What Does It Mean to Love, and Love Oneself?
Acharya Prashant: This phrase — “Loving oneself is meaningful only in the context of man”. For nothing else in existence is this meaningful at all. Love is distance and duality. Love is the very meaning and purpose of duality. It is such a paradoxical thing about love that love is the frontier of duality, the climax of duality, and love is also what would dissolve all duality. The final duality is to have a distance between what you are and what you think yourself to be, that is the climax of duality— “My imagination and reality.”
What is love then? Love is the movement of all that you know yourself to be, think yourself to be, imagine yourself to be, towards that place where you have no imaginations or knowledge about yourself. So, what does it mean to love oneself? It would be easy for me to say that loving oneself means knowing oneself. But, considering the way we use the word “know”, knowing for us is concept formation, thinking. So, considering the way we use the word “know”, loving oneself rather means not knowing oneself.
When you have ideas about yourself, then you know yourself, you are predictable and there exists a future and a pattern for you. This future, this pattern, this sense of ‘me’, this sense of personality, is one’s limit, one’s trap, and one’s struggles incessantly to get rid of it. Loving oneself would simply mean that — I realize that whatever I think myself to be — and there is nobody here who doesn’t think themself to be something, there is nobody here who doesn’t carry an expression on his face.
Have you ever seen this, that a face is never blank? Face is always carrying an expression. Even when you have nothing to do, nothing to think, nothing to say, still your faces never get to be blank and innocent. They are always carrying a particular map, a particular mark, that is what you are. Loving oneself means that I see that this pattern, this expression, is not something to be maintained or preserved. It is not something to be felt proud of. It must go.
And when it must go, it must not be substituted. Loving oneself is not the replacement of oneself by another self. It is a movement into selflessness. Strange are we and strange is our language. In normal parlance, when you would say, “I love myself”, you would be quite close to implying that you love your thoughts, ideas, your personality, and you want to reinforce them. That is how we would use this phrase.
You ask somebody, “Do you love yourself?” And, if the fellow says, “yes”, ask him, “what is it that you love?” And, you will surely find something concrete that he has to say. He would say, “I love my attitude, I love my accomplishments, I love the way I go about doing things, I love my courage, I love my knowledge.” They would say something about himself that he would admire, and because he would admire it, he would reinforce it. Rather than letting go, he would rather be cementing it.
But, in reality, loving oneself means letting go of all that you know yourself to be. The man who loves himself keeps reducing. He keeps getting to become, rather unbecome, less and less of a man. Because, again we come back to the same point that what we call as “Man,”, is just a bundle of all that what man is really not. The man who loves himself keeps on reducing and reducing and reducing.
Reducing into what? That no one knows. But what is certain is that if we look at that man, we would get an eerie sense, almost a frightening sense that this man is going away. If we look at that man and if we had ever thought that that man belongs to us, we would get an alarming feeling that this man belongs less and less to us. If you knew that man as a particular personality and your relationship was with that personality, which it almost always is, then you would get a disappointing feeling that your relationship with that man is reducing.
The man who loves himself is on an everlasting journey of self-annihilation. Sounds paradoxical, right? Because to us, love means preservation. When you say that you love your business, you don’t want to annihilate it, or do you? You want to preserve and expand it. When a mother says, “she loves her kid”, annihilating the kid is the last thing on her mind. Whenever you say, “you love something”, you want its boundaries to be defended. Whenever you say, “you love something”, you want the fault lines to be deepened.
Your love is a curse, actually. When you deeply hate someone, you get in love with that person. Your love is a neurosis — A deep hatred. Whatever you would touch in your love, you would end up destroying it. What is our ignorance that we crave for love? We are unable to see that whoever, whosoever has loved us, has only taken us away from our center by making us into something. And whatsoever we have loved, we have done the same with it.
Real love is not at all love the way we know and define love. I repeat, what we call as love is just deep hatred and curse. If you have any consideration for someone, I request you to not to love him. The more you love somebody, the more you poison his life. And because we are self-centered people, the gaze of our love falls first of all upon ourselves. So, we are the first one that we poison.
The man who loves himself will find that he is less and less sure of himself. The man who used to keep very confident will find that he has less and less to feel confident about. Because, confidence the way we define it, is predictability. Because, confidence the way we define is, is being sure of the outcomes, and that is not confidence at all, that is just fear asking for some consolation.
As you move on the journey of loving yourself, you will find that you know less and less of yourself. You cannot really be sure of yourself. And, how that scares the bit out of us, right? Even hearing this makes us feel so uneasy. “The man who loves himself does not know what he is going to do?” Yes, he does not know. To the extent, we do not know what is going to happen tomorrow, it is alright. It becomes unacceptable, if I know what is happening and yet I do not know how I am going to respond to it.
We can live with the uncertainty that the universe offers, because we have compromised with it. We do not really like it, but somehow, we have adapted ourselves to live with it. The universe is an uncertain place and nobody knows what is going to happen tomorrow. But there is no way we can live with inner uncertainty. We may say that one out of the four situations will arise tomorrow — A, B, C, and D. But we want to be certain what my response to A, B, C, and D, respectively, would be. “I do not know whether it would be A, B, C, or D, but what I know is that if it is B, then my response will be B1; if it is C, my response will be C1.”
Of that we want to be sure. We want to create a semblance of certainty in a totally uncertain world. The man who loves himself becomes uncertain even internally. He does not know what his response would be if situation B arises or situation C arises. As he disappears, his certainties also keep disappearing. And, the certainties do not like that, the certainties feel uncomfortable with that.
If you have remained certain, if you have remained the way you were a couple of years back, then all the ignorant ones around you will tell you that you love yourself. Well, of course you do, because had you not loved yourself the way these people define love, how is it possible that you would have remained the same as you were two years or four years back.
But, in the eyes of Truth, you are a masochist. You really, really hate yourself. Otherwise, how is it possible that you have been preserving your personality, your disease, since so long? How is it possible that you know that tomorrow you will respond the same way you used to respond four years or ten years back? But you are sure of that. In fact, even if your response seems like changing, you would stand in front of the change.
Figure out what it is that you find yourself loving. Figure out what is it that you find yourself certain of. Figure out what is it that you crave for so desperately. When you no longer love what you have been loving so far, then you love yourself. When this very face changes, when this rigidity, this blueprint that you carry within changes, then love is showing itself up.
I’m repeating — loving oneself cannot mean loving something specific. But, since we know only specifics, so, loving oneself rather means not loving all those specifics that we have loved so far. Your self is an accumulation of your love and your hatred. That is what has built you up. And because we are talking of the self, there is no question of real love. Real love is not the opposite of hatred. So, actually your self is an accumulation of your attraction and your fear. You feel attracted to something, you feel afraid of something, that is what constitutes the self. That is what brings about that expression on the face.
Till the time you like what you like, you remain what you are. Till the time you dislike what you dislike, you remain what you are. Real love would mean going towards that last frontier of duality. That brings us back to what we started with, that love is the meaning and purpose of duality. The last end of duality is non-being, being versus non-being. When being, fed up of itself, moves towards non-being, that is love. And, that is the reason why love is just death.
