Me 2/5

Love too is a journey. We have to set out, get away from ourselves. We have to take the first step, and keep our balance. And, ultimately it is all a question of balance. The one thing that the teachings of all spiritualities, religions, philosophies and modern psychologies have in common has to do with the fact that we always have to begin with ourselves. There is no escaping that. We must learn to know ourselves, learn to accept ourselves and learn to love ourselves. Once again, we are talking about processes and stages, and about the evolution that allows individuals to understand themselves better, to gain maturity and, ultimately, to accept themselves for what they are. In the beginning, we are carefree, natural, and put our feelings on display; loving means feeling love, showing it and talking about it. And then we begin to have, express and formulate expectations. We have to go further. Love’s first journey is a journey to the inside: again and again, we come back to ourselves, watch ourselves, study ourselves and become completely imbued with ourselves. Not in order to drown in a blind and arrogant egocentrism, but in order to find a balance. It is in fact possible that going back to ourselves is the best way to avoid egocentrism. We have here a relative paradox: on the periphery of the self, the ego is both prominent and hypertrophied.

Learning to love ourselves means learning to accept ourselves. It means entering oneself, in the way that we enter a foreign or ‘other’ world, and taking stock of the qualities, achievements and potential of our being and personality. A searching gaze can also be a positive gaze, and a positive gaze requires an intellectual predisposition. It will be noted that all religious, philosophical and spiritual teachings are from the outset imbued with the basically positive attitude that invites human beings to become initiates, to change, to reform themselves and to find inner resources that will lift them up. That is their essence. It is when they are perverted that their teachings become rigid and dogmatic, and solidify into moral codes that inspire a feeling of guilt, that stigmatize what is natural, or lead to an obsessions limits, flaws or ‘sin’. It is at this point that things become inverted and that we begin to see ourselves in a negative and deprecatory light. When it is not one’s own gaze or final judgement that condemns one to condemn oneself, one begins to feel uncomfortable, and feel that one cannot live up to one’s ideals. Now, love really is the ‘key’, and it means, first and foremost, love of oneself, of one’s qualities, will power and ability to make progress. With determination, strength and humility; once more, it is a question of balance. We must observe ourselves through our qualities, the efforts and the progress we have made, the resistances we have overcome, the struggles we have won, and the failures we have recovered from. Rather than counting, as Labro suggests, the number of times we have ‘fallen’, we should count the number of times we have been able to pick ourselves up again. Lao Tsu said that ‘failure is the basis of success’, and success consists, in the same way, in fully understanding the existence of that inner energy that allowed and allows us to overcome failures . . . that have become successes. What do we see when we look in our own mirror? The gaze is more important than the evaluation because, ultimately, it is the gaze that determines the evaluation. Our relationship with ethics begins with our relationship with our being: if we began by deprecating ourselves or even hating ourselves, the harm has already been done. That is the criticism Nietzsche makes of the moralists in The Genealogy of Morals: when we are taught to hate what is human, morals become a prison for some, and an instrument of power for others. To go towards the self, towards our liberation, towards the Cosmos or God, is to go . . . and we cannot go unless we begin to love ourselves. Without any illusions about ourselves, of course, but without fear and without hesitation.

This self-love can be expressed in various ways: lucidity consists in denying nothing of ourselves, and especially not our needs. We can certainly try to overcome certain needs and certain expectations, but there can be no question of denying their existence from the outset. Our needs – for protection, to be listened to, to communicate and for tenderness, affection and love – are, to a greater or lesser extent, both deep-rooted and natural, and both the monist oriental traditions and the dualist Semitic or Western traditions teach us that it is physically and spiritually impossible to find our balance and to achieve inner well-being without taking them into account. A love for someone else that fuses with the other to such an extent as to lead us to deny our own being and our own needs is a love that is fragile, unstable and unbalanced and that will lead, in the long term, to suffering and failure (unless it merges into the experience of absolute self-sacrifice). The ability to give ourselves presupposes and demands, by definition, that there really is a ‘self’ to give: we give ourselves in love without denying any of our needs or expectations. This obviously does not mean that we have to accept everything from ourselves, or that the ‘self’ forces itself on us. It means primarily that we must learn to listen to ourselves, to respect ourselves and, when we experience love, to make ourselves heard and respected. We must love ourselves with humility and dignity: we must expect ourselves to change and make constant progress, and expect others to help us on our way without denying us in any circumstances. We must learn to love ourselves, and to make ourselves loved.

‘Self’-centred approaches have all too often been described as the antithesis of spiritual experience and the inclination towards altruism. This is a serious misunderstanding. All experience of transcendence, detachment, liberation and proximity to God begin with the ‘self’: we have to work on ourselves, our gaze, our desires and our intentions. Self-love is no exception to this requirement: far from becoming trapped within the ego and its desires, we start with what exists, and, as we learn to love ourselves better and more deeply, we gradually learn to love others better, and to love their needs, expectations, doubts and hopes. Prophets, sages and philosophers unanimously recommend that we should question our intentions and objectives. Nothing has changed: listening to ourselves teaches us to listen but if we listen only to ourselves, we become deaf to others, and eventually to ourselves. Some begin with the ‘self’ in order to reach a higher finality; others can see nothing but themselves and smugly come to a standstill at the very point where their apprenticeship begins. The world’s religions and philosophies have always warned us against the latter attitude and invite us to follow the difficult, but so much more illuminating, prospect of the former. Love and be what you are, for that is the path that will make you what you would like to be.