Love as Our Unconditional Nature: Tulku Lobsang on Energy

Two hours into a free online live teaching, Tulku Lobsang sets aside the vocabulary most of us were raised on and makes a claim that sounds almost like a provocation: love is not something we learn, earn, or borrow from other people. In "The Power of Love," published on his channel in October 2026, he describes love as a kind of inborn wealth, a wisdom and a healing that we are born with. He separates what he calls our unconditional nature from our conditional nature, which includes anger, attachment, and ego, all of which arise and pass. He argues that truth, knowledge, and perception are always changing and always partial, and that genuine love, unlike these, strengthens us rather than exhausting us. The teaching lays out three qualities of love (happiness, freedom from pain, and energy) and a graded path of practice that moves from ourselves outward to strangers, enemies, and the natural world. What follows is a close reading of those ideas, drawn from the portion of the transcript available, so that the argument can be followed even by someone who never clicked play.

Is love something we are born with or something we learn?

The teaching begins with a deliberate reframing. Tulku Lobsang says that love is "a wisdom something we not learned," that it is "something we born with," and that it is "some kind of wealth" we did not earn. The emphasis is not sentimental. He is making an ontological claim about what we are, and he is contrasting it with how we usually operate.

That contrast is the spine of the first section. Our nature, in his telling, has two registers. The unconditional register is love. The conditional register contains anger, attachment, and ego, which he says are also "our nature" but are "conditional." The test he uses is impermanence. Conditions change. Time changes. A person changes. Anger, attachment, and ego all rise and fall with circumstances. Love, he says, is different: "Different moment in our life we have a different conditions but this never make a change love."

He gives a personal example to make the point concrete. He describes being, in one year, a person who felt wealthy and healthy, and in another, a person who felt terrible, and says the person changed while love did not. It is a plain, almost disarmingly simple observation, and it is the hinge on which the rest of the teaching turns.

Why does Tulku Lobsang say truth is not enough?

This is the part of the teaching that will likely unsettle people who value knowledge and accuracy most. Tulku Lobsang does not dismiss truth. He relativizes it. "Truth is changed. Person is changed. Their truth is got to change it," he says, adding that different cultures, religions, and societies hold different truths. "We not born with the truth and the truth is something we learn."

From there he makes the argument that organizes the whole talk: "love is more important than truth and wisdom is more important than knowledge." His reasoning is a test question he poses to the audience. Is truth enough to produce a peaceful world? Is knowledge enough? His answer, offered as "maybe not," rests on a claim about purity. He does not believe anyone holds pure knowledge or pure truth, because truth and knowledge are "diluted" by "our anger, our ego, our attachment, our jealous whatever." In his framing, a mind that is still moved by those conditions cannot see clearly, however much it knows.

He also uses a Buddhist image of the perceiving self. We are born with our own perception, he says, we live with it, and we die with it, which is why each person lives in what he calls their own world. He does not present this as despair. He presents it as the reason love is the more reliable foundation: it does not depend on the world being seen correctly.

"Love is the best medicine. That's why I say love is wealth. That's why I say once you have love you have all."

(Tulku Lobsang, "The Power of Love," YouTube teaching, October 2026)

What are the three qualities of love?

Around the 11-minute mark, the teaching shifts into a more structured register. Tulku Lobsang names three qualities, or manifestations, of love. The first is happiness: love makes you happy. The second is the absence of hurt: once you have love, "nothing make you hurt." The third is energy: "love is give you energy." He compresses this into a line: "Shortcut love means energy. Love means no pain. Love means happy."

The energy claim is the one that matters most to the teaching's promise. Tulku Lobsang says that when love is genuine, "nobody need to give you energy" and you "don't need to take energy anywhere," because you discover energy within yourself. For anyone who has come out of a relationship, a crowded event, or a demanding job feeling hollowed out, this is a sharp reframing. Love, here, is not the thing that consumes your reserves. It is the thing that refills them.

He then sorts love into three Buddhist categories: love of the mind, love of the body, and love beyond body and mind. In his shorthand, love of the body is associated with bliss, love of the mind with happiness, and love beyond both with peace. He is explicit that this session would concentrate on love of the mind, and he returns to its three qualities as the working definition for the rest of the talk.

Why practice love if it is already our nature?

This is a question Tulku Lobsang anticipates, and his answer is one of the more subtle moves in the talk. If love is our nature, why practice it at all? He says we practice not because love is absent, but because we want to discover what is already there. "We are practicing because of discovering," he says. The practice is an uncovering, not a manufacturing.

Around the 17-minute mark he lays out the structure. Traditionally, practice begins with oneself and then extends outward. Love for others is itself graded into three circles: near and dear ones, strangers, and those we dislike or, in the worst case, regard as enemies. From there, practice reaches the natural world, which he lists as "sky, sun, moon, water, rivers, flowers."

The logic of the sequence is what makes it coherent. He says that if you have love for yourself, you become your own happiness; if you have love for others, others become your happiness; and if you have love for nature, nature becomes a source of happiness too. He is careful, though, not to promise that life will be free of difficulty. "Please don't misunderstand," he says. "We are the world of the problem." Love does not remove problems. It changes your relationship to them.

He also says he would give "eight steps" to discover this unconditional love, and he moves toward them through a sequence of foundations. In the portion of the transcript available, he emphasizes that you cannot love others without first practicing love for yourself, and that self-kindness and self-tolerance come first. "You cannot love others" if you have not begun with yourself, he says, which is the reason the path starts inward.

Why does self-kindness come before everything else?

The later portions of the teaching, as captured in the segments available, return repeatedly to self-kindness as the base of the structure. He describes kindness toward oneself as a foundation, and then tolerance toward oneself, and calls the sequence something you build in order, the way a structure is raised floor by floor. The image is practical: you need energy to help others, and that energy comes from a settled relationship with yourself.

Read this way, the teaching is less a philosophy of love than a method for stopping the drain. Tulku Lobsang's central complaint about the conditional nature is that it makes us dependent. Anger depends on circumstances, attachment depends on the object, ego depends on recognition. Love practiced as our own nature becomes the one resource that does not need to be borrowed, which is why he returns to the word energy so often.

What does this teaching ask of a reader?

It asks for patience with a line of argument that moves in loops and returns, sometimes in a single sentence, to the same claims about impermanence, truth, and energy. Auto-generated transcripts of spoken teachings also carry errors, and some passages here are hard to parse exactly. The core ideas, though, are clear enough to test in daily life. Notice which of your states are conditional and which seem to hold steady. Notice how your energy rises or falls after time with others. Notice whether your sense of wellbeing depends on being given something, or on something you already carry.

The video's description also points viewers to versions of the same teaching in German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, listed on the channel's site, which may help readers who want to compare translations of the key terms.

Where to go from here

If this teaching has caught your attention, the most useful step is to watch the full two-hour session, which the transcript shows goes deeper into the eight steps and into the qualities of love. Take notes on the three qualities and try testing them: after an encounter that leaves you drained, ask whether the feeling came from a conditional state, and after one that leaves you energized, ask what in you responded. Return to the three-part structure of the practice, starting with yourself, and notice how the sequence reshapes your attention. Tulku Lobsang's claim is ambitious, and it is meant to be examined, not simply believed.