Why can’t we love ourselves just the way we are? Why do we put a price on love?
Here are two excerpts from my Encounter with Unconditional Love. They provide contrast to the current belief that we must put a price on love to control our behavior. What do you think? Join the discussion!
Pete
Excerpt 1:
This time, if I make contact with the wall of energy, I’ll stay with it until I know what it is. Wham! It’s still there as I reach out with my mind once more and react with the same emotional intensity as before. This time, though, I stand my ground. I refuse to budge one inch and, suddenly, I’m inside the energy field!
When nothing strange happens, I ask, what are you?
“This is the Energy of Unconditional Love,” says a deep, soothing male voice that seems to come from every point within the energy field – yet, ALL speak as one.
Wow! Sobbing in relief, I finally know why I keep bursting into tears every time I touch this energy with my mind! Intuitively, I must have known all along what it was, but intellectually, I didn’t have a clue.
What I do now astounds me, even though it seems natural under the circumstances. I open up. I utterly and completely open my life and being to this loving Energy. Realizing, after a moment, that this special Being has full access to every thought and feeling I’ve ever had and every act I’ve ever committed, the bad ones as well as the good, I want to shut down as quickly as I opened up. Having grown up in a value judgment world of right and wrong, good and bad, guilt and punishment, I feel exposed to disapproval, ridicule and condemnation. I’ve seen the damage this can do to others and I’ve experienced it myself.
Like most of us, I’ve done things in life that made me feel guilty but learned not to share them unnecessarily for fear of disapproval. Instead, I chose to learn from my mistakes and correct them on my own. Now, fearing disapproval once again, I want to shield my most private self from view, as I always have.
Sensing my anxiety, the Voice of Unconditional Love says, “Nothing you can ever think, say or do can keep you from being loved unconditionally.”
Shocked and relieved by this level of unconditional acceptance, I cry even harder. I don’t remember ever experiencing this kind of love before! As I experience it now, I know there’s nothing I have to do to earn it. Just being is enough! Here, unlike the material world, there are no demands, no expectations, and no pre-conditions to satisfy before we receive love. It is freely available for anyone to experience and enjoy, which forces me to ask, what does this Loving Energy know about us that we don’t? Why and how can it love us unconditionally?
Literally bathing in Love, I wonder if the anger, imagined sins and misperceptions of my past will wash away forever. I use this moment to imagine they will, if not forever, at least for now. Even if it’s just the beginning of the end to my emotional suffering, that’s good enough for me!
Soon, my own love begins to flow and I want to perform miracles for this Loving Energy. I want to honor it for the loving regard in which it holds me. A superman in this alternate reality, I’m able to perform feats of magic and strength that are impossible to perform in the physical world.
Suddenly, I realize much of my joy comes from “knowing” that the State of Unconditional Love is our home, our real home! It is both our place of birth, or point of origin as living energy, and our ultimate destination. A beacon, it forever draws us forward in an eternal cycle of Being and Creation. As unique, individualized expressions of All That Is, we are both one AND separate. We are not only the product of creation; we are creation itself!
I now understand why it’s important for us to fulfill our own unique potential as human beings here on earth. Using our abilities freely and playfully is how we find our way back to love, how we learn and evolve. The Energy of Unconditional Love is more than just a “place” – it is a state of mind and being we can create and experience wherever we are, no matter what we’re doing.
Excerpt 2:
As I continue my journey toward Clearlake Highlands in the afterglow of my Encounter with Unconditional Love, I ask, Why me? What did I do to deserve this amazing experience?
Rolling this question around in my mind, I travel back in time to a point two years earlier. At home alone, I’m sitting at my office desk feeling frustrated and depressed because every attempt I’ve made thus far to become independently wealthy has failed, and I’m unable to think about what to do next. My belief is that changing myself, and the world, for the better will require lots of time and money.
As a child, I was unhappy with life. In my world, most people didn’t treat each other very well and I hated that (were they unhappy too?). It seemed I had three choices; withdraw from life, end my life (if I could summon the courage) or do something about it. I chose to do something about it! Specifically, although I couldn’t express my desire in words at the time, I wanted to see more love, truth and joy in the world. I knew it was asking a lot of us but, hey, what’s life without a challenge? Changing the world for the better seems preferable to hiding from it in denial, or giving in to established beliefs with which we disagree.
I had decided to climb Mt. Everest but here I was, in my early forties, still stuck in the foothills with too little time and too little money to do more than maintain essentials. My salad dressing business after college had failed, my several attempts at multilevel marketing failed, and even though I liked my low-paying job, here I was, still working full time driving buses for a living. When the memory of my failures became too unbearable to stand, I threw my arms up in the air and asked whoever was listening, including me, what I wanted more than anything else in All That Is.
In response, a strong, male voice, about six inches in front of my forehead, said, “LOVE!”
Overcoming my surprise, I shouted, that’s it! More than anything else in All That Is, I want love – I want to give and receive love, unconditionally! In a flash of insight, I realized that everything I’ve ever done in life was for love, whether it was love from me or others. I was either looking for love or acting out because of a lack of it. When I felt or acted badly, it was because I felt unappreciated and unloved for who I was or what I was doing. How can I love others, if I can’t love myself, I thought.
As a young person, I was angry and frustrated because I found it hard to love the people around me, including myself. Almost everyone I knew, with rare and wonderful exceptions, seemed petty, mean, critical, insincere or vindictive. My parents and most of their adult friends seemed unhappy, unless they were drinking alcohol.
At the time, it didn’t occur to me that we might all be suffering from the same problem, a cultural mandate to make value judgments, to constantly compare ourselves to one another and to outside standards of being and performance. It is the kind of belief system that fuels fear, anger, guilt, contempt, competition, conflict and violence because it assumes we’re bad and we can’t trust ourselves. In this psychological climate, many of us become Master Fault-Finders and a source of pain and anguish to others as well as ourselves. A popular belief system, it still dominates all others in the world today.
We can do better than create a fear-based value-judgment world of right and wrong, good and bad, guilt and punishment. In this world, unconditional love can only be an ideal, not a reality. Out of personal and culturally supported fear and distrust of ourselves, and others, we must place conditions on almost everything we do. As parents, teachers and civil authorities we end up telling each other, whether spoken or not, to “act ‘good’ (by my definition and authority) and I will reward you. Act ‘bad’ and I will punish or destroy you.”
By treating ourselves as little more than mindless masses of protoplasm that need to be poked and prodded into predefined forms of order and behavior, it’s no wonder many of us find it hard to like ourselves, let alone others. Our “official” belief system fails to acknowledge the true nature of who we are and what we’re capable of becoming.
As Pogo, an old comic strip character created by Walt Kelly, once said: “We have met the enemy (and savior)… and he is us.”
What amazes me most about my Encounter with Unconditional Love is that, even though it took two years for the universe to arrange, it gave me what I wanted!
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Roger “Pete” Peterson – http://realtalkworld.com
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We create our own reality from what we choose to believe about ourselves, and the world around us.
If we do not CONSCIOUSLY choose our own beliefs, we UNCONSCIOUSLY absorb them from our surroundings.
If we are accountable (responsible) for our actions, how can we afford NOT to question our beliefs?
How you define yourself, and the world around you, forms your intent, which, in turn, forms your reality. – Seth
The more we love and understand ourselves, the better we treat ourselves, and the world.
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