Unconditional Love for Your Life

How may we have unconditional love for our lives?

Thank you for listening. More talks and courses with Sananda and Christopher at www.heaven-on-earth.co.uk.

Transcript

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Welcome from Sananda. It's an interesting question and a profound one and a question also that has more than one meaning or at least more than one way of approaching, more than one way of understanding and exploring. It might be that unconditional love for your life is about unconditionally loving the story of your life, all the events, your past, your history, your journey into the present moment, your feeling about your life as it is in the present moment, taking in your circumstances, your state of health and so on. Or it might be different. It might be a question about loving the life that you are unconditionally, the essence of your being. And if we begin to look it in that way, there's no clear distinction. Perhaps we might suggest ultimately no distinction at all between the life that you are of, you are an expression of, and the life that a dolphin is an expression of or a mosquito is an expression of or an oak tree is an expression of or a mould is an expression of. It's all life. 

1:38

Let's explore that a little further. Let's begin with that before we look at the more personal set of experiences that you may consider are your life. If life itself is not absolutely of love, if it is not fully that, then I think we may consider that love is very close to the essence of what life is. That your life, the life you are, is itself, we might say, an expression of love. That the source of your being, however you consider that the source of life, your life, all life, expresses love and that a primary, perhaps the primary, expression of that love is life. 

3:12

We might then say as we consider this (and as you hear these words or as you read a transcript, let yourself feel sense open to the energy behind the words), so if we look at life, the absolute essence, aliveness, and we consider love as an essence also, a kind of foundational emotion, you can perhaps observe, witnessing your own experience, your own inner senses of this, that if love is not quite the same as life, there is this continuous symmetrical communion between that which you call life and that which you call love, that love gives rise to life and that all expressions of life are derived from love. 

5:08

At these fundamental levels, then, or from these kinds of fundamental viewpoint, as close to fundamental as you can get, suggest that actually it's not so much a question of how you may unconditionally love your life, life itself, but how could you not? Though, as I say, you might conclude that love and life are not exactly the same, the power of the connection and this continuous communion between love and life makes it, I suggest, very difficult to imagine how you could not unconditionally love that you are life. 

6:28

That then helps when we look at life as the life lived, this life you’re living now, the journey, the adventure, the history, the story. Because the story is always partial. There is what is: the experiences of your life. And then there is what isn’t: the experiences you haven't had, you've chosen not to have or have felt unable to have, that perhaps you see others have, but don't experience, however it comes about, yourself. So soon as you get some kind of division, even if the division is a chosen one, such as you choosing to take on this life, there begins to be at least the sense of that which is within the compass of your life and that which is beyond or outside in some way. There can be a process of discernment: you are choosing. ‘I choose this experience. I choose not to investigate that experience.’ But you may well have found (because this is a common experience) that simple discernment, a sense of ‘I choose this rather than that’, begins to become freighted with the weight of judgement: ‘I choose this because it is better or on occasion perhaps I choose this because it's worse. I'm not worthy of the better choice’. 

8:42

In this life, in this reality, if it is your experience that you do not find yourself unconditionally loving the life you're living, then the shenanigans of the mind have a lot to do with it. Your mind is designed to discern. It has evolved over millions of years to discern the choices that are life-enhancing. Imagine your ancestors at a stage of life where they were hunter gatherers. Discerning the fruits that are edible and those which are poisonous, very important, but you can readily see how easily those fruits that are found to be indigestible often get categorised as bad and so the judgement begins in this fable (in reality, it may have begun elsewhere altogether). And so you find yourself as a living being in relationship with this living world, creating safe spaces for yourself: ‘here the food is good, over there it's bad. I exclude it from my life’. 

10:38

So you're experiencing, you’re developing, a conditionality to the process of living and that easily becomes a conditionality in your relationship with yourself. One day you pick one of the bad fruits and it gives you an upset stomach and quite a lot of pain and you tell yourself you're a fool, you should have remembered. And so some of that seeing an aspect of the outer world as bad becomes internalised. You are bad because you associated with what was bad. You brought the badness into yourself literally and gave yourself pain. And so now that imaginary Garden of Eden kind of state of consciousness - all is good, all is innocent, there is no knowledge of good and evil, all is as it is, God walks in the garden - begins to mutate. ‘This is good, this is bad. And if there is something bad in the world, then I am in some way infected by it. I'm now experiencing bad. It is no longer possible for me to unconditionally love my life. It has become tainted and I need to remember that, so that I don't eat those bad fruit again. So I need to carry that sense of ‘there is badness’ and therefore unconditional love is removed from the scope of my experience. I can still love a lot but not absolutely unconditionally’. 

12:59

So there as well as the mind with its ideas, you have the emotions of loss, shall we say, the physical pain of that stomach ache and so on. You're engaged in this apparently limited life. You as life have chosen to identify with a very specific form, made up of a tiny portion of all that the physical Universe is, a kind of sample that enables you to investigate this immense reality. And so prior to that story of the hunter gatherer is that choosing as life to identify with one small portion of all that is possible and as a necessary part of that, at least for a while, there is the sense of the other. ‘This is me. Everything else is other.’ There is a separation. 

14:34

Unconditional love dissolves all separation. So if we now step back and consider the life you're living now. To the degree that you experience yourself as separate from the world in which you're living, to that degree unconditional love for your life is a little separate from you. It's not wholly unavailable. There may be many, many moments in this life when you have felt without even thinking about it in unconditional love for the life you are. But if you're engaged in identification with your human self (and to some extent you are), then there is also a maintenance of the idea of separateness and that tendency towards, with that, conditionality. 

15:48

Part of what makes this such a valuable question for many is that you're living in a time when what I've been saying is less fixed in its truth than has been the case. For many of you, there can be a growing sense - it may be fleeting, it may sometimes feel imaginary or elusive or frustratingly absent - but a growing feeling that somehow actually it is possible to feel unconditional love for all that your life is and at the same time have a recognition of your existence as this distinct physical form that relates to all that the physical Universe is but is not itself all that the Universe is, but just a small part. 

17:00

And that word relate is useful here. You are related to everything. Everything is related to you. Everything that this Universe is, is family. It's not really that separate from you. If you step aside a moment and consider your own human family, your blood relatives, it may be you notice that whilst perhaps some and perhaps many, perhaps almost all those relationships are profoundly loving, perhaps to a high degree unconditionally loving, it may be that you don't have to look too far within your bloodline, your genetic relatives to find that sometimes those you're closest to in terms of being related can also be the most challenging for you to feel unconditional love for. And so it can be with the Universe. You may be very closely related as an energy presence to really everything in this Universe, but it may be far easier for you to feel a harmony, an unconditional love for a favourite dog or a favourite cat than it is for you to feel unconditional love for a distant galaxy that your imagination has difficulty even reaching out to. 

19:04

So you can still find as you reach into unconditional love, that you're dealing with a kind of law of proximity. It's easier to love the dolphin than the mosquito. Physically, the mosquito may be closer to you in terms of physical distance, but in terms of compatibility and in terms of behaviour, it's likely to feel more different to you than the dolphin. Nevertheless, there is for many of you this growing experience that both the dolphin and the mosquito and all the forms of life that you know have a real connection with you, that you are of the same life, that you can see, you can sense, you can feel that essence within these very different forms and that as you do so, you find yourself growing into a sense of unconditional love, that that unconditional love ceases to be to some degree a kind of contract as might be the case with a favourite dog or cat: there's a sort of mutual agreement at work and the love is part of that agreement. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. But as you open up and recognise that you can also unconditionally love beings who, as far as you can tell, have no deal to offer you beyond the sense of life sharing life with life and that is the deal actually, that's what makes, we might say, unconditional love so appealing. It is unconditional. It's not dependent upon contracts. Nor is it dependent upon ideas. So we come now back to the mind. 

21:50

As you look at unconditionally loving your life, this life you're living now, then you can find that ideas, beliefs, customs, around what love is may be exerting quite an influence, perhaps more than seems to be the case at first sight. For example, if you're wishing to feel more unconditional love for your life, you may find that your ideas of what love feels like are getting in the way, that unconditional love for your life ought to feel, perhaps there's an idea, like being in love with that degree of passion and intensity and it might be that feeling unconditional love for your life is not like that at all, but not any the less love and unconditional love at that. So notice your own expectations around what feeling unconditional love for your life might be like. And allow yourself to let go of every expectation you discover. None of them are needed. 

23:44

From one point of view, you can see yourself as a journey. You're making a journey towards unconditional love or a greater state of unconditional love or a more continuous or deeper experience of unconditional love. That notion of the journey, whilst useful in many ways, also has profound limitations because it has embedded in it a sense of separation. If you're on a journey, there's a destination and if there's a destination and you're on a journey, you haven't reached the destination yet and if the destination is unconditional love for your life, then you haven't achieved it yet. So that journey towards unconditional love is telling you that you haven't got it, that you're wrong or not enough, must try harder. So again, ideas sometimes quite subtle, not obvious ideas, come into play. Rather, draw upon the first area we explored: the sense of that essence, looking at life as essence, the essence of your being, the essence of all life, all living beings, and its relationship with love and that sense of the continuous inseparable relationship of life and love, a total intimacy. And recognise that that is you already, you are life. The life you are is in a state of unconditional love. It cannot be otherwise. 

25:56

So what we call a journey is really more like a delicate, continuous and continual transfer of attention from the details that create the experience of separation as you live this life and the continuum of life in a state of unconditional love. And increasingly trust that you can find within yourself at any moment that essence of your being that is in that state of unconditional love, that it's not hidden from you. It's always available and that anytime you notice that you're in some way removed from a state of unconditional love, know that you have a choice. It's a free choice. You don't have to jump straight back into that profound state of unconditional love that is the state of your essence, but let yourself know that it is available and understand that if you choose, so to speak, to ignore or postpone that choice, there is nothing there to create separation even more with, by self-accusation or self-criticism. Simply notice ‘I’m choosing to experience something less than unconditional love in this moment’ and you may not know what part of you is making the choice or why it's making the choice or how to change the choice, but allow none of that to matter. Just observe a choice is being made and ‘I am able, if I choose, to be in that state of unconditional love’. 

28:30

And what happens, we might say, is that for you living this human life, you find yourself more and more becoming as it were a kind of doorway through which that primal state of unconditional love, wed with the life that you are, comes more and more to you through that doorway, to be more present in your life as your life. And increasingly you find yourself, as you witness the life you're living and indeed the journey of your life up till this present moment or looking forward into the future as well, that you can find unconditional love there too. That, for example, if you look at a memory that has been painful to you, a situation in which you were unable to feel unconditional love for yourself or perhaps others were unable to demonstrate unconditional love or to feel unconditional love for themselves, you have within you the ability - and for sure it's a skill (by that I simply mean that it is something that you can develop and become better at - and by better at, I just mean finding it easier) to look at whatever the memory is and to find, however deeply hidden, that underlying unconditional love, blended with embracing all that life is. 

30:40

There's much help as you open in this kind of way. One of the beautiful things about unconditional love is it's not governed by the laws of time. Looking back in the way I was describing just now, you may have a sense of unconditional love being marked by its absence in periods of your life or in particular relationships or sets of experience. But that is not immutable. As I've said, you can find unconditional love anywhere and everywhere, because it is there behind every outward manifestation. Sometimes easy to see, easy to feel, sometimes less obvious, but always there. And as you find that more and more, you find that your understanding of time itself changes, that you're entering more and more into the reality of your soul, where everything is available now. And in this way too, you draw closer to that sense of being life, being life that not only exists through all time, but life for which time is just a momentary, so to speak, creation, an idea that you’ve played with, as life becoming more alive. Therefore, as you consider feeling unconditional love for all the detail of your life as you live it, let this be something that doesn't demand a great deal of effort. But at the same time, recognise that it is highly valuable, that every time you're able to feel unconditional love for something or someone or some occurrence towards which you felt less loving before, you're opening your life to more life. You're becoming more alive, you're connecting with more of the infinite essence of your being, the limitless love of Source. 

Thank you for listening. Goodbye for now.