I love myself. I have not always. Culture taught me to hate myself and for a long time I did. People criticize me for loving myself.
“He loves himself.”
They say as if it is a bad thing, something to be ashamed of, something to deride and prejudice against a person for. And the majority agree, snide faces and comments, to belittle, to wear away any feelings of self worth. It has nothing to do with gender at all. Both gender’s do this.
Yet after time to heal and re-assess my situation I love myself more now as a result than I did before. I spend money on healthy food which costs more than what most people around me eat but I do not pay a tv license to be programmed by negativity, I do not run a car to poison the air we all share and cause cancer. So I can afford to eat a healthier diet, besides which food costs less when you stop eating sugar and carbs anyway. I still cannot afford to eat vegan recipes. I still comfort eat too much chocolate. I still criticize my own diet although I am no longer anorexic as I was a decade ago. I have not had to eat from skips for thirteen years.
I love myself and it becomes so much easier to identify those around me who do not love themselves, who as a result do not love other people either. Someone once told me there are two sorts of people in the world, two types of hearts: radiant stars and black holes. The black holes suck in all the energy, all the light, and they hate. The radiant stars are their food but also the healers, the ones capable of creativity and genuine happiness. He also taught me the secret of maintaining a radiant star. He did this by quoting Aliester Crowley who without going too much into it, he was very into:
“Love is the Law, the Law is for All. Love is the Law, Love under Will.”
I asked him about this last part, because I found it confusing: if Love is the ultimate foundation and source of creativity and happiness, why is it under Will, which can be used for nasty as often as it can be used for positive? His reply was beautiful: “You said it yourself: it is the foundation. How far do you think you can get without that ground under your feet?”
It was a long time before I learned sufficient legalese to understand that the word under-stand’’ means not ‘to comprehend’, rather it means ‘to stand under the authority of’. Crowley was not teaching that Will is superior to Love. He was teaching that Love is superior to Will but that Will is also a factor. In case you are confused, the word Will is used to describe a faculty of Mind which we could also describe as Intent. I made it my intent to love myself and not let anyone else grind me down.The ones who were used to doing so hated me more for it, but as people say, “Haters gonna hate.” After a lot of contemplation I believe Will is the factor involved in choosing to accept to Love oneself and others, accepting Love for what it is. Or not.
People do still grind me down, usually by envy and manipulation. I adamantly refuse to accept that Loving self is a bad thing. I love: it is not to selfishly take from the external universe. It is a glow, a radiance, a give to the external universe. I love people, even the sociopaths who want to cruelly control me and enjoy my suffering. Those black holes are probably the ones who need loving the most, they are incapable of self love and that is what motivates them to drag everyone else down to their empty and destructive level. Some of them mimic it but when you know what Love is, you can see through that.
There is no point in wasting eternity attempting to fill a black hole. All that does is make it bigger. A black hole ceases to be a black hole and starts to become a radiant star only when it decides to. The physics involved are entirely internal. How the energy is arranged within it so that it can be able to radiate instead of absorb. Humans are lucky, we do have the faculty to choose how we do this, and to accept that changing experiences are involved. Both in that they are necessary to do so, and that they will occur as a result.
©2017 Ordo Octopia
