Love, the Ultimate Power
By Phil Golding
It is common to assume that our only hope of escape from the nexus of suffering is to find someone who is willing to love us unconditionally. Surely we should be able to find refuge from suffering in a relationship with some ideal person.
This expectation however, is a one way road to inevitable conflict and disillusionment. We expect others to make us happy. We even demand that they do so. We want someone who is safe, predictable and who satisfies our essential needs. Instead we end up with a human being with flaws, with fears, with insecurities just like ourselves. This won't do of course, so we become locked in a struggle to control and change our loved one in the hope of getting the love that we want, not realizing that we are choking love instead. Does that mean that unconditional love is not real? Should we just stop trying to fool ourselves?
It is said that love is a mystery, but it isn't really. From the perspective of the great Wisdom teachings of the ages, love can be regarded as a science, and the most studied and mastered science of all. From this perspective, love is regarded as a universal law of life, a force of life, or life-force that transcends the limited human idea of personal love that we may experience with another. If love is regarded as a universal force, like light or gravity, then we can begin to look at it very differently. You don't need permission from somebody to receive light, freely given from the sun. Gravity is a natural part of everybody's experience. Why can't love be the same?
The problem lies in the fact that we have mistakenly come to believe that we can only receive love when someone else gives it to us. This is a natural psychological position for a child. Being a child means we are acutely vulnerable and deeply dependent on our fallible carers. When we didn't live up to the expectations of our carers, we may have experienced having their love withdrawn from us. If this was the case, we were likely to feel rejected and abandoned. If this abandonment occurred too often, the result is a growing belief that we are unworthy of love. This misbelief then blocks our ability to love ourselves. When this misbelief continues to influence our minds, we develop an even deeper dependency on the love from others. We come to believe that others have the power over our love. We remain feeling like a vulnerable child, even in adulthood. We are needy for love, but we are at the same time afraid of it. This fear of not receiving love then triggers our ego defenses. We don't love ourselves, and we are afraid of other people because they may not give us the love that we so desperately need.
We are in such a vulnerable state as a child, our natural attachment needs are so great that we often think we are being rejected and abandoned even when our carers are doing their best to love us. For example, one of our parents may pass away, or suffer a prolonged illness, or may simply find it difficult to relate to us, due to personality differences. Even through unavoidable circumstances, we can miss out on the care we need.
Our confusion about love is such a factor in our human experience that our misbeliefs have become ingrained in our collective human psyche. Even with a stable, happy childhood, we are still deeply influenced by this confusion about love. We don't realize that this love that we are trying to get from others is a second hand love, and often a worn out, neglected love at that.
Just as we can put up an umbrella to block out the rays of the sun, we have unconsciously constructed a mental umbrella that blocks out the vital life-force of love.
Let's now pause for a moment and ask ourselves a very important question. What if our love wasn't actually owned by somebody else? That question requires some deep thought to grasp its significance.
To solve this riddle, we must re-examine the way we look at love. The common mistake we make is in thinking that we should be able to guarantee a sustainable love from another person, place or thing. For a start, an emotional need cannot be truly satisfied with a material thing, so let's drop the places and things out of the equation. What about getting love from someone else? To lift the veil off this confusion we must deeply examine the above question. How can someone else own our love? Who gave them our love?
In that case, we must own the love that belongs to someone else. Where did we get that from? What do we really know about someone else's requirements of love and fulfilment? Do we even know what our own requirements are? If we are really honest with ourselves, we end up concluding that our awareness of this is vague at best. And yet human beings do love, and with great power.
Where I am getting to here is that we don't really know about love with any real clarity of awareness until we can truly love ourselves. I am talking here about loving ourselves unconditionally, which means being able to face and accept and work with everything about ourselves, even the parts of ourselves that we would rather hide away from the rest of society.
Occasionally we do experience being in the presence of someone who has a high capacity for loving unconditionally. It feels so wonderful. We feel so accepted and free being in their presence. But then they are gone again, and we are once again left feeling empty, even more so after having such an experience. We feel empty because we are looking for this love somewhere outside ourselves.
We are so desperately looking outside ourselves for love, because of the depth of our own lack of self-awareness and even self-rejection.
The pressure to perform, to measure up, has become so great in our society that our socially conditioned minds are stuffed full of self-condemnation about all the little and big ways we do not measure up, which also means we blame others for not measuring up, which is really the same thing. We have an inner-tyrant constantly whipping us for our so-called failings. You don't think so? Try this personal experiment and see what you find.
Today, right this moment, make a rock solid commitment to treat yourself and speak to yourself only with loving kindness, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance. Keep this up for the next four weeks.
Keep a little note book in your pocket or your handbag and jot down every time you put yourself down. When you catch yourself, imagine this human-self that you are putting down is a vulnerable child just trying to grow up. Do your best to instead find a way to mentor yourself and care for yourself in that moment in a kind and constructive way.
Be prepared to be shocked at what you discover. Be prepared to discover how unskilled you are at being your own wise, loving parent. That's okay. Accept that too and just keep learning about yourself through this process and keep trying your best to love yourself unconditionally. After all, this is what unconditional love does. Concentrate on loving yourself and let everyone else just be themselves.
When doing this experiment, you may get quick positive results. You may, however, also run into confusion and pain. Don't be discouraged by this either, as hard it may seem. What I suggest is happening is that you are running hard up against some negative conditioning, often from childhood, this too strong for you to as yet get a sense of how to love yourself and actually feel the benefits of this. The benefits will come if you don't give up, but you may need to reach out for help from a good counsellor or mentor to get yourself over that hump.
What this exercise is about is being the wise, loving parent to your own fragile, vulnerable, confused and often frighted human-self. It is realizing that love is something that we can access internally. It is not somewhere outside us.
Doing this experiment for a month is just a taste. This won't be enough to turn your life around, but it will be enough to reveal to you why your life is not working for you. To turn your life around, you need to make living the principles of self-acceptance your new life-style. When you genuinely do this, you will place yourself in the position to just keep on learning and growing. When you do this, success is then inevitable.
Given the right love and skillful mentoring as a child, we actually grow up naturally having the ability to powerfully access this vital life-force of love directly, independent of anyone else? This is the healthy self-esteem that is created by a loving and positive childhood conditioning. We have learned to love ourselves unconditionally to a high degree and therefore we are in love all the time!
What if, once we grew to a certain level of mental maturity, or conscious-awareness, to put it another way, we are able to powerfully access love directly, regardless of the wounding and negative conditioning we experienced in childhood? As the adults that we are now, what if we can identify the confusion about love that has accumulated in our minds throughout our formative years. What if, armed with this self-awareness, we can literally reprogram our minds to be in tune with the natural laws of love, thus establishing within our minds a healthy self-esteem, even when we didn't receive that in childhood?
I have personally experienced doing just that, and so have countless others throughout the history of humanity, and particularly now in this day and age. Likewise, I have experienced, along with this rising tide of an awakening humanity, love as a life-force that I can freely access at anytime, regardless of how humanly imperfect I may be at any given moment and regardless of my circumstances and conditions.
No one owns my love. All that I need to do to qualify for this Unconditional Universal Love is to exist! That's it! This is the reality for you as well, and for every human being. For many of us, this is a radical way of looking at love.
We are born from this love, we are born into this love, we live within this love, and we die back into this love. In this way, you can regard Life and Love as the some thing.
I am not trying to preach to you here. What I am doing is offering you a scientific perspective on the reality of love as a universal life-force. I am offering you a very powerful hypothesis. Try the experiment and see for yourself.
We can love and heal ourselves because there is something about our human consciousness that enables us to get above our vulnerable, wounded human mind and instead of being controlled by it, we can look after it. We actually have the power to create our own internal environment, regardless of our circumstances and conditions.
In reality, relationships succeed, and personal fulfillment is achieved, not only because other people love us, but because we possess a healthy form of self-love. This healthy self-love provides us with an inner-peace and openness that makes forming loving and healthy relationships with others a natural outcome. Fear and condemnation forces, controls and attacks. Love and acceptance encourages, inspires and supports. Which of these spaces would you prefer to live in?
We can examine and take a lesson from the lives of certain famous people who supposedly had it all, but suffered depression, loneliness and self-neglect, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Tammy Wynnette and Michael Jackson, just to name a few. They were so loved and admired by so many people. What they also had in common was that they did not love themselves. They did not accept their own humanness.
Whenever we choose to accept ourselves as we are, we experience love. We are literally “in love”. The love is always there. We are just opening up our minds to it and letting it in. In this atmosphere of self-acceptance, we can more effectively love others unconditionally, because we are not so afraid of not getting love. We are less afraid of not getting love because we already have it direct from the universal source of love. In such moments, we can also better receive the love that is offered to us by others. We can give them the freedom to be human, to be themselves, which makes giving and receiving love much easier. This is the foundation stone of trust.
This is about learning to be happy, free and comfortable in your own skin. By cultivating this healthy form of self-love, every other aspect of your life is lifted up also. Make accepting yourself and loving yourself just as you are, no matter what, in a self-responsible way, your life-style and you will increasingly find yourself in Love as a natural state of being. Attracting and creating good things in your life will come much easier. You won't be searching for love while running on empty, you will literally be Love and discover what Buddha revealed, and that is realizing the true nature of yourself.
