The illusions of self love and self improvement
Does the splash come from the water? The stone? Or is the splash only in your mind? The correct answer of course is that it’s only in your mind, because the splash is something you perceive from your senses as a result of the event of the stone dropping into water. The sight and sound of the splash is relationship, and comes from you being relative to both the stone and the water, which of course are relative to each other as well.
Relationship, any relationship at all, is environment. Environment is many different things coming together in different relationships. All existence is change. All existence it relationship. This means that fundamentally everything is environment, because existence without being in a relationship with everything else simply isn’t possible.
So if you try to love yourself, what are you trying to achieve? What does it mean to actually love yourself? What are you actually trying to say here? If you understand that love implies a relationship, then what is it exactly that you love?
So let’s unpack this further and dig a little deeper here.
Let’s start with the object of love, which is your concept of self. This comes down to the ultimate mystery in life - the mystery of who am I? Who are you? Who is the real you? Who or what are you referring to whenever you use the words ‘I’ or ‘me’ in a sentence? You can try and think about this, and you can spend as much time as you like thinking about this, but the end result will always be the same - you will arrive at a concept which is based entirely on environment, or relationship.
When self becomes other and other becomes self
You see when you step back and do some digging or thinking into the question of loving yourself, and you do any kind of analysis of the question of self-love, you can very quickly become confused as to what self is in comparison to other. If you dig even deeper, and do some more exploring and examining, you will probably find that what you actually love about yourself is actually coming from other and from the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’.
You won’t be able to get past the reality that ‘self’ is relationship, and therefore environment.
I mean are you just your physical body? Are you the sum total of your experiences in life? What about your emotions and feelings? What about your random thoughts? What about that subvocal chatter or inner voice in your mind? What is it that you perceive about ‘self’ that you love, or is your perception actually nothing more than your conception?
What this all boils down to is that you are the perceiver of your life experiences, the subject of your life and your relationships, and love requires an object. Can you see inside your head? What does your back look like? This is where we get to the oxymoron of self-love. Love implies a relationship, yet if you see your ‘self’ as a single entity or concept, there is no relationship, and if there is no relationship, then how can there be anything which can be described as love? Trying to love yourself only leads you into some sort of double bind or mental trap. ‘Self’ and ‘love’ cancel each other out.
It’s the exact same situation when it comes to self-improvement
Self-improvement also leads you into a kind of mental trap or double bind. If you get caught up in the illusion of self-improvement or ‘working on yourself’ you’re negating yourself by wishing you are different to who you actually are in reality. Wanting to be better is futile because you’re implying that you’re worse and trying to hold yourself up to some illusion of who you are which doesn’t exist in reality.
You’re getting in the way of yourself and actually undermining yourself.
You cannot be anyone other than who you are right now in the present moment in time. Sure you can build a better Ego, and there are lots of ways to build a better Ego and change your concept of self, but it all amounts to wishful thinking and conceptualizing a different reality than the reality you’re currently experiencing. Just like with self-love, you’re disregarding both reality and possibility in favour of impossibilities.
The choice between being more conscious or less conscious
This is the only choice you have in any given situation in life, and this is the reality of what you can do. There’s a lot to be said for happiness. But happiness is a state of mind, and comes from acceptance of self, acceptance of environment and also, more importantly, acceptance of change. Please keep in mind that happiness is often undermined by fear (anxiety, insecurity) and desire - and you get drawn into both fear and desire through buying into the illusions of self-love and self-improvement.
Please also keep in mind that self-love and self-improvement are traps to draw you back into the widespread social and mental conditioning that goes on in society, which like the illusion of enlightenment can often steer the focus of your attention away from the present moment into the future.
We are all pushed into a socialization process which focusses on the future with an unstated ‘goodie’ which we will get at some point. It starts early in life, pre-school, runs right through school, education, college, training, and into work and what we understand to be the Real World. So you can spend your life constantly preparing, learning, studying and working towards something, but never being really sure what you’re actually working towards. This is until you reach your 30’s or 40’s and you figure that you’ve arrived somewhere in life, with a sense of being cheated or deceived along the way, and you figure out that the ‘goodie’ turned out to be a mirage.
But see existence is constant change just as much as it is relationship, which is the whole point of trauma. If there was no trauma in life, and that trauma wasn’t inevitable, then there would be no sense in living existence, no point, and everything would become fixed, predetermined and boring. Trauma exists to make everything interesting and to give you a reference point in life. If there was no pain how would you be able to recognize pleasure? If there was no heartache how would you even begin to understand what love is? If there was no fear, no heartache, no disappointment, how would you know how to be happy or what happiness is?
Fundamental humanity negates the need for self-love and self-improvement
There’s a fundamental assumption here that when you wake up in the morning, you wake up hoping that you’re going to have a pleasant day and find some happiness. Have you ever woken up in the morning not wishing to be happy?
Change is just as inevitable in life as relationship and trauma - there is no need to seek it. Instead of thinking up different ways through which you can improve yourself, or work on yourself, or trying to find reasons to love yourself, you could simply accept yourself for who you really are, accept your reality, including all your stuff and emotional baggage, and just accept the fact that change is going to happen anyway.
The key here is appreciation.
What I’m not suggesting is to become mindless and just go through life willy nilly. What I’m suggesting is quite the opposite. The bottom line of life is the choice over whether to live more consciously or less consciously. You do have that choice, and that choice is always available to you. You are living your life, experiencing your reality, you are always the perceiver of your experiences, the subject of your felt sense of immediate experience, you have the brain, the senses, the mind, the body, the environment through which you can always develop more consciousness, expand on your level of conscious awareness.
Your mind is the space through which your environment is flowing constantly, perception, conception, and back again, thoughts, feelings and emotions, flowing constantly - the so called ‘flow of life’. There’s nothing you need to do, need to believe, or even need to think for this flow to happen, as it happens all in itself. Consider that if you seek change, you’re denying the inevitability of change, and you’re getting in the way of yourself.
What this boils down to is living your truth.
Truth does not need participation to exist. It just is, because truth is consciousness.
But for truth to exist, you need to give truth space and opportunity to exist, and this often requires developing or building an environment for truth to exist. This is where we get into not just appreciation but also exploration, experimentation, discovery and learning. Truth is nothing more than your perception of reality, it’s relative to your perspective, and the only way you can find your truth is to go into environment and go through the experiences of reality.