Last week, I wrote about the basic idea that you cannot love someone and try to change them at the same time, because if you are trying to change someone, you aren’t really loving them; you are just loving parts of them.
I also mentioned that this perspective also puts us on a path to unconditional love. This is a big topic that can get confusing for a lot of people, so it deserves its own post.
Before we get into unconditional love, though, we have to talk about resistance, because resistance is what truly gets in the way of loving unconditionally. It prevents us from being happy, finding peace, and reaching enlightenment. Resistance is the root of all of our suffering, and, if we are able to fully let go of any resistance at all, we will be put on the path of spiritual awakening and, in turn, discover the truth of unconditional love.
Resistance as the Root of Suffering
The resistance that I speak of has to do with our desires for things to be a certain way. Most people are not satisfied with the way things are. They either desire more of something or want less of something else. This is the duality of being caught between craving and aversion, concepts many meditation communities are intimately familiar with.
In terms of craving, the average person wants so much. We want to be paid more for our jobs, while also not wanting to have a job in the first place. We want our boss to be nicer and our partner to truly understand us. We want to be thinner, stronger, or better looking. We want the bigger house, faster computer, and newest phone. We see a commercial for a robot vacuum or a new piece of exercise equipment, and think “Wow, if I had that, I would truly be happy.”
On the aversion side, we are always running away from something. Many people think they are seeking happiness when in reality they are running from a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. We wake up thirsty so take a big drink of water. The water reminds us of our empty stomach so we eat a big breakfast. This makes us sleepy so we have a cup of coffee. And on and on.
Aversion fuels much of our behavior. We do not want to get sick so we take vitamins and fuel a billion dollar supplement industry. We fear our partner will leave us, so sacrifice our own integrity to get them to stay. We do not want our new car to get scratched, so we keep in the garage.
Craving and aversion are two sides of the same coin, reflecting a fundamental dissatisfaction with the way things are right now. We think the present is not perfect enough: it is either to hot or too cold or we planned for a beautiful picnic but the sky is grey and cloudy.
Wanting things to be different reflects a fundamental resistance to the present moment, to what is happening right here, right now. And when we resist the way things are, a separation happens. A division grows between “me” and the world, between what we consider ourselves to be and what is happening all around us. This resistance then creates our sense of self, what you might call the “ego,” ahaṃkāra, Atman, or however you refer to what you think you are.
Resistance as the Source of Ego
Whatever you want to call yourself, this identity is formed through the process of tightening against. We resist the world, trying to build up a separate, isolated identity that gives us the illusion of constancy in a world of constant change.
This tightening comes in the form of holding onto the thoughts, emotions, perceptions, belief systems, assumptions, and identifications that formulate who we think we are. We say we like or dislike certain things, and that becomes who we are. We say “I’m a cat person.” or “I’m a dog person.” or “I love jazz.” or “I hate Justin Bieber.” If someone tells us our taste in music is terrible, we get defensive. If someone tells us we are wrong, we become enraged.
If we notice anger rising in our body, we identify with that too by saying, “I am angry,” and then projecting our sense of entitlement onto the world that should not have angered us.
The contraction that is the ego–or whatever you think you are–also causes suffering, as we spend much of our days defending ourselves against the world and anything that might knock us off our delicate precipice. We become what Chogyam Trungpa calls “a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.”
The Art of Letting Go
So what are we to do? We have to let go. The path to awakening is a path of dissolving our delusions by finally noticing how strongly and quickly we latch onto things and then committing to letting them go.
This is the path of non-resistance, and it is the key to spiritual awakening. In his book A New Earth, Eckharte Tolle wrote that, “Non-resistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.” He notes that it requires a complete and uncompromising surrender to what is.
Non-resistance is the ultimate theme of my poetry collection, 108 Savasana Poems, as Savasana is the final yoga pose in most classes, it requires our complete and utter relaxation in order to fully rest in the truth of our being.
The book was inspired by many incredible poets. I am often reminded of one in particular, Dorothy Hunt, who eloquently described the true meaning of peace in her poem, “Peace is This Moment.”
Do you think peace requires an end to war?
Or tigers eating only vegetables?
Does peace require an absence from
your boss, your spouse, yourself? …
Do you think peace will come some other place than here?
Some other time than Now?
In some other heart than yours?
Peace is this moment without judgment.
That is all. This moment in the Heart-space
where everything that is is welcome.
Peace is this moment without thinking
that it should be some other way,
that you should feel some other thing,
that your life should unfold according to your plans.
Peace is this moment without judgment,
this moment in the heart-space where
everything that is is welcome.
Hunt’s poem taps into the essence of what we are talking about. Peace is a moment without judgement. Peace is when we stop resisting life, when we stop wishing that anything was different, that everything should unfold according to our plans. Peace is a moment of openness where everything is welcome, where resistance has completely melted away.
Those thoughts, emotions, perceptions, belief systems, assumptions, and identifications I mentioned earlier? We let go of those, too, as well as any resistance, tension, or desire to stay closed in any way. We let it all go.
And, quite surprisingly, once we do let it all go, we do not find an emptiness of being, but rather an upwelling of beautiful magical unconditional love.
Letting Go to Unconditional Love
Once we dissolve our sense of ego–our sense of separateness–we not only feel unconditional love, we become unconditional love.
There are two main reasons for this transformation. The first is that, if there is no sense of “I,” then there is no sense of “other,” either. The entire world becomes a reflection of us–a part of us–because it is us. When we truly awaken to an undivided reality, we see ourselves in all things. Violence against nature is now violence against ourselves.
Thich Nhat Hahn describes this phenomenon beautifully in his poem, Call Me By My True Names, where the narrator is not only a bud on a spring branch and a tiny bird learning to sing, but also a young girl raped by sea pirates and the sea pirates themselves.
The second reason we feel an upwelling of unconditional love upon spiritual awakening and the dissolution of our separate sense of self, is that we are finally able to let everything be exactly as it is. We know that we cannot love something and try to change it at the same time. Now we see it works the opposite way, too: when we stop trying to change something, we end up loving it and appreciating it for exactly as it is.
There is a saying that goes “If you like a flower, pick it. If you love a flower, let it be.” This taps us into the truth of love, telling us that it mustn’t be conflated with any attempt to possess or control. Rather, unconditional love does not require anything of anybody. We love our partner for exactly who they are, through the good and the bad, both when they cook us dinner without asking and when they forget our anniversary.
The unconditional love of spiritual awakening involves a complete letting go–what the Jesuit priest Anthony De Mello calls “a complete cooperation with the inevitable.” True realization, true enlightenment, involves a deep recognition that there is no atom in the universe that is out of place. Once we see the natural perfection of everything, we are able to allow it to be exactly as it is; once we allow something to be exactly as it is, we are fully able to love it and appreciate it.
We require no conditions for our love, nothing needs to change. When this is applied to our partners, it means there is nothing they need to do, change, or improve to receive our love. When applied to ourselves, well, we realize we are already whole and deserving of love too. There is nothing we need to change, do, or improve about ourselves, we are already worthy of all the love our heart can handle.
(Cover Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash)
