SPIRITUAL/ THOUGHTS: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LOVE YOURSELF?

I was watching Oprah and she was talking again ...about loving yourself. Who is the self that you love? Are you your education, your family, your relationship, your likes and dislike? On the level of personality, you are all of these things. But is loving yourself just a matter of loving your personality? What is underneath it? What is our true nature, which support all of these aspects of your personality? Self acceptance and self love are necessary to healthy relationship, but on a truly spiritual level, the I disappears. There is no I to love. There is no story of me...there is simply BEINGNESS. True freedom means not identifying with anything. And in this simple beingness is freedom: freedom from identification with me. And from this beingness comes the possibility of connecting with all that is. When you lose your identification with the ego, with all of its wants and needs, there is no barrier to experiencing a connection of the self---to all that is. The more strongly you are identified with the I and me and ego, the more isolated and separated you feel, the more you feel the need to get the love you deserve. The less identified you are, the more connected you feel, and out of this comes a love that is connected to all things. It is not ego based, but it actually a spiritual love.

The more invisible you become to yourself, the more you drop your identification with the story of me and what I think, then the more you are able to feel true love. This is because you are not relating everything back to how it affects you. You're not worried about the loss of love to you, because when you don't identify with your preceptions of yourself, you aren't there. You don't have any expectations because you have seen through the illusions of the personality always asking what's in it for me. This leaves room for simply loving without an agenda.

The less identified we are with the small self, the personality, the more we are able to feel connection with all that is----we are not contracted down to me...me. Ironically, we then become liberated and we can really let our personality rip. We become looser and freer because we know that it is not really us..what we really are is the clear and present awareness from which it all arises.

To be awake doesn't mean you do anything you want because nothing matters...it the opposite....everything matters. You are aware of your own pain and every bit of pain that you be causing. So when a person has a unrequited crush on you, you don't exploit them sexually or mine them for expensive dinners, you treat them with gently and with honesty.