WE, THE CONDITIONED

How Much Do We Love Our Children?

Do We Even Know What It Means To “Love Our Children”?

Subject/Object Duality

Everything we perceive of ourselves and the world comes through our mind in the form of a thought.

Better put, every object, thought, and perception of the world happens before we become consciously aware of it in the form of a thought.

Let’s call this place Awareness or Pure Consciousness.

It is this Awareness that gets the first taste of any experience.

But following closely on its heel is the mind arising in the form of a thought that interprets, labels, and splits the experience as an individually existing “object” and the one experiencing it as the “subject”, thus creating duality.

A world seen in this bifurcated manner as the knower and the known is the great illusion that spiritual philosophers talk about.

They say that the pure, undivided, and unchanging Awareness that underlies all experiences is the true reality, while the perceived world filtered through the conditioned mind — thus creating a limited, subjective reality is an illusion.

In fact, the world is very much real, but believing that the separate self we perceive is inherently real, rather than recognizing it as a temporary construct of the mind, is the grand illusion.

If The World Is An Illusion, Then So Are My Children

Ironically, realizing this truth was a disturbing moment in my spiritual journey.

If the world I see through my mind is an illusion, then so are my children who are also a part of the illusory world.

When I say “illusion” I don’t mean that they don’t exist but the way I perceive and relate to them is influenced by the illusory and conditioned aspects of my mind.

I hold my children in my heart of hearts with a love that aches so much that it almost feels like sadness. I claim that I love them with all I have and assert the virtues of an archetype mom filled with unconditional love.

But do I honestly know what any of that really means?

A Love Conditioned By The Illusory Mind

Do I realize that when I say, “I” — love — “you”, I have already created distance between me and my child, that I’ve established a fundamental separation between us rigid with conventional boundaries?

Do I realize that this separateness creates a sense of incompleteness or lack that seeks fulfillment through a larger web of my conditioned expectations of these innocent beings?

Do I understand that when I say “I love my children” the love that I’m grandstanding is really an expression of societal motivation, possessiveness, fear of detachment, fear of loss, and egoic validation?

I Need To Realize My Own True Nature To Know The Love My Children Deserve

I’m seeing my children from the place of conventional love influenced by the illusionary aspects of my mind.

It breaks my heart to think that my own veiled, limited mind can only know my precious sons as separate from me, refracting them through its filters and faulty perception while they should really be known through God’s purest, untainted love.

For all the love I feel for my children, I should hold them not just in my heart but in a place closer than that, a place that’s the inseparable essence of pure knowing called Awareness.

“It is thought that says knowing takes place here and the existence of objects takes place out there. But for awareness, knowing and being are the same thing. Awareness never experiences things as “things”. It knows things much more intimately than that. It knows everything as itself. This inseparable intimacy is known as love.”

— Rupert Spira

We, the conditioned, is an ongoing exploration of the self from the bedrock up. It involves taking a telescopic view of the world — politics, people, et al., along with a microscopic view of the self — mind, thoughts, and perception. It’s about hacking away the fluff around spirituality, seeing reality for what it really is through the lens of philosophy, and learning what we really are beneath all that we think we are.