Desperately Seeking Unconditional Love
by Michael Brown • South Africa

On some level we are all angry because we were not loved unconditionally as children, but were all conditionally loved.

This isn’t an accusation; it is the predicament of being born into a world of constantly changing conditions. Since childhood, we have unconsciously spent our whole life attempting to live up to the conditions we thought would earn us unconditional love. This has manifested as the endless physical, mental, and emotional “doings” or dramas we have performed in an attempt to gain attention and acceptance.

Unfortunately, unconditional love isn’t an experience we can force others to channel in our direction through drama. All attention we attract through drama is by its nature conditional. The truth is that we have failed at every turn to get the attention we have sought. We have failed because unconditional love is not money; it is not something we have to or can earn. Love isn’t something we have to achieve through merit. We don’t have to qualify to be loved. Love is our birthright. Love just is. Love is who and what we are.

During our childhood, the example of love set for us through our parents’ interaction with us and with each other became our primary definition of love. This is the automatic outcome of emotional imprinting. Consequently, as adults, whenever we seek to manifest an experience of love for ourselves, we unconsciously manufacture a physical, mental, or emotional scenario that will recreate the emotional resonance we experienced during our initial childhood interactions with our parents. This resonance doesn’t have to be comfortable or in any way pleasant. It only has to be similar.

For example, if we received abuse when we asked for love, then abuse would have become part of our childhood definition of love. Consequently, as adults, whenever we feel a need for love, we automatically manifest an experience that includes the emotional resonance of abuse. We do this unconsciously, automatically. Why? Because this is the only way we know how to get what we think love is. But the love we end up getting always hurts. It always hurts because of its conditions.

On a conscious level, we might then say, "Why does this keep happening to me?" The reason we keep manifesting the same hurtful experiences is because we don’t know any better. This is the predicament we are all in, the open wound in the heart of humanity. This is why many of us automatically assume love hurts. Yet "hurting" is a condition, love is not.

We need to see beyond the limitations of our own childhood interpretations. We are being taught how to grow up emotionally. The consequence of this emotional growth is that we are beginning to lift the illusory veils set in place by our childhood experiences. As these veils of fear, anger, and grief lift, we enter a different world experience. It isn’t a world experience that’s made up of the past or the projected future, but a world experience that’s accessed through present moment awareness.

Confirmation we are awakening to this world of present moment awareness is that we begin to have profound realizations and insights about the real nature of our shared human condition. One of these insights is: Without exception, everyone we encounter, no matter how his or her behavior may appear on the surface, is looking for the experience of unconditional love.

Initially, this isn’t apparent to us because the behavior we all use in an attempt to manifest the experience of unconditional love for ourselves seldom reflects the unconditional love we seek. This is because we are all attempting to “get” this love from others. So in our individual experience, it appears everyone is attempting to “get” something from us. The feeling that this world is constantly attempting to get something from us is the automatic reflection of our own behavior. We assume this behavior from childhood by parroting our parents. They assumed it by parroting their parents.

When we gain enough present moment awareness to truly see that we have unconsciously manifested a life experience based purely on a childhood definition of what we think love is, then we can accept the comic tragedy of our predicament. We have blindly followed the example set for us by our parents. How could things have turned out differently based on the initial input? In fact, it’s true to say that we are our parents until we unlearn and overcome the belief systems they imprinted upon us. It’s a case of the blind leading the blind.

Understanding and accepting this predicament empowers us to forgive ourselves for all our misguided behaviors. We were looking for love in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. This insight enables us to understand why we have manifested the life experience we have gone through up to now.

We can enter a state of authenticity by accepting that we don’t know what unconditional love is. In a world of constantly changing conditions, the experience of unconditional love is the rarest of all gems. Awakening to unconditional love is like attempting to find a breath of fresh air in the depths of the ocean.

And therein lies the clue to awakening to unconditional love in this world: If we want to experience a breath of fresh air in the depths of the ocean, we had better make sure we place it down there ourselves.

Adapted from The Presence Process, Namaste Publishing.

Michael Brown has frequently visited North America on speaking tours. In addition to The Presence Process, he is also the author of the Namaste Publishing book, Alchemy of the Heart.