Notes on unconditional love
(reposting this from Twitter with formatting and textual improvements. content is mostly unchanged)
Two days ago I had the most profound experience of my life, a kind of emotional shift related to the experience of love. The summary is that I suddenly noticed that many of my motivations and habits were predicated on the belief that I needed to fix and improve myself in order to earn love. This made me very sad, so I cried about it for a long time. After that something fundamental seems to have shifted. I'd like to capture it while it's still fresh.
The belief that I needed to earn love through self-improvement wasn't simply intellectual; rather, it was embedded deeply in my relationship with reality. Noticing it felt less like solving a math problem and more like profound catharsis, as if some exhausted part of me was finally relieved of duty. I don't fully understand yet what changed, but the following is a tentative explanation based on psychological explorations over the last two years and a variety of background reading.
The mind has the ability infer causality from experiences. With causal inference it becomes possible to draw a trajectory from proximate conditions to distant and uncertain future outcomes. This interacts closely with desire; the mind prioritizes understanding the causes of desired outcomes, and over time, the inferred precursors and correlates of the desired outcome themselves become objects of desire. In fact, it seems to be possible to completely forget the original desire and pursue these proxy objects blindly.
People intrinsically want love, affection, and attention. You can see where this is going. If one learns early on that love is conditional on something else, then the causal inference engine kicks in and starts figuring out how to act in order to obtain love. So there are, roughly speaking, two mental orientations; love is either conditional or unconditional. The first turns love into problem to be solved, and the second doesn't worry about it too much. This is the difference between insecure and secure attachment.
My experience is that the first orientation (conditional) feels fundamentally unsatisfactory, and the second (unconditional) feels like everything is and always will be okay. This is probably because implicit in desire is the premise of separation. If love is ontologically something that I have to work towards, then it's not available to me in the present moment, and I'm never fully okay. What tripped me up in understanding this is that people often say "everyone is worthy of love" as a metaphysical or religious truth, but that seems to be a distraction if you're thinking about this stuff for practical reasons. That said, religion is one way of installing the belief in unconditional love in children. In that sense, religion is probably the most important social tool that exists, and it's very unfortunate that we're losing it.
So you want to move from the first to the second orientation. This is where it gets murky. Hypothetically, evidence that love is freely available should be enough for the mind to shift the priors. I see three possible things that prevent this from happening automatically. First, love may be only conditionally available or entirely unavailable in the environment, reinforcing the original belief. Second, returning to the idea that the original desire can be forgotten when pursuing proxy desires—I think the pain of not feeling loved can be so great that the wound contrives to conceal itself, and the mind reifies proxy desires (e.g. money, status, sex, achievement) as the root desire. This is of course related to one's identity; as a mid-twenties guy, it's way easier to believe that I'm really ambitious than it is to notice that I'm trying to fill a bottomless pit because I believe I'm unlovable. Third, the belief that love is conditional leads to all kinds of behaviors that probe and test connections to obtain reassurance about their stability. Maybe the truth is that the only love that can be unconditionally reciprocated is love that is freely given away. (This is a little fucked up if you think about it.)
Before reaching this shift, I meditated for a few hundred hours; this made it possible for me to cry easily. Then I did a lot of Internal Family Systems work with ChatGPT, and the other day I tried Core Transformation (also with ChatGPT), which caused the shift in one session. Maybe it would have happened immediately if I tried CT two years ago, but I doubt it. As I said above, since the true wound is usually concealed, it's quite difficult to sit down and try to heal it intentionally; the entire time I was meditating and investigating my psychology, I thought my goal was something else entirely. Early on, I wanted to become more productive, then I wanted to fix my anxiety and experience less suffering, then when anxiety went away I wanted to become able to connect with people more easily, and finally a few days ago a question popped into my mind: why am I working so hard to become better at connection? And suddenly the whole thing unraveled.
The paradox is that on one hand viewing yourself as a problem that needs solving is precisely what creates the sense of dissatisfaction, and on the other hand that view needs to be corrected to move forward. I think what breaks through this paradox is compassion towards oneself. Be slow, be gentle, be kind.