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.
