Unconditional Love
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
Unconditional love begins in our
lives with unconditional acceptance. The first place that this is experienced
in a person’s life is in the context of the relationship with one’s
parents. From the first gaze and smiles that is focused on the mother and
father, the infant experiences the truth of what unconditional love is.
It is a process that happens without the benefits or impediments of language,
experienced wholly through the open heart space with which we come into
this world. The process manifests continually through those first days,
and on throughout childhood, even as the child learns the conditions that
humans experience around love. In order to remember these first uncomplicated
feelings, the process of sharing unconditional love becomes one of unlearning.
As Rumi notes, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek
and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Unconditional love is the divine expression of our true nature. It is the unhindered flow of our eternal, boundless self. The vibration of unconditional love carries us to our true self, where we are always perfectly divine and connected with all. While the deepest part of ourselves is always in this state of eternal love, we also experience what it is like to have this flow of energy hindered by the blocks of pain that we hold. We are being called to remember our true nature, our eternal, boundless self. We are being called to allow love to flow in and out of ourselves without any limitations.
Unconditional love moves beyond the ego to the spiritual self, which unites us with all of life. In this way, to be drawn toward unconditional love is the same as being drawn toward the true self. It is the path home, the path to the self that is untouched by anything that we do. When we understand love as our natural state, we see the phrase “unconditional love” expresses a reversal of the limited experience of conditional love, back to the experience of our natural state of oneness. While we often forget this state of oneness while in physical form, there is always the potential to flow back to remembering our source. This flow then moves from being in the natural state of the true self, to forgetting, and growing into remembering once again. In this way, we are all part of an eternal love story in which we move through these various stages of love. In The Path To Love (1998), Deepak Chopra tell us that this love story begins when we come into the world as innocent love. As we grow, we come into loving our family, friends, and intimate partners. We later find ourselves experiencing the love of giving, along with feelings of compassion and forgiveness. The final stage is marked by directly experiencing the pure love of the Divine. We can then leave our lives in the same state in which we came in, knowing that we are love itself.