This potential liberation is with us every day, and it offers itself in many ways. As I write now, my recognition of this becomes more and more evident. In our lives, from the very beginning, we need unconditional positive regard for our very survival. It begins even before our first breath as we float within the unconditional womb. At birth, we seek the unconditional as a matter of life and death. Even in that moment, in the true beginning of our being and our becoming self, we seek to reciprocate our own version of unconditional positive regard. We cannot do so with our undeveloped consciousness. We can do so and do so with our entire physical being. We share our bodies in all their sensory complexity with the being of our birth. As we feel it, we are still in absolute unity of the unconditional with that being. That feeling takes us back to the Edenic myth. Adam and Eve exist at one with the divine. They feel the unconditional unity with the divine although the divine offers one condition in which Adam and Eve will violate the unconditional relationship. They must not eat of the fruit of knowledge—the essence of awareness and consciousness. When Eve heroically eats of that fruit and Adam shares, their eyes are open to themselves, and in that self-conscious awareness, they surrender their absolute unity of the unconditional with the divine. The divine still offers unconditional positive regard, and now Eve and Adam can consciously respond to the divine with their own unconditional positive regard in return. It becomes a mutual unconditional relationship no longer mono-directional as it had been.
Until our eventual separation, our response to the unconditional is purely physical as a need and as a gift. From what women have told me, this exchange of the unconditional happens in the relationship during breast feeding. Both mother and child open themselves to the sharing experience and in that sharing, the unconditional flows between them. In a sense, this is a kind of paradise, and in another, it has not become the conscious exchange of the unconditional. That cannot begin, as with Eve and Adam, until we begin to know ourselves. This beginning forms our first critical moment and our entry into the transformative. Our original meaning perspective of absolute unity with the mother and the world ends as we open ourselves to ourselves.
When we make that separation, it signifies a developing consciousness of the becoming self. When that happens, then we have a chance to find and choose the unconditional within us. In this writing, I can see that we eventually need and want to give the unconditional to others. We see this as a desire to love as well as to be loved. We can also see it in the feelings we have of compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance. All of these feelings serve as part of our unconditional giving, unconditional care. They happen to us every day even when we deny them.[110]
In our sexual relationships, we feel that same impulse toward the unconditional. When we speak of our sexual acts as making love, we might consider what this making entails. In such a moment of making, of creating something that wasn't there before the act, we give of ourselves unconditionally to the other and for a moment, we achieve something of the unity we give up in our original separation. This unity begins with two beings, two awarenesses. With that conscious unity, we create a third and loving being born out of our physical, emotional, and even spiritual exchange of the unconditional. All this happens to us when we make love. Other kinds of satisfaction may ensue if we simply take pleasure from a sexual act, but we do not make anything more than we started with. When we create that third being of our shared making, it also makes of us individually someone who has felt close to and acted out of the becoming self. In this way, and in many other ways, we know the presence and the intimate closeness of the becoming self.[111]