Unconditional Love
Love is always unconditional. If it has conditions, it is not love. Conditions turn love into attachment, rather selfish attachment. Attachment makes us like someone, based on his/her qualities. Attachment has a lot of expectations. Problem with lot of relationships is the huge gap between expectations and the reality.
If we observe our mind, we’ll find that we judge people before loving them. We judge people based on their actions, words, qualities, how they treat us and we reject anyone who doesn’t fulfill these requirements. This cannot be love, this is attachment. Most shocking thing is that often we don’t even love ourselves unconditionally. How many times have you heard people saying, “I love and accept myself as I am”? We have inferiority complexes because we don’t love ourselves. We say negative things about ourselves because we don’t love and accept us as we are.
Attachment is a very biased system. It makes us like certain people only if they relate to us or if they take care of us. People who don’t care about us or make us feel secure, safe and happy; we also don’t care about them. Attachment makes us selfish, because we constantly think in terms of “I” eg. Does he/she treat “me” nicely, does he/she take care of “me”, can “I” relate to him, does he/she match “my” social status.
Anything that involves ego, i.e. “I”ness is not love.
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE on the other hand is loving people as they are; it is not trying to change them according to our image of a perfect person. Unconditional love is very direct, straight forward, simple and relaxed emotion. It is just loving everyone no matter where they are from and how do they look. Attachment is very complicated and superficial because it looks at the appearances of people and has a lot of prerequisites. Love is not superficial at all, it looks much deeper, it sees the very basic nature of human being i.e. Love and Bliss.
In today’s world, where people from different parts of the world come in contact with each other; it is almost stupid to have so many conditions for loving someone.
But is it really possible to love someone unconditionally?
The answer to this is in nature. Sun gives light to everybody; trees give shade to all, water wets everything that comes in its contact. This happens because they follow their real nature. The real nature of human being is love, peace and bliss. When we realize our real nature, we will become “love personified” and then we won’t have any conditions for our love; and that’s how unconditional love is possible.