From Ice Cream to Life Partners

. . . notes on unconditional love

From time to time I hear the suggestion that we should love one another "unconditionally." This is not possible, of course. In these bodies in this world, all experiences of love are conditioned.

From ice cream to life partners, we perceive and evaluate differences based on what we can get. We call it "love" but is it really?

A Course in Miracles calls this way of thinking level confusion - i.e., we think that what is possible at the level of the spirit, or mind (e.g., unconditional love), is also possible at the level of the body. But in fact, the levels do not interact with or affect one another at all (T-2.IV.2:2). Errors can only be fixed at the level at which they occur.

At the level of the body in the world, all we can do is love with conditions and qualifications. This is not a crisis! It's what bodies in the world do. But it's not the Love of God, in which all conflict and suffering for all Creation are undone.

The challenge is to see the levels as they are and not confuse them (T-1.I.23:1-2). This is both harder and easier to do than it sounds.

It is harder because we are all struggling at the level of the body and the world. We are scared of the political future, we are broke, we have cancer, our dog died. And we all know folks for whom it is orders of magnitude worse.

So we are all trying to fix things here - we are doing yoga, going to therapy, studying nonduality, and taking multivitamins. We are voting and volunteering.

But if the problem is our inability to love without conditions, and that inability is literally built into our bodies and the world, then all of that activity - however well-intentioned - does nothing to fix the problem. At best - at best - it's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

So what should we do?

A Course in Miracles consistently invites us to enter into relationship with the Holy Spirit, Who is "the mechanism of miracles" (T-1.I.38:1). Miracles place our minds "in the service of the Holy Spirit" (T-1.IV.2:6). Miracles demonstrate that we share God's Will with all Creation.

Love does not limit, and what it creates is not limited. To give without limit is God’s Will for you, because only this can bring you the joy that is His and that He wills to share with you. ⁸Your love is as boundless as His because it is His (T-11.I.6:6-8).

This is a learning process that occurs in the world in the body. This is why it is okay - it is more than okay - to lean into the life that is given to us. Everything that appears - from ice cream to life partners - can be used to remind us we are not separate from God.

The curriculum you set up is . . . determined exclusively by what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others is to you. . . . it is impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really teach, and therefore really learn (M-in.3:1-3).

Teachers of God are not perfect. They are not enlightened. They are not experts. Yet “it is their mission to become perfect here, and so they teach perfection over and over, in many, many ways, until they have learned it" (M-in.5:6).

William Blake knew.

. . . we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love . . .

We experience conflict in this life, right? We make mistakes. We hurt people, confuse people, alienate people. We struggle with self-love, self-hate and with letting go of psychological extremes.

The course invites us to reframe those conflicts. They are not problems to be solved by us but lessons to be taught to us by the Holy Spirit - lessons in letting go, in seeing the illusion of control, in loving ourselves and others, and in co-creating a just and happy world that excludes no body and no thing.

When we do this, in time in the world in the bodies, we learn that time is an illusion, there is no world, and we are not bodies. Peace becomes possible and then inevitable. Happiness follows.

We are not asked to reject the world or deny the body. We don't have to seek God or earn God's Love. We simply give attention to our lives - specifically, the relationships comprising them - through the lens of the Holy Spirit.

Thank you for reading.

Sean