Q: I want to talk about unconditional love. Sometimes you want to love someone and they are not in a [vibrational] place to accept it.
Abe: Yes. There’s another way of saying this that’s so much easier for you, and it isn’t ‘sometimes,’ it is always that you want to love, and some of those buggers are just not lovable. (Laughter.) So what you have to do is find one who is. (Laughter.) Because it isn’t fair to you and it isn’t fair to them — when you say, “I need you to be different so that I can love,” they might if they could, but it doesn’t work, does it? ‘Unconditional love’ means ‘I’m going to love regardless of the conditions because there’s enough on this buffet that I can enjoy that I don’t need the calamari to be gone or different than it is. I can find something else that I enjoy. And so the conditions can remain the same and I can still be pleased.’
Q: Right.
Abe: So the same thing is true of unconditional love of others. In other words, if I can’t find anything in that one to love, then I can look over there. And as I’ve looked over there and I’ve maintained my connection to Source and my connection to love, now I am a lover, and in that vibration I may even be able to find something to love in the one who formerly I couldn’t find anything to love.
Here’s the answer to this, and this is the most significant thing to know: everyone is like the universe at large — there is that which is wanted and lack of it in every particle of everything. So even in those who are in a strong place where they’ve activated something that makes it very hard for you to love them, like maybe they’re not loving you in the moment or maybe they’re acting out… in some sort of violent way — when you say, “I cannot love under this condition and I need so much to love, so you’ve got to change the condition,” we say no, because you don’t need to love them in order to love.
Q: Right.
Abe: You still have the ability to love. And so as you choose something through the path of least resistance or the path of most allowance, that is easier to love, in time, once you really get back into that vibe of love, you can find lovable things even about that one who is predominantly projecting unlovable things.
Q: Well, first of all, I’ve learned that it’s hard for people to love someone when they don’t love themselves. And….
Abe: So that’s true. But blah blah blah blah blah. (Laughter.) And the reason that we’re making fun of that is because, so someone is rude to you and you have a kneejerk response to that, and then you say, “Well, if I were really tuned in, tapped in, turned on, then even though you’re mistreating me it wouldn’t bother me so much.” And we say if you’re really tuned in, tapped in, turned on, the Universe would not put you together for this abuse. To say….
Q: It’s not really abuse, in a sense. I don’t feel abused with this person in any way. It’s almost like can you be with somebody if they’re not always happy? ‘Cause what you do is, like, you work so hard on always being happy within yourself, right? You always want to feel good. Can someone who always wants to feel good maintain a relationship with someone who has a hard time?
Abe: Well, it is possible if you get really good at directing your thought and you fill your pockets full of [touchstones] that feel really good. But we want to give you something here in light of what we talked about earlier.
In other words, when you feel awful — let’s say someone’s really hurt your feelings and you just feel awful — and you really want to adore them and you really want them to adore you, and you really want it to be like it was…you really want it to be like it was in that moment when you discovered you were in love with this person. You really want to feel like that, not like this. But you can’t get to there from [the place of feeling hurt], not right now, not this red-hot minute, because there’s something else activated within you. And so what we’re wanting you to do is start letting yourself off the hook as you reach for the emotions that feel a little better, a little better, a little better. Until eventually you get there.
And the thing that makes this interaction so valuable in what you’re evoking here is that if you are determined to be selfish enough to want to feel good so that even though you can’t change the circumstance — meaning you can’t change this person’s mood, not this minute, and it’s not your job to do it, and even though you want to do it you couldn’t do it — but if you want to be selfish enough that you want to feel good, so that you’re reaching for anything that feels a little better, maybe just being mad feels a little better than being hurt. And then maybe feeling not so mad feels a little better than so mad.
In other words, you just do the best you can to find a feeling that gives you a little more breathing space. And then, in the process of you making that transition, those that are close to you often make it, too. But if you say to someone, “I was a happy person before I hooked up with you…” (Laughter.) “…and now you’re bringing me down,” even if they would like it be different, they don’t know what to do. Because they don’t want to be unhappy either…. And now you’ve saddled them with all this responsibility that not only are they unhappy, but they’re making somebody that they love unhappy. And so they usually resort to the mechanism that we’re trying to teach you here — they just get mad. Because it feels better to them to feel mad than to feel bad, you see.
So let us recap what we’re saying here:
So you want love and in this moment you don’t feel like you’re getting it. Or you want to communicate or be one, and in this moment you feel separate. Or you want a relationship with someone who can make you happy, but what you really want is to be happy. It feels like you’re making a choice — ‘I can choose this person or I can choose happiness, but I can’t have both at the same time.’ And we want to say to you: you can have both at the same time, but your happiness has to matter the most.
Now we don’t want you to say to this person or even to yourself, “I want so much to be happy that I’m not ever going to think about you.” We want you to be able to change your thoughts enough that you can show yourself ‘I’m going to be all right. I can be all right here.’ Because there is nothing more suffocating than to feel like you can’t control your thoughts and [that] your thoughts are painful…. And when you show yourself ‘I can find thoughts that give me space, even under these conditions,’ then you are absolutely free. And then you have the capacity to mine this experience for all the delicious stuff that would be there, you see.
We’re not really big on encouraging people to go into miserable relationships and try to make them better. (Laughter.) We have to say to you that you attract from where you are, and there is much good stuff that you wanted that was there. In other words, all of your hopes and dreams do have the potential of being satisfied. You just don’t have to eat the calamari — you can eat the other stuff on the buffet. Of if you like calamari, then go for it.
Make sense?
Q: Yeah. Thanks.
— Abe — Portland, OR, 7/12/03A