, with ego, with barriers, with any of that. Take yourself out of the equation. It just exists, has its own power, we just benefit from it. It's not a feeling, it's action.

Well, sure, the idea is real and prevalent in millions of minds and has been for thousands of years. So, yeah, it just exists... but in the same sense that you "just exist". No?

Why do you insist on taking yourself out of the equation when you are absolutely, positively a part of it?

It's not a feeling, it's action.

How can you support that statement after "removing yourself from the equation", when you are what holds the idea to begin with?

Accepting your relevance is no different from accepting your presence here and now. This is the essence or purpose of non-duality. How is it you come to know unconditional love? What makes you so sure of what it is? How can you know anything at all if you've taken yourself out of the equation? Without you, there is no one to perceive any ideas.

What really baffles me about the quote is the idea of loving all species. If I have a roach or a rodent problem in my house, some critters are going to have to die. And what about microorganisms? Does Thich Nhat Hanh think it's bad to wash your hands? His body is killing microbes by the gazillions every day. Does he consider that to be ongoing mass tragedy? And... does he eat?

Can anything really be unconditional? If a human is doing it, they are doing it because of their past experiences and genetics and every other form of causality. Even if you wanna throw in an aspect of will, free or otherwise, it's still happening because of past conditions.

We can act freely in a sense. If we become aware of our own conditioning(cultural conditioning, traumatic experiences) and how it limits our behaviour then we can make a conscious choice to break through these limits. I think unconditional love is a poor translation, but maybe Jesus was talking about something completely different from this. If we have a desire to act ethically or compassionately we can go into a situation seeing things from a wider perspective. You can use this to be more compassionate towards others which in the long run is better(if you accept the assertion that not suffering is better than suffering) for both you and them.

However this doesn't always mean that you love people, at least in the way which I define love, which is based on being attracted to someone in some way. By attraction I don't mean physical attraction, but attraction to something more like a persons character, their mind, things like this. When I feel love for someone or something it is because of conditions. If those conditions change drastically I may still feel love for the person because of who they were in the past, but it's still based on conditions in some way. Saying you love someone unconditionally doesn't seem much different to me to saying you love them for no reason. Maybe this is true, but to me loving someone because of who they are is a much deeper kind of love than loving someone for no reason at all. We may in some situations want to remain unaware of the reason we love someone, this can be romantic, but we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that things happen for no reason at all.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

If I succeed in loving you, I will be able to love everyone and all species on Earth.

I know its not what was intended, but it sounds like a joke about an evil woman, along the lines of "I told [the devil] that I love you, and the devil cried".

To a large degree I'm not a person who should be offering advice about love. Something broke in me when I was about five, and if there's anything like reincarnation, my heart was probably black before I was born. But I do care about people in a distorted, buried kind of way, and maybe I know something useful even if I'm mostly wrong. So here are a few thoughts, for whatever they're worth.

If you become content, and don't feel that loneliness, you may be more dangerous to other people because you won't feel like you need them for anything any more. Furthermore, when you develop a clearer psychic connection with people, so that you don't feel as isolated, you'll have a much easier time manipulating people for your amusement and to their detriment. I think its sort of like pedophilia, but with less developed minds instead of with less developed physical bodies. So even though you wish to transcend morality, since its imposed and inauthentic, you do need something like morality to make yourself safe for other people. Otherwise you can't transcend the loneliness problem. The solution may not be the uptight, rule oriented, spiritual ass-covering, desire-for-control masquerading as goodness that you dislike in religious people. But that's not the only kind of morality that there is. If you decide, for instance, not to get drunk, it doesn't mean that your trying to posture as a pure or moral person. It can just be because you care about yourself and see it as detrimental to that.

I'm not sure that posters here are qualified to make philosophical pronouncements about the nature or reality of unconditional love. Grammar and logic can be all nuanced and rigorous and a person can still be almost entirely wrong. We're not starting from the right place. But off hand I don't think that any love is conditional. The way we treat people can be conditional, and rightly so. And the way we open or do not open ourselves to other people can be conditional, and rightly so. But I think there is something else that is more rightly called love which is never conditional, can never be conditional. Its not that kind of thing. To even modify it with the 'unconditional' qualifier seems to me to imply that we're in the habit of talking about something else.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

What really baffles me about the quote is the idea of loving all species. If I have a roach or a rodent problem in my house, some critters are going to have to die. And what about microorganisms? Does Thich Nhat Hanh think it's bad to wash your hands? His body is killing microbes by the gazillions every day. Does he consider that to be ongoing mass tragedy? And... does he eat?

He would probably argue that one's actions do not need to reflect their feelings all the time, they can also reflect logic. Logically, you do not let a thief borrow your possessions or cockroaches infest your home. But while you're doing what's best for you, you're still allowed to have love for the cockroaches.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Grammar and logic can be all nuanced and rigorous and a person can still be almost entirely wrong. We're not starting from the right place. But off hand I don't think that any love is conditional.

Haha! I see exactly what you mean.

I'm not sure that posters here are qualified to make philosophical pronouncements about the nature or reality of unconditional love.

You're really too hard on yourself. You did really well! This is such a fantastic point:

I don't think that any love is conditional.

It excellently supports and sharpens the stance Darkmatters, Original Poster and notsharpenough hold, which poses one cannot (always) love unconditionally without abandoning oneself (altogether) because unconditional love is nothing personal--it is affection felt independently, free from judgments. Only through detachment, only through divorcing our (impersonal) awareness from the (personal) filter which constitutes "self" or "ego" can we achieve the "pure awareness" (as someone dubbed it earlier in the thread) required to embody something non conditional or absolute like "unconditional love". Without personality or preferences, we are no longer slaves to our own ideals, our own rules, our self-imposed conditions; to deliver ourselves from ego, thus, is to become limitless, unrestricted and ultimately free to love.

Yet here we are, still pouting in contention over various interpretations of not only what unconditional love is, but also what we mean by ego.

Why can't we reach a consensus?

What is keeping us from gliding in the absolute?

What is the point of debating "how the fuck" if we can't even agree on what the fuck we're even talking about? If we continue to linger in the obscurity of our personal interpretations of otherwise shared concepts, then we will remain powerless at large: for what use are our interpretations--our understandings--if they communicate nothing to others?

Originally Posted by Parousia

In regards to what it is, I think we can all agree that unconditional love is an idea.

If we can be certain of anything, it is how we obviously are not in agreement over this. So, what do we mean by "unconditional love"? How is it different from other types of love? Is it logical to conclude multiple types of love exist? shadowofwind called to our attention how the word "unconditional" is a qualifier. Placing it before "love" suggests that love is not absolute or independent of circumstance; in other words, that it is contingent. This is another way to say love is not always here.

Love is not always here...

Is that logical to conclude? Can you relate? Romantic love may come to mind. Maybe you've experienced relationships just "not working out". Do failed relationships entail an absence of love? What about lasting romance? How is "true love" different from "unconditional love"? Well, romances aside, what are the chances love could really be here forever? Do we know of any absolutes in the universe?

If nothing is absolute, then everything existing is finite, limited. Thus, as tsiouz and StonedApe have suggested, love is attraction resulting from specific conditions.

If absolutes exist, infinity isn't fantasy, but rather a logical quality existing physically outside the imagination. Thus, the expression "unconditional love" is redundant because love, as shadowofwind posited, is never conditional and never ends.

How can we decide? Before/without regarding any scientific data for absolutes or axioms, we can actually deduce a solution by answering a different question: do either of these choices lead to a contradiction? Solving this should help us clarify the answers to a few other questions raised in this thread, strengthen our overall understanding about the topic, and, most importantly, lead us to a consensus. So, what say you?

Originally Posted by Parousia

So, what say you?

WELL, I say DreamViews is a load of bull and y'all're a buncha pansies.