Spiritual and Nondual Awakening

You Can’t Fake “Unconditional Love”

Unconditional Love is all there is. But we, as a separate ego-self, can never know it unconditionally.

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Love

“Love” is one of the most powerful words one can write and speak.

Love is something we all want. But even when we have it, we never have enough of it. We have written innumerable stories, songs, dramas, and comedies about love. Yet it is impossible to define exactly what it is. It is a feeling and a knowing, for which words always fall short.

That said, I think the word “Unconditional” may be even more powerful and challenging. “Unconditional” means without boundaries or limitations of any kind. In that sense, it is “infinite”.

We cannot directly experience boundless and limitless infinity because the use of a word instantly creates a boundary. Even to call it an “experience” immediately cages the unconditional with the conditional definition of what an experience is.

Unconditional Love as Spiritual Awakening

Unconditional love is often used to describe how someone who has had a spiritual “nonduality awakening” views existence.

In nonduality, everything is known/seen/sensed to be one thing (sometimes called oneness or unity consciousness). It is not an intellectual knowing. It is beyond words. It is a sense of being one with everything. That everything is sometimes described as pure energy. And that pure energy is often called “unconditional love”.

Unconditional love is all there is. Nothing more and nothing less has ever existed. That is the perspective of a spiritually awakened (or liberated) radical nondualist (like Tony Parsons).

Faking Unconditional Love

I recently heard someone being interviewed about their nonduality awakening. When asked about unconditional love, they said they did not like that term because it is difficult to love some people, some things, and some events unconditionally.

Two thoughts came to mind when I heard that:

(1) It is impossible to love anything unconditionally from the perspective of a separate ego-self.

Not just sometimes, but anytime we speak of “I”, “me”, or “us”, we are in the realm of separation and unconditional love (in its true meaning) is impossible. There will always be conditions because everything in the experiential world of separation is inherently conditional.

Some say that the love a mother feels toward her newborn is unconditional. But even though it may appear to approach unconditional love sometimes, there is at least one huge condition: the newborn must be the child of the mother.

(2) My criticism of this person’s view of unconditional love shows I am not in a state of nondual awakening.

But then, I have never claimed I was in a state of spiritual or nondual awakening because I know that “I” (ego-self) cannot achieve that.

Many speakers say, and I agree, that spiritual/nondual awakening is the death/dissolution/end of the separate ego-self. When that happens, there is “I” remaining to be critical of others.

There is some value to appearing to be a separate ego-self. This article came about because of that role. It could only have come about because there was a sense (or energy) of a separate and critical “I”/ego-self.

But it is not a voice reflecting the transcendental absolute-self, which is one with everything and is completely beyond separation and judgments. It is unconditional love.

“Do not mistake Understanding for Realization, and do not mistake Realization for Liberation” — Sogyal Rinpoche, ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’

Faking Nonduality

I (ego-self) believe that everyone who writes or speaks about nonduality and spirituality awakening is faking it. And that includes me.

They may have had a oneness awakening glimpse. But in the interview, they fall back into their separate ego-self.

The inherent nature of words is to create boundaries, divisions, and separation. Simply thinking that one thing is better than another thing is a clear sign of being in the world of separation. It is the opposite of nondual oneness. It is placing conditions on what is liked/loved and what is not.

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” — Rudyard Kipling

When I write about nonduality or anything spiritual, I can never speak the absolute truth. I can only try to point toward it, as I am doing here. I (ego-self) often wonder if it would be better to not write anything because of that.

On the other hand, from the perspective of “I” (absolute-self), everything is one. Nothing can be outside of everything. Even nothing is part of nondual oneness.

So, faking awakening is also an aspect of nondual oneness (what some call “All-That-Is”). That is what radical nondualist mean when they say “there is only what is” and “there is just this”.

Just This

We like to write, talk, and debate about spirituality and nonduality (which I believe are the same thing in the end). It seems to create a sense (or energy) of curiosity, fun, and stimulation for many. And it helps relieve a sense (or energy) of separation and suffering experienced by some of us.

From my ego-self perspective, I like and love some of it, but I also dislike and am critical of other aspects of it. And that is just the way it is.

From my absolute-self perspective, everything is loved with absolutely no conditions. My absolute-self cannot fake unconditional love because it is unconditional love.

But my unawakened ego-self cannot say the same thing. Any attempt to feel unconditional love toward everything from a sense of separation will fail. Faking it will only make that failure worse because it strengthens separation, which many consider the source of human suffering.

It is a paradox. And that is just the way it is.

For more on religion, spirituality, and nonduality as the same thing, see:

A Story About Speaking Too Much

There is a Zen Buddhism story about a young monk who had the extreme good fortune of being invited to accompany the senior monk at the temple on his walk in the woods. They came upon a magnificent view of mountains, trees, and lakes below. The young monk was overwhelmed and said, “wow, this is so beautiful!”.

When they returned, the older monk told the group that this young monk will never again be invited to accompany him on his forest walk because of how he debased the unconditional experience of nature by confining it in words.

Related Resources

• A similar message is in this article:

• For more on Nonduality (Advaita), see this collection of articles:

• Note that the articles in that collection are behind the Medium paywall. For paywall-free access to my articles, go to www.AlanLew.com, linked below.

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