A Challenge of Radical Unconditional Love
by Thom Thumb on Wednesday, July 25, 2012 at 2:01am ·
One of my favorite tricks when playing hide and seek is to pick a spot where I can see the seeker. Then as soon as they go off to look I hide in the place that they counted. Humans rarely look closely in places they have already labeled in their minds as fruitless. In this way I think we have hidden our most precious treasure. We hid our road to nirvana in the last place we would think to look for it… Right under our noses! It is hidden within most songs. It is the basis for every major spiritual lineage and creative exploration.
Why then is this idea called love so slippery? It certainly has to do with our words.. Tricksy things are words. Have we perhaps diluted the potency and the meaning of the word love with our overuse of it? I am sure many of us take for granted that the definition we have latched onto of love is complete, (at least as far as ourselves are concerned). As we know, whenever you think something is satisfactory or complete you stagnate your growth in that realm. But truly it has now come to mean a plethora of different things to a great many people. The definitions I have found in dictionaries use words such as affection, devotion, attachment, admiration and attraction. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it; “"Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, to the platonic love that defines friendship, or to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love, or to a concept of love that encompasses all of those feelings. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.”
My spiritual cocoon is bursting and it all started with my ambitious redefinition of love. A definition that ties together all of love’s aspects and forges a way of life. For this purpose I will call it “radical unconditional love”. I have a natural aversion to definitions of love as something selfless. Without the self to be conscious of it existing it becomes a mute point. Yet I believe our definition of self can be as limitless as our definition of love. Limitlessness is one of the main qualities of my definition of love. I have yet to see an end to the amount of love that can be generated with a willingness to do so. As far as I can tell we draw from an infinite well. Radical unconditional love begins with radical acceptance and I believe we have been intuitively evolving in that direction as a species. There was a time when slavery was a widely embraced way of life. We have mostly grown out of that time. Yet still we value some living things over others and value living things over “inanimate things”. We put limits on who or what we are capable of loving, choosing to define some entities as being on another team. But everything in existence is on the same team or more precisely, we are the same team. So without further ado, here is my current iteration of my definition of love:
“A boundless and ever-growing need to become aware of blissful oneness through creative interaction.”
Allow me to elaborate: Most religion’s god(s) have this similar aspect: ~Creator(s)~ Creation in perhaps every culture is revered as divine or sacred. Our amazing abilities to create both physically and intellectually are all powered by an act of love and as far as I can tell, what these acts of love can create is limitless. When a person loves another person they are drawn to interact with them because of a deep need to become one either through physical union or through enthusiastic co-creation. Sometimes all of the above. The same thing goes for loving an object or an idea. The great Carl Jung once said,
“The creation of something new comes not from the intellect but from the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.”
The exploration of another entity’s perspective is a remembering of that aspect of your greater cosmic self! We are an infinite entity viewing itself expanding from one perspective node in the sphere. Perhaps enlightenment is being able to witness it all unfolding from an integrated and unified vision of all the perspectives simultaneously. Likely it is more of a grand, blissful feeling awareness than a viewing.
I believe the key to grokking radical unconditional love lies in the question; “Is there a motive?” If you are interacting with something, be it person, plant, or inanimate object for a reason, than you have strayed away from the highest vibration of radical unconditional love. What does a baby do, for instance, when it comes in contact with something beautiful it has yet to interact with yet such as a shiny marble on the floor? It smells it, it shakes it, it rubs it on it’s face, it tastes it. It is a fascinating exploration of interaction birthed from inner necessity. Most “adults” only engage in this kind of limitless visceral exploration during private sexual interactions and sometimes not even then. The baby would behave the same way if the marble were a piece of cat poop.
True love lies within this place of unconditional fascination. It is the irresistible gravity that pulls us to connect and become one with all that is. Play for it’s own sake is the language of love. This existence is an excruciatingly beautiful playground. We are infinitely more vast than our beliefs and dispositions. We are children of a diving formula. Matrix comes from the latin Mater, which means mother. Pattern comes from the Latin Pater, which means Father. Waves of sound; Waves of light; Pulses of universal chi… These are our ancestors. We are a magnum opus of energy’s eternal and permeating diversity. When we set limits on our expressions of love and methods of exploration, let us take care to do so like we are consciously playing a game. A game where all roads lead to victory despite our best efforts. Let us do this with exuberant curiosity and the conscious compassion of unattachment to the designs of any specific path. Our treasure map to enlightenment is hidden within all of us and all we have to do is listen to our loving essence. Our judgements, our labels, our motives are all camouflage… The built in challenges that spice up existence and make it a story. The challenges that make samadhi a prize worth winning. I believe that this state of unconditional, genuine wonder love can be cultivated…
And so I issue forth these 3 challenges to all my other perspectives ~
I challenge you to be silent for one day, only witnessing, listening, breathing and turning up the knobs on how much you love everything you see and experience!
I challenge you to pick something you find distasteful, whether it be a food, person or place and engage it with full intention to take it in without labels or judgements and love it more than you did when you began!
The final thing I ask refrains from being an equal appreciation of everything… I challenge you to boldly and radically embrace the ecstatic bliss of everything you see today as if you were “falling in love” with your other self.
If you have read this far than thank you family! I am truly blessed to have you and have gargantuan gratitude for your curiosity and care of my words. I will leave you with a gift of this poem, which was inspired by these thoughts…
Falling in love? Haha, This is a remembering!
A blissful expansion, an ego dismembering,
An acceptance of self, containing all forms of wealth,
A flow only found in surrendering…
And surrender I will to meadow and hill,
To sun, cloud, moon, rain and snow,
Surrender I will To park and landfill,To lover, to friend, and to foe,
I’ll surrender to pleasure,I’ll surrender to pain,
I’ll surrender to things most find trite or mundane,
I’ll surrender to breath and laughter and song,
I’ll surrender to whatever dance comes along,
I’ll surrender to objects and small silly games,
I’ll surrender to babbling things without names,
I’ll surrender to shaking out traumas of old,
Till all limits dissolve and begin to lose hold,
I’ll sink into all like a big wave coming home,
To the ocean born of that most glorious ohm,
What once were boundaries, now redefine as connections,
Till eternity’s voice rings out to my far off sections,
Till this “falling in love” we typically have for just one,
Explodes from within like a large dying sun,
And rains down upon every speck in existence,
A fire that blends time and obliterates distance!
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