Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

There is an old saying that has gained a lot of believers in the West that you cannot love anyone until you first love yourself.

Not only is this overly simplistic, but from my experience, it is just wrong.

How does a toddler learn how to love him or her self?  Easy, by being loved by the mother or father.  At about age three, the toddler has reached the developmental stage where it can differentiate itself from its environment, from its mother, father and siblings.  Once this differentiation takes place between me and others, and we feel both the love from others and our own sense of self at the same time, then we can love that self-sense, our self.

Very often in this world that toddler does not receive sufficient love during this formative stage, or the love is expressed in a way the toddler can not receive and incorporate it, then that toddler may not even develop a sense of self, let alone appreciate its existence. I know that I never experienced a sense of self separate from the world until I was in my 60s through the love I received then.

If as an adult we do receive the love of a peer, a man or woman who we respect and love, then, for the first time we can both experience a sense of a separate-from-the-world self, and also we can actually let that love in, so to speak, realizing that someone “out there” in the environment loves us in a most spectacular way.

If either or both lovers are ready enough, deep enough, empty enough, the mutual love can explode into an experience of the divine within as the life force, and the life force itself becomes us; it energizes, purifies, and elevates one’s own sense of self, as well as for the other, to a realization of God within.  At this point we realize that we are God incarnated into a fragile and impermanent body of flesh loving the life force incarnated into that other fragile and temporary body of flesh.  We both become self-realized and incarnate, which brings utter humility and utter, utter surrender to the other, and we can both rest in a unified emptiness, a stillness, filled with life and love. 

This is the greatest healing possible.  But this cannot take place unless the ground is laid for such a relationship and such love.  You must be aware of being empty of self, and if one looks within, one sees/feels only emptiness, silence, the Void.  This is one’s sadhana, to empty oneself of pseudo selves through meditation, self-inquiry, and prayer, for the deepest love, divine love, seeks those who are empty.  If you are not empty, all the best you can experience is a normal, human, love affair, which is body-oriented, sensual, and manipulative.  This is pre-personal love, reactive-love, for the person has not yet realized his or her self.