Acharya Prashant (AP): Pleasing oneself is not at all an example of self-love; if at all, it is an example of lack of self-knowledge. You cannot have self-love without self-knowledge; it is a great misconception that must be cleared very very thoroughly, very very finely. Making yourself happy is not at all an example of loving yourself.
Love does not bother for happiness; it bothers for rightness, for elevation. Self-gratification ‘fattens’ the self. Self-elevation ‘dissolves’ the self. Obviously, if you are a fat man, getting a little fatter doesn’t quite hurt you immediately, or does it?
If you already have 105 kilograms, it’s all right to binge a little more and turn 106.5kg by end of the dinner; it doesn’t quite hurt. Right? You are already 105kg. But someone comes to you and says you ought to be 75kg; you want that person to drop dead in front of your eyes. What did he just say? He wants me to lose 30kg; he wants me to dissolve, he wants me to reduce.
Oh my God! Isn’t life about gaining more and more? Now, when it comes to the body, you find it obvious that sometimes it is important to reduce. Right? But when it comes to the ego, we don’t appreciate that it is mostly important to reduce. All we want is an accumulation and further accumulation.
Self-love is an exercise in reduction, not further accumulation; therefore, be it love toward somebody else or love towards oneself, real love is always tough. False love is very lucrative and very charming. Oh, there is such a romance around it- but then that romance is hardly love.
Real love tests, Real love stretches, and breaks. Real love is like a sculptor carving a beautiful one out of an unseemly rock. The rock must go through suffering and a lot of hits of the sculptor’s tools. Without suffering at the hands of the sculptor, no rock can ever turn into a beautiful piece of art- that is love.
When you help someone else’s life take a beautiful shape, then you are loving the other. When you help your own life turn beautiful, then you are loving yourself. One has to very clearly appreciate the difference between pleasure and welfare. That which pleases you is not necessarily in your welfare.
Mostly, if not always, that which pleases you fattens, spoils you, and degrades you. Be very cautious of pleasure and the elder brother of pleasure called happiness. Pleasure is when you are receiving very physical, very carnal gratification. Animals experience pleasure when give tasty food, which the animal experiences as a pleasure. Give an opportunity to mate, what an animal experiences is pleasure.
A little higher than pleasure is happiness. When your aims are achieved, when something happens as per your desired image, then what you experiences is happiness. Happiness is more definable and lasts a bit longer than pleasure. But neither the pursuit of pleasure nor the chase of happiness can be called as self-love. Why? Because your contentment cannot come through pleasure or happiness; love is about giving yourself the highest. When you love somebody, do you want to stop short of giving them the highest possible?
Similarly, when you love yourself, would you stop short of giving yourself the highest possible? The highest possible is not contained in pleasure nor in happiness; both pleasure and happiness leave you craving for more, and you know that, have you not? We all have experienced pleasure, and we all have experienced happiness as well. Have they ever been sufficient and final? Never. Therefore, if you really love yourself, then it is not pleasure or happiness or gratification that you would want to provide yourself.
You want to give yourself something that lasts, something that is trustworthy, something that you place your faith on; something that is really an act of intelligence. Is it intelligent to invest yourself in something that would come to you, be with you for half an hour, and then evaporate?
Doesn’t sound quite intelligent. Therefore, self-love is an exercise in intelligence. You have to ask, what is it that I really want, what is it that would provide me a deep and very long-lasting contentment, what is it that would elevate me from the level of desires for the futile? That is what I would want to gift myself, and that is called self-love; gifting oneself the highest possible.
Beware of false self-love; being indifferent to the self is far better than fake self-love. If you do not know what to gift to yourself, at least abstain from giving all the toxic and harmful stuff to yourself.
Sisyphus pushes a rock up a hill forever, knowing it will always roll back down. A regular workman does the same thing inside a job: he keeps pushing too, except he hopes it will eventually pay off, a promotion, a house, a better life. This hope is often just a comfortable lie. Sisyphus, who expects nothing and still keeps going, is actually more honest than we are. The real question is not whether the effort is worth it, but whether we can stop lying to ourselves about it.
Oppression should not see caste, gender, creed or colour, and it should not see species either. The moral threshold is sentience, not intelligence. An animal feels pain as fully as a human does, whether or not it can explain its suffering.
Seen a bubble in the sea? That is our story.
You came with the hands empty, empty, and nothing will you carry.
So why be caught in misery? Make merry, make merry!
Who is your family? Who is a lover really?
You are deep in illusion, happily, happily fooling yourself…
