Unconditional Love

"A young man with AIDS was dying in a hospital, and he was literally shaking from the fear of death. What had been communicated to him as a child was an emotionally charged idea of God as an implacable judge ready to bring down the verdict of guilty, or a harsh policeman ever on the watch— someone you would want to avoid encountering. The young man was afraid of dying and going to meet this hazardous God whom he had heard about in early childhood. One of the nurses came into his room, and he asked her, “Can you do something to help me?”

She said, “I can give you a treatment called therapeutic touch.” He replied, “Please do.” The nurse began the gentle treatment. At one point his eyes rolled back, and the nurse thought he was going to die, but she kept on with the treatment. When she finished, he opened his eyes and said, “You’ll never know what you just did for me. I have experienced unconditional love.” About an hour later, he died. If we have not experienced ourselves as unconditional love, we have more work to do, because that is who we really are...

"The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don't ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment. For example, instead of drinking your friends under the table as a significant sign of self-worth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, as I did, fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory. In that case, what would have changed? Nothing.

"We can be converted to the values of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and do the best we can to moderate the excesses of our desperate search for security, affection and esteem, power and control, while our basic attitudes remain the same. This is how conversion is distinguished from external changes of lifestyle. Conversion addresses the heart of the problem. Jesus has some harsh sayings that are incomprehensible unless we see them in light of the harm that our emotional programs are doing. For example, Jesus said, 'If your foot scandalizes you, cut it off.' He wasn't recommending self-mutilation but was saying that if your emotional programs are so close to you that you love them as much as your own hand or foot or eye, get rid of them. They are programs for human misery that will never work. They will interfere with all your relationships — with God, yourself, other people, the earth, and the cosmos."

“The fact that we experience anxiety and annoyance is the certain sign that, in the unconscious, there is an emotional program for happiness that has just been frustrated.”

"When you have been liberated from them all, you are in a space that is both empty of self and full of God."

~ Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation