The Man in the Mirror Project - What it means to love yourself

Character "Gilderoy Lockhart"
 from the Harry Potter Series

Michael Jackson gave an interview to Oprah Winfrey on February 10, 1993. He grimaced when speaking of his childhood abuse at the hands of his father; he believed he had missed out on much of his childhood years, admitting that he often cried from loneliness.  When asked about his sadness, he replied he was better.  When asked how, he simply stated "I started to give back."

When we think of love we often think of others loving us or us loving them.  Seldom do we think of self love and seldom is it that we actually know what real self love is.  The image I get is of Gilderoy Lockhart from Harry Potter.  He was an author Harry met who wrote a book called "Magical Me".  Just by the title you might get the impression he really did love himself, but the kind of love we are talking about here takes on a different tone.

The love we receive from others is often ego based love, but the real love for ourselves comes from our spiritual selves.  To explain, here is a passage from Phil Nuernberger, PH D from his book "From Loneliness to Love":

"Loneliness has nothing to do with other people or their love.  It is the people we love and who love us that make us feel lonely.  We never miss our enemies.  We don't feel lonely when we think about people whom we don't like.  We only miss the ones we care for.  So how can getting more people to love us do anything but make us more lonely?

We feel isolated and alone because we aren't sharing our love with those around us.  It is not the love we receive, but the love we give, that frees us from loneliness and isolation.  We can search the world for the perfect partner, we can have countless loverrs and friends and we can receive love without end.  But unless we ourselves express love we will never be free from lonliness.

The love we desperately seek flows from the very core of our being.  This is not the self-love that psychologists talk about.  It has to do with becoming love itself.  This is the expression, and the power, of the spiritual Self.  As long as we remain unaware of and neglect this spiritual Self, we will feel lonely and isolated.

Loneliness is in essence a spiritiual problem.  When we are isolated from the spiritual Self we experience loneliness.  We compensate by finding lovers and friends, and we develop philosophical insights and religious beliefs and faith to fill the emptiness.  But we cannot put an end to loneliness until we touch the power of our human core, the spiritual self.

Human beings are not the sum total of the physical sensations of the body, the thoughts and beliefs of the intellect or the ups and down of emotional reactions.  Our real identity is spiritual.  We confuse the tool (the personality and all its resources) with the owner, the spiritual self.  As long as we remain unaware of this Truth within ourselves we know ourselves only as the ego-self.  Consequently, we confuse love with emotional attachment.  . . . ."


. . . . pure love of the spiritual self is clouded and colored by the ego-self and we must learn to free ourselves from the illusion we mistakenly call love.  

In the next Man in the Mirror segments we will explore how to do that.