According to Wikipedia, unconditional love is “a term that means to love someone regardless of one’s actions or beliefs [ ... ] Unconditional love is frequently used to describe love between family members, comrades in arms and between others in highly committed relationships.”

While on this blog, what I’d like to do is go on thinking about elusive un-conditional love and heart-chakra energy.

My personal realization is that we, as a species, have been struggling with a massive Achilles’ heel  but, perhaps oddly, seeing as we are all endowed with a soul and created in the ‘image of god’,  our weakness is located in our heart – and I’m not talking here about heart murmurs and atrial fibrillation.

The start up questions I need to ask myself are these:

Are we truly able to *give* love and affection, unconditionally, if only to a chosen few?

Do we ever really *get* unconditional love and affection from the ones closest to us?

Are we truly capable of *making* love – of creating love?

There is a consensus of opinion that suggests that, generally speaking, as a species, we don’t really *know* what love is and even less what unconditional love looks like and feels like.  Even J. Krishnamurti, in Freedom From The Known, published in 1983, seemed to find it easier to explain what love is NOT.

“When you ask what love is,” he wrote, “you may be too frightened to see the answer [ ... ] But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, responsibility is not love, possessiveness  and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate anymore than humility is the opposite of vanity. So if you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them, but by washing them away as rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then maybe you will come upon this strange flower which man always hungers for.”

This is all absolutely brilliant thinking but, as an aside, the feminist part of me can’t help interjecting that I really wish people such as K. and other great, modern thinkers, even Allan Watts, had thought, back in the 80’s, to write “humankind” instead of, just, “man”.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Interestingly, from a few thousand years ago, the Book of Isaiah gives another glimpse into what is really needed from us. Instead of assuming that gifts, offerings and prayers will amend our deeds, it is our heart-energy that we have to action – both actively and willingly.

“What care I for the number of your sacrifices? says the LORD. I have had enough of whole-burnt rams and fat of fatlings; In the blood of calves, lambs and goats I find no pleasure. When you come in to visit me, who asks these things of you? Trample my courts no more! Bring no more worthless offerings; your incense is loathsome to me. New moon and shabbath, calling of assemblies, octaves with wickedness: these I cannot bear. Your new moons and festivals I detest; they weigh me down, I tire of the load. When you spread out your hands, I close my eyes to you; Though you pray the more, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood! Wash yourselves clean! Put away your misdeeds from before my eyes; cease doing evil; learn to do good. Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow. Come now, let us set things right, says the LORD: Though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow; Though they be crimson red, they may become white as wool. If you are willing, and obey, you shall eat the good things of the land.”

A series of What If clues have been playing on my mind in regards to how dry the river-bed of genuine, non-profit, non-bartered love might really be.

• If we did get decent lashings of unconditional, real love, from the ones in our inner circle why, then, are so many of us disconsolate from the loss of our dog,  should it be taken from us by the ex as s/he moves out, or should it be lost to a disease or to old age?

If we did get lashings of unconditional, real love, from those who have been earmarked to give it to us in this lifetime, I assume we would know contentment – inner peace. But, if we drink to cheer ourselves up when we are sad, tired or disconnected from the moment, why then do we also drink, even if only sociably, when we are happy and have something aMAzing to celebrate?

Do we ever truly feel cocooned and safe, not merely in a moment of physical togetherness but in our day-to-day?

Might it be because we never feel truly contented, truly at peace with ourselves and truly at peace within our circumstances that we rely on the lovely bubbles in a glass of champagne, the sweetness of a Cruiser or the amber hue of a Jack Daniels to successfully dispel, if only for a moment, the edge of angst that gnaws at our insides?

If we felt truly loved in a non-bartering way by our long term partner, why do we want, expect or demand tangible proofs of love? From whence comes the cyclic impulse to ask, “Do you love me?”

Why is it necessary to buy, receive or give a bouquet of roses, a heart-shaped box of chocolate, a diamond pendant or a funky sports car or a yacht as a measure of our lover or partner’s love – if we already felt genuinely loved – just as we are?

If most of us were giving/receiving heartfelt doses of heart-chakra energy, why has our culture been thriving on love songs, romantic comedies and smaltzy paperbacks from one turn of the century to the next? When we do read bedtime stories to our children why, in this day and age, are they often of princes and princesses who will, by the last page, live to love each other forever and ever? Could it be because these texts resonate from our yearning for true love and the calm, contentment that keeps eluding us – as a species?

Why do so many children plead for a bedtime story and another and another? Is it about the stories themselves or is it about a subconscious yearning for a heartfelt connection that this shared moment of bonding is intended to generate? When we do read our bedtime stories, yes, we might do the ogre’s voice and the rabbit’s voice very convincingly but, hand-on-heart, how active is our heart chakra during the reading? How heart-tuned are we to the child?

If, we, as parents did give true, energetic, love to our little ones why, then, would a piece of blanket or a mangy teddy bear generate such a strong connection with so many children in the early years of their lives?  Even if most of us do humor the child’s need for the Blanky or Teddy, sometimes on the advice of psychologists, isn’t the very need for the thing a sign that the child is yearning for more of something s/he is not getting?

Why, on the whole, are we awed by the stranger who has risked her/his life to save another’s? Why are we so jollied by on-screen good endings such as the one generated by the character Jackson Curtis in the Sci-fi film 2012? It is only by digging very deep into selflessness and risking his life many times that the unassuming *little guy* almost single-handedly thwarted the powerful elite’s cold-hearted and callous bid for survival to force them to *share* their humongous lifeboats with the thousands of everyday people like ourselves who would have perished in the wake of the disappearing mighty ships. Fiction it is, but why do we find such fiction heart-warming? Could it be because subconsciously we *know* that this is heart-chakra stuff as clearly as we know that such demonstrations are not a part of our every-day lives?

A few lines of the still immensely popular iconic song, I Want To Know What Love Is, written by Mick Jones in 1984, provide us with yet another glimpse of our species’ yearning for that elusive heart-connection:

I gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when Im colder

I wanna know what love is…..
I want you to show me……
I wanna feel what love is…..

We do want to know – we do want to feel what love is. We do, don’t we?