Do I Need Self-Esteem to Love Myself and Others | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

Is it possible to live without having a relationship with yourself? Neither good nor bad? Is it possible to be so completely yourself that the mind made image of me dissolves? Yes, this is why we're here. This is the essence of our gathering. The mind made image is connected to thought, to continuous thinking. It's fueled by, perpetuated by, upheld by the continuous thought processes, many of which are about me and myself. And so I have a through thought, I have a relationship with a thought made entity which sometimes feels quite comfortable and sometimes feels not pleasant. Don't want to have to live with that person. And of course it's true. Many people live with a self that is very unpleasant, that creates a lot of trouble, a lot of problems, a lot of suffering. That continuously criticizes them, that continuously blames them, that continuously tells them they're not enough. And they live with that entity. Mind made conditioned. Mind movements conditioned in such a way that that they attack you continuously. And that's the self that they have a relationship with. They would never live with a person like that. You would run out of the room. You couldn't live with a person for more than a day. If your partner, somebody you live with, did that to you, what your self image is doing to you through thought, you would have filed for divorce long ago. But you can't do that with that because it's your own. The mind, it walks with you. And there you have this complaining and whining and accusing and oh, get away. And a large part of that is because you are identified with thought. There isn't the ability to step back from thought and watch thought, watch that. And here the mind made entity because that self that you have a relationship with is part of the story based self. The me that was the self that I had a very unpleasant relationship with for many years. I had a very extremely painful relationship with myself. I couldn't live with myself anymore. And so I somehow said that's it, I can't live with it anymore, that's it. But that was so total that I no longer sustained, fueled the self through thought. I didn't know anything about it, it just happened. So the mind made image dissolved. The self that I couldn't live with, that was so heavy dissolved. And what was left was simply I. So the I shifted from Whereas before when I said I I was referring to myself. The unhappy, dense I, the story based I that dissolved. And then the true I emerged, had always been there presence. I am nothing in particular anymore. A simple sense of presence or beingness. And for the first time I could walk and be without having a relationship with myself. And that there is something so precious in that I or presence. So it's beyond words. You could say it's like a diamond. It's something extremely, very, very precious. That's why perhaps Buddhism sometimes has the image of diamond. But this is not comparative. It's not a sense of that deepest self, not the mind made self is so precious that it has. It knows itself to be that in a non dualistic way, without needing to compare itself to others. It has nothing to do with the form or any mind form. So as presence arises, you don't need self esteem anymore. You don't depend on that anymore. Because what dissolves is the mind made entity with which you have a relationship. And self esteem is an intermediate thing that for a little while makes your life more pleasant. It's fine. And then after a while you see the unsatisfactory nature even of that. Because you cannot uphold continuous self esteem. It's hard work, all these affirmations. And then things come into your life that tell you the opposite inevitably sooner or later. So then suddenly you don't love yourself anymore. Nor do you hate yourself. Because there's no self to love. There's simply the state of this, which is love, it emanate it.