The year 2017 has arrived. It looks like the winds of change are upon us. New times and new challenges await us in this coming year. To set the tone for the New Year I wanted to consider the deepest priority and motivator that I believe drives us in what we do. I have been contemplating this subject most of 2016, trying to find the hidden underlying driver of so many outwardly diverse behaviors. I think I have pinned it down as last.
If I am correct in my assessment, then I have pinpointed the common element behind what drives some people to become hugely successful businessmen, media stars, welfare dependents or homeless. What could possibly be common to such seemingly different lifestyle outcomes?
This may seem crazy, but I believe the quest for unconditional love is at the base of much of human behavior. We are born with this overpowering need to belong and receive the unconditional love and support we had before we were born. We enter the world utterly dependent and in profound need of love and support just to survive. We want the same security and safety we felt prior to birth. We want the unconditional love we had before we entered this world of sharp contrasts and challenges.
But this world does not come in an unconditional manner. Everything here is very conditional. How we deal with this realization is what creates the many different prime drivers we see in people. We all want unconditional love because it means we feel completely safe and cared for, without having to do anything but exist. When we are small we try to believe our parents are omnipotent and able to give us unconditional love. It is not true, but we want to believe it, so we manipulate our perception of reality to maintain this fiction. Even if they don’t act like they love us, we want to believe that they could and should love us in the way that would make us feel utterly safe and cared for.
The variety of ways we manipulate our perception and how we participate with life to support this manipulation is what produces the wide variety of relationships to life we see between people. Our experience keeps telling us that our parents are not omnipotent and not able to function from an unconditional stance. We try to figure out what we can do to elicit what we want from our parents. Some of us will find that being ill or playing victim elicits more attention from our parents and this attention feels like it is on the right tract towards the unconditional love we want. Others will experience that we get more positive attention by being a star – shining out in some way our parents approve of, like being a top student or excellent at sports or maybe being entertaining or just simply being pretty and acting cute. Anything that gets us more attention becomes our motivator for participation with life. Positive attention is preferred, but negative attention is better than no attention.
We want the feeling of how our life would be if we had the unconditional love we deserve. We make up stories in our heads that are all about how perfect we would feel “if only _____.” For example we create entitlement stories about how we should get loving support just because we exist. This story produces people that create their life around trying to get things for nothing, since being cared for without having to do anything feels kind of like the unconditional love they are seeking. Others go for the “I should be able to do whatever I want” story to prove to themselves that the unconditionality they are seeking is real. Still others want to be the center of attention and be “special” because they believe the story they created will give them the experience of unconditional love they need. Especially popular is the belief that “everyone should be and act the way I think they should” so that we can feel the unlimited safety and comfort we want. The principle seems to be “If I act like I have unconditional love then it will happen.”
We create all these different stories to convince ourselves that we will receive the unconditional love we so deeply crave. The problem is all these stories are a lie because they are based on conditions in our outer world. Unconditional love is not available on Earth.
Unconditional love is a spiritual reality, not a physical reality. We are all mortal, fragile creatures here, and we all have needs, fears, and desires. This makes all of us very conditional creatures. None of us are omnipotent and infinite and therefore able to be sources of unconditional love, support and caring.
How can we align with truth and empower ourselves to stop chasing unreachable dreams? How can we let go of our manufactured stories that simply hide our emptiness inside and build an actual relationship with our spiritual nature where the unconditional love feelings can be met? I believe the first step is to accept what is available to and for us – belonging. Our parents, and by extension everyone else on the planet, are just like us. We all want unconditional love so we can feel safe and cared for. We all have fears, needs, and desires. We can connect and share that common humanness. We can belong through this sharing. We can let go of trying to get our inner desires for fulfillment met by other humans because it is impossible to fill our insides from something outside ourselves. Instead we can warm ourselves with the connection of mutual support and mutual caring based on our fundamental oneness as humans. We need to accept the fact that we are all incapable of filling that desire for unconditional love for each other, but we can share our common desire, so we do not feel alone in the world. We can belong to each other.
We live in a world of huge diversity. I see that diversity as primarily the expression of the infinite creativity between us for creating ways to try to get something we all want so deeply. We come up with so many beliefs and stories about why and how we will be able to get what we want. Because we know that what we want on the feeling level is so right, we falsely believe that the stories and beliefs on how to get it are also right. They aren’t. The conflicts between everyone’s beliefs are all unnecessary. Simply accept that we all want the same things at our core. Just our ways of going about trying to get what we want are different. That difference is ok. Understanding this we can support each other the best we are able. We can belong.
Once we have belonging, then we can really engage the journey to achieving the spiritual connection that is able to fill our longing for the oneness with the source of unconditional love.