relationships and unconditional love

[tadeas]

Relationship is possible only if there's some kind of barrier present. For example you love somebody, but you don't love everyone else. Why? Because there are barriers in you. By forming a relationship you dismantle or somehow modify the existing barriers, so that there's less friction, more openness. When people split up, the barriers are put up again. But when there are no barriers to begin with it is unconditional love, which is the source of everything else. Every other form of relationship is just a reflection of this one love. So if there are no barriers to begin with, you just let love flow through you, there is no possibility of a new relationship in the old sense, because you are already in a loving (but not sentimental/romantic) relationship with everything/everyone. Now it's up to others to wake up to this, to get rid of the barriers that prevent them from seeing it. Unconditional love helps others a lot in this matter, I'd say

So just loving without conditions also means that one doesn't project their desires on others, because of his/her completeness, which is the completeness/emptiness of the whole reality, not one's personal dream. It is absolutely fulfilling and natural.

Living in this state is just being present. When it happens that I fall back to my dream and want to manipulate things or people, an alarm goes off in my head, a lot of processes, little programs start up and start calculating. What I'll say, what I'll do, who does what and a whole lot of this crap This is so limiting. It kills all spontaneity, every bit of easiness, playfullness, your eyes become cloudy Just living in love, not making up problems in your mind makes the whole world friendly, it clears one's vision and actually makes it possible to help someone from the heart. By not projecting desires on another, the role being played is just mirroring, unless there's some creative cooperation going on

Existing like that is freedom. No-one affects your self-image, because there's none, one can be around anybody, not being defined by the situation or by the personal dreams of other people. It's because you are not creating worlds in your mind that you can see what's going on.

From the sexual point of view, it feels like uniting both sexes inside. Or closing a circuit... which means there's no need for external sexual stimulation, but it certainly is possible. It's preorgasmic living... or perhaps orgasmic living, because orgasms have become much more whole-body, internal and less sexual. I love hand orgasms while driving )
Actually the notion of sex seems to have disappeared. It's here all the time... there's nothing more in the sexual act itself - at least if both of you are "unblocked".

Just looking around, embracing someone, sharing.., pumps up kundalini, but it kind of flows out at the same time... I don't know if other people feel it, but when it goes from the heart area it can be really intesive, for me. It shakes the whole body.


Thanks for reading and thanks to AYP for unlocking me.

[Jim and His Karma]

What a great, beautiful posting. I agree with everything you've written. Please permit me to digress about the terminology for a sec! The phrase "unconditional love" has all sorts of connotations placed on it by cultural usage. You picture saintly motherly figures staring at you with adoring doe eyes, sticking with you regardless of your erring ways. You never call! But that's ok!! I still love you!!!

And that's not a bad picture, but what you're talking about (what any serious mystic talks about) is something more. Yogani calls it "outpouring love". There are other terms.

I like to think of it as love-without-an-object. Because it's not about me or you or anyone else and their erring ways. It's not individual, it's about the whole shebang. Spraying love indiscriminantly. Just gobbling up all of creation as love, and lovingly spitting back love just as love for love. When you talk about this stuff, if you don't start sounding completely nuts, you're not really there yet! The heart is an idiot (at least to the mind).

For me the most evocative picture of unconditional love/outpouring love/love-without-an-object is offered by Buddha's Metta Sutta: http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/index.php?topic=2438

But one thing...the mind does have uses beyond the machinery of self-serving calculation! Don't blame the gun...blame the gunman! The mind is an exquisitely useful tool, just so long as it doesn't own the movie. The mind is just another manifestation within that sea of love. Nothing's outside that sea,  despite the weird dysfunctional hiccup we do when we build barriers...when we resist, as if there were something about our individual bags of skin that could realistically provide a fulcrum for resistance. Calculation, in and of itself, isn't an agent of resistance. It's only that when the calculator absurdly deems itself set apart.

We are complete and we lack nothing because we are everything and nothing. We are improved or fulfilled or satisfied by literally no-thing. There's nothing to do, nothing to change. But then the gorgeous paradox is that doing and changing continues, because that's the nature of it all! And so relationships are fine, sex is fine, thinking's fine, it's all fine. It's just no longer about filling the empty place in our soul. There is no empty place because our soul is (and has always been) everything that Is. And we then ache, out of empathy, to relieve the emptyness (however fictionally created) still plaguing this universe that we inescapably are. Can't escape that emptiness...we can run but we can't hide! And that's the wellspring of further action (even calculated action!): service and compassion.

[emc]

Synchronicity... I sat down to start a new thread on how we experience relationships in stillness and here it is already... Thank you, tadeas!

quote:So if there are no barriers to begin with, you just let love flow through you, there is no possibility of a new relationship in the old sense, because you are already in a loving (but not sentimental/romantic) relationship with everything/everyone.

Yep, still... there's something about that monogamy and having One to relate to... I have just met someone, and it is truly a different thing to have a constant relating going on instead of a relationship in the oldfashioned way. It is as you say, impossible to go back to the old sense of creating a relationship. Nothing is as it was before. There are no demands, expectations and therefore no disappointments. There's no missing or longing when we don't see eachother, there's no hoping to do anything special in the future. There's no fear. There IS NO FEAR of any kind. Everything that happens is ok, perfect and what should happen. Even that which seems as possible problems or obstacles are no problems when we look closer and remember to love what is.

quote:Living in this state is just being present. When it happens that I fall back to my dream and want to manipulate things or people, an alarm goes off in my head...

Yes, my alarm bell is the old emotionality - feelings - bringing a contraction and closing the flow down. Feelings of any type - negative or overwhelmingly positive, as when "madly in love" in the traditional sense. There's instead a calmness, total joy and openness and an unshakeable acceptance and love of what is.

quote:Actually the notion of sex seems to have disappeared. It's here all the time... there's nothing more in the sexual act itself - at least if both of you are "unblocked".

Not sure what you mean here by 'unblocked', but my association is: Mutuality is overrated. It only takes ONE to have a great relationship, and that's me. The mirroring comes from me. And the beauty of that mirroring is unnameable, there are no words to express the softness, gentleness and beauty, which with such abundance is flowing through the mirror...

The dance... the soft kiss from the perfect lover that is happening inside of me, reflected in manifestation of the male principle appearing as a man in flesh... who kisses me on the forehead and I blow off in space...closing the circuit... duality melts into oneness... and the world disappears... time is gone and it's only The Kiss. No me, no he, no us. Just the kiss melting into... nothing...

There's a God and a Goddess meeting in sense-perception, and the natural softness, noble caressing tenderness that is overflowing creates flowers all over the place that is budding and sprouting, bringing a constant spring whereever we move... I litterally see with the third eye, that we walk on a bed of flowers that just begin to sprout wherever we dancingly move... It is a fairy tale...

quote:It's because you are not creating worlds in your mind that you can see what's going on.

Oh, yes. Dancing in stillness to the glittering tones of divine music playing, is sprung out of no desire... No desire to change what is. No desire as a projected dream on the future. And even if that would  happen... THAT thought process in itself is seen for what it is, and release is there again.

Abundance... when we drop our desires and hopes, life gives us more than we could possibly imagine. It's truly a 'love-without-an-object', Jim. The man in front of me with fire in his eyes is not the object of my love. The love goes on everywhere, inside. The man and his mind will most certainly not behave according to my dreams, and that is totally irrelevant. That's not what's going on here - no minds comforting and reassuring eachother in a casual emotional love play... It's itself having a love affair with itself, celebrated by a union in flesh...

Jim:

quote:It's just no longer about filling the empty place in our soul. There is no empty place because our soul is (and has always been) everything that Is.

Yes, It's just happening. It is a constant creation of more wonderful love movement, not out of any need to fill anything up, but for the sheer joy of creating it, manifesting it. Immense joy. And the beauty is almost hard to bear. Heart cracks open and it's a flood flowing out...

When a man is pure and has an open heart, he cleanses the woman from what's left of her wounds... I cry, and I cry, and I cry. And he just holds my hand... and kisses my forehead... And there's nothing else going on. And no wish for anything else to happen...

[tadeas]

Thanks for the replies nice posts.
Actually I was thinking about you for a moment while writing this, Emc
And now: shall Love flow in full force hey, it's already flowing...

[mikkiji]

There is, in my personal experience, an experience of Love which IS the direct personal experience of god.  It must be pure, and it must be timeless, and it must be without limit--infinite.  This is not an easy state to achieve, and certainly is not reached overnight.  I was led there by my devotion to my wife over the course of 40 years, and from the unity achieved of our long relationship.  When she passed beyond to her next life without me, I had all my love for her still, but no "her" to give it to.  In that state, my love became purely abstract, and somehow became infused with a power or force which was easily identified with Divinity, with god.  And then it hit me--with a loud, "DUH!", that the old adage, and the Beatles' song, were exactly right--Love IS all there is, and Love is the path to god, just as god is the path to love.  They are an absolute equivalency, in fact.  I'm certain it didn't hurt matters that for the first 5 years of our relationship, from age 15 to 20, we were spiritual soulmates searching together for truth, but not yet lovers--so our relationship, from the beginning was based on our quest for god more than anything else.
I believe that this poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning says it perfectly...


How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

[YogaIsLife]

Yes, Love...we all want Love...we all need Love... "All we need is Love" like those great mystics sang hahaha

Beautiful heart-felt posts guys, thank you.

Love "relationships"...now there is something else. We want them, we need or think we need them, and then when we have them we wonder...will we ever get along? Will I ever be able to REALLY Love another person? etc. etc. etc. I think everybody wants this but it is not easy to accomplish, like Michael wrote. I believe it is possible but it takes work, it won't just fall out of the sky. In a way is forgetting about ourselves and our needs but, like Yogani said once, also not becoming a doormat in the process...ah, the complications!

On the other hand it might just fall out of the sky if we are concerned, primarly, with our very own oppeness and happiness. I guess then we won't fail. If we open up inside to the Love inside of us, beyond the mind and any expectations, and live from there, we will see love everywhere, we will give love much more freely, but...I am still not sure how this affects a "love relationship" we might have with someone...will Love heal all? Will that person also understand this pure love? Well, only by doing it we will know...

It is all, for me at the moment, a matter of what is natural - the distribution of love, monogamy, poligamy, expectations, attachments, etc. Is it all a matter of choice? Do we really have the answers inside already? Ah...the complications... It seems far simpler (although maybe less "rich") when one is alone - no relationship at all, but then again that is boring Well, as long as we keep going inside I am sure it will all turn out ok in the end

What the hell am I saying here after all? hehehe