(This is Part 36 of a series. Go back to Part 35.)
To approach someone with unconditional love does not look any particular way on the outside. It's an inside job. Nor does it mean being a doormat or disrespecting our own wishes.
At a deep level it simply means that we have a lot of trust. We look beneath the surface and discover that existence is completely trustable, so that we don't have to go around trying to change people.
On the surface unconditional love may even look tough at times. It may come out as a "yes" or a "no", for instance. But internally it's always a "yes" to who that person is. It means letting go of our sacred ideas of how other people ought to be.
We need not worry about being able to love perfectly. Ha! Such perfection would be for some other planet, not this one. And to be superhuman is ultimately to be inhuman, because it doesn't allow for our beautiful human quality of falling short, of failing sometimes.
What does make a difference is just our intention to love without insisting on certain conditions. If the intention to see with loving eyes is strongly there, the veil will lift sooner or later and we'll see the naked truth—the divine embedded in the ordinary world.
God/Heaven isn't off in some heavenly realm somewhere. It is right here, right now, and all it takes to see It is to surrender to existence and open our hearts. Simple, huh?
The tonglen exercise can be very valuable in this. When we breathe in suffering wherever it may be and breathe out love and compassion to all beings, it helps in opening our eyes. We begin to see for the first time, and what we see is divine perfection disquised as imperfection.
Unconditional love doesn't end with people, of course. Nothing whatsoever is left out. So it extends to existence itself, in all its hues, for we come to see that all of the "ten thousand" beings and things are simply disguises for the One Love. We begin to see a universal masquerade ball where all the disguises are just that—just disguises.
Unconditional love also extends, naturally, to our internal thoughts and feelings.
Basically, we get two bites at the apple: If we love the world as it is, that is happiness. But if we feel resistance to some part of the external world being the way it is, then we get to have a stress feeling such as fear, anger or depression. That is our second chance at acceptance.
If we try to push that feeling away, minimize it, reject it, change it or whatever, it simply intensifies and we suffer all the more. Resistance is the great magnifier, internally or externally.
But if we are willing to have that feeling be there, to welcome it as a friend—"Oh look, here's my old friend sadness again"—then our happiness is restored. Right within the stressful feeling we discover something else that is not stressed at all.
A meditator went to his roshi one time and said, "Roshi, I'm feeling terribly anxious; what should I do?" The roshi said, "Let the anxiety overwhelm you. Maybe you'll be the first meditator to die of anxiety." Just as resistance is the great magnifier, open observation is the great calmer.
Wherever life goes, it goes. If we're willing for life to go where it goes, life transforms. Yes, we have intentions, but beneath those intentions is a great willingness. And right in the middle of that surrender—and this is really interesting—we become more effective at whatever it is we think we're doing.
By the time we're experiencing a stressful feeling we're already way downstream. A stressful feeling is simply
a symptom that we're believing a thought or story about how somebody or something ought to be different.
To work at a more causal stage, we want to go upstream. We look at the thought or story that is causing the feeling and we just see that it's not true. In that very seeing our suffering ends.
Existence itself is the ultimate reference, the ultimate standard of how it ought to be. Paradoxically, when we fall down in bottomless surrender to how things are, we become a more nurturing gardener in this beautiful and exquisite garden of creation. And we see that the same energy that moves the stars moves your heart and mine.
—jim sloman, 10.31.04 for Sep 20
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