It is important to honour the depth of unconscious fear around the word “Love”, still more when we talk and aspire to a love which is unconditional. No fear can survive in the here and now – fear is always generated by thoughts based on what was, and what could be. In the ‘Now’, fear is just the momentary imprint of an excitement in the nervous system. So it is worthwhile to check into this fear – around unconditional love – through the present moment, and to mentally release some of the beliefs on which this fear is based.

7 beliefs about love through which we imprison ourselves.

1. Love exists separately from the rest of creation.

Where love is believed as a way to escape, transcend or evade the world of body, mind and gut, a misconception is underway which will open a process of suffering.

While love is beneficial, expansive, healing and opening, the very idea that it is somehow “other” than the kitchen sink, the grit in our finger nails, the neighbors mother, or the big cruel world is a misconception.

Embedded in this misconception is the subtle mental agenda to divide the self from the feared “outside”.  This unconscious investment in a belief in the feared “outside” causes an energetic contraction or freezing which feeds back into the form as a “reality”.

In no time, “Love” is something that needs to be defended, protected against perceived enemies. In no time, love isn’t that loving anymore.

2. Love is something that we do.

The question of choice in love is an open one. Is there a subtle layer of choice in which we agree to let go of our patterns, identifications, fears and refusals to endure the vulnerability of pain?

Yet even here, we don’t “do” love. What is actually happening is that we allow this imperceivable mystery called love.

“We” – all the ideas and beliefs of who and what we think we are and where we think we are going – gets out the way. These networks of identification and agenda surrender to something wondrous beyond themselves.

It is not a doing, but a “letting”. Do we “do” the allowance? Perhaps. But the allowance is unconditional – if what emerges from the surrender is something that feels like love, then it’s good. But it’s not in our control. Also pain and grief is made of love.

We don’t get to decide the form.

3. Love can be owned and controlled.

Even if in our language we are gunning for universal love, in our minds and in the configurations of our energy, we are still formed to some degree in the pattern that there is an inherent difference between “my” love and “your” love.

Seeing our individual personhood as the origin of love, we inevitably feel it as limited in supply, and that it is given at a certain cost. We believe that this love can be “won” and “lost. We get possessed by the idea of it.

We can feel outraged if our (personal) love is not seen, respected or recognized by the “other” person. We expect a bit of their personal love in return. Otherwise it is abuse. The love is contracting into hatred, sacrifice, and resentment.

In this, there is a confusion between the tender, vulnerability of the form in opening to love, and the love itself which can never be controlled, directed, possessed or identified.

We tend to fall short of the mystery and spiral into a quest for particular feelings that can look like a spiritual copy of any drug addiction.

4. Love depends on certain conditions.

Funnily enough – unconditional love is… unconditional.

It doesn’t depend on any conditions of form, mind, heart or body. It does not require us to meet a certain standard of perfection in order to be everywhere and in everything. It is equally present in the heart of the greatest sage as it is in the hairs clogging the kitchen sink. It doesn’t differentiate. It can’t, because it does not depend on time and space.

This means that we can experience the same effects of love today as we did for someone 40 years ago. It is not caught in time. Nor is it caught in space. In a large part, it is unconscious, needing nothing of reflection.

If the object of our love dies, does the love vanish with it?

5. Love can be more or less.

We can measure the effects of love. But we can never measure love itself.

This is because love is not limited by our mental, emotional and psychological forms. We can decide that “somebody” is bringing a tremendous love, and “somebody else” is not bringing any love at all. But this verdict is based on the projections of mind arising out of a fundamental misconception. Love is not exclusively in, or even exclusively moving through the objects of our physical senses. It is not confined or originating in the separate physical body.

The objects of our physical senses, including our own bodies, are in fact moving through love. The closest analogy would be to take love as the air on the planet. The space between stuff. The space within stuff. The space behind stuff and the space after stuff.

All this stuff is here by grace of this loving space, and is inseparable from it.  All transformation and healing is allowed by virtue of this loving space. This infinite space does not require any stuff to exist. But all the stuff is dependent on it.

Can infinity be more or less?

6. Love is the feeling of love.

When someone punches you on the nose, your nose burns with pain. The pain is an effect of the punch. In the same way, when the living space which is love appears through the breaking open of our hearts, there is a feeling of the heart breaking open. Perhaps a feeling of the mind losing its normal functioning, perhaps even a feeling of the body getting a life of its own (phew!). These are the imprints of love. They are not love in its purity.

These feelings are the effects of love. They are not the love itself. They are the sentient impressions of love on the forms which we are carrying, which are breaking down, healing, transforming and evolving.

The confusion of the effect with the cause (and labelling this panorama of changing effects “love”) leads again into suffering.

In no time, we are choosing to identify the “positive” or pleasant effects us love, and the other (painful) effects as not-love. How many of us would affirm the power of love in a process of grief or loss? How many would have the courage to allow the love in the agony of rejection or abandonment? But how could these feelings be anything other than the effects of love? The effects we don’t ‘want’?

And love becomes conditional again, on the pleasure and not the pain. And in running from suffering, we suffer more. Still worse, we become cruel to ourselves and others.

7. Love is the opposite of hate

From  this belief all the way to the crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.

Love exists beyond duality. It is not separate from any molecule, particle, or “moment” of memory. Love never excludes, it never divides.

It is so much at source of who we are that it is when it is at its most powerful and free that we are often least aware of it – such as in infancy or in those time pure action through truth – too fast for sentient reflection.

Hatred is also composed of love. Without the omnipotency of love, hatred would have no context. In the world of energetic form, the opposite of hatred is not love, but sacrifice. We experience hatred towards ourselves and others when something needs to be destroyed or be allowed to die. Something needs to be sacrifice. Unevolved enough to e able to sacrifice an aspect of our inner world – an illusory sentient belief structure of identification and attachment, we seek to sacrifice it in the apparent “other” – as if this sacrifice could bring relief to the demon we face within.

These crucifixion scenarios, or the hunt for the infidel (or the witch-hunt), these displays of hatred are the actions of despair – the multi-layered attempts to realize the deeper truth of who we are through destruction – the direct destruction or burning down of false identity.

The love is here, before, during, within and after every rampage of hatred. It can not be erased, it can only be hidden in the smoke of human delusion.