To love yourself means you have to know yourself; you can’t love something you don’t know. When we want to know ourselves, we must begin by accepting ourselves. Therefore we must know ourselves first, and then accept ourselves starting from this simple assumption: the human being did not “create” himself.
Physically, we have been created as we are: energetically and characteristically we are a combination of various elements: from genetics to the conditioning of society, to the energy that permeates us.
So all things considered, our conscious task begins the moment we decide we want to know ourselves.
We must know and love ourselves for the very reason that we didn’t “make” ourselves, we found ourselves as we are, and so with Love, our task is to begin the path of self knowledge.
If we start having bad feelings about ourselves, if we don’t love ourselves, we will find so many personal shortcomings, that we will try to be as others want us to be. We will submit to the role that society demands of us, to impress others and focus on our own interests, but we will never be our true selves, therefore we will be only an unloveable travesty.
When we say” love your neighbor as yourself” the strongest commandment ( the only valid one, because when I love my neighbor as myself, then I do to others as I would have them do to me) all the rest are not necessary: just as all the laws and rules are not necessary, because if I love myself and my neighbor, I respect myself and my neighbor, nothing else is necessary.
I will not wage war, I will not perpetrate injustices, I will not quarrel with others, I will respect them just as I respect myself.
When you link loving yourself to the ego, it becomes difficult, When you say“love yourself” and the reply is”I’m not an egoist for goodness sake, I must love other people!”
Certainly you must love others, but it depends how you do it. With the kind of love that you know how to express, or the same kind of love that you have for yourself?
You love others for the comfort they give you, because they accept you, make you feel important, and loving them gratifies you.
However, this is a distorted, unhealthy, incomplete kind of love, because if you have not first loved yourself, and worked towards knowing, accepting and loving yourself, you can never really love someone else. You will judge them, and they will have to correspond to what you want, you will have neither pity or understanding for them, because you have not understood yourself.
The most wonderful thing the human being can do, is accept himself with Love.
Then begins the knowledge of oneself, which is gratifying because each of us has a treasure trove within himself, and we all have a marvelous part of the divine. Often we suffocate or do not recognize this part. Why?
Because sometimes it isn’t popular, fruitful or accepted by others, so we falsify ourselves to favor the others and society.
When a person has started the process of self knowledge through acceptance, and uses love as an instrument in this search, he enters into a stream of such positive understanding. He comprehends other people, their defects and the difficulties a person can have concerning himself and his desire for self knowledge, demonstrating his real love for that person.
He loves their limitations and their problems, because he knows how difficult it is to love and accept oneself, because he has been there himself.
You cannot love yourself, unless you start from acceptance and self knowledge, and the basic principle that we are part of the divine, and within us there is a wonderful part which we must simply search for.
The personality must take second place: it is useful and right that it exists, but it must never dominate us.
The part that must emerge is always the best part of us: the divine within us.