Unconditional love is when you expect nothing in return for giving your own love. When Christ said that ‘Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends’ he was talking about unconditional love.
To most scientists, unconditional love has always been an anomaly – ‘survival of the fittest’ ideas of evolution led them to believe that every act should have a selfish basis, because at a genetic level, you would only do something for someone if it somehow helped your reproductive chances. Despite this however, the existence of unconditional love is undeniable - it is seen for example when people risk and even give their lives for other people during emergencies.
The real problem with admitting the importance of unconditional love is that it forces us to face the fact that most of the time we aren’t unconditionally loving. It was only once we had the first-principle, biological explanation for our selfishness, which we now do, that we could safely acknowledge its importance and universality. It is this first-principle, biological explanation that the biologist Jeremy Griffith has provided – as you can see for yourself in Part 1.7 of this short video and his book FREEDOM.
Briefly, Jeremy Griffith explains that humans have an instinctive orientation to loving unconditionally that developed in our ancestral forebears. This first-principle, biological explanation of the human condition also defends humans’ current compromised ability to love unconditionally in the most wonderful way. It turns out that when consciousness emerged, humans tragically had to defy our instinctive orientation toward unconditionally loving behavior in order to search for knowledge – and as a result we became upset and at odds with those instincts. However, despite our current state of upset, we still retain our instinctive orientation to behaving selflessly – and it is this instinctive orientation that we occasionally defer to despite our upset.
With the explanation of the human condition now found, upset can now subside, and humans will be able again to return to a state of unconditional love – however this time, with understanding!
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