How Can I Love Myself? | Eckhart Tolle Answers

If you want to learn about not having a mental self image, watch your dog or your cat. They don't have an opinion about who they are, they just are who they are. How can I love myself? What is this? I don't remember ever saying that you should love yourself. So is it bad to love yourself? No, of course not. Is it better than to hate yourself? Yes, of course. Loss. Let's start with many people are uncomfortable with themselves. They dislike who they are. Perhaps they dislike their body, how they look. Perhaps they dislike who they are as a person, don't feel they are good enough, or are self critical a lot. Many people live with negative self image, which of course all consists of certain types of mind activity. And that's not pleasant. And it may be for some of those people, once they realize that they live with a mind pattern that continually criticizes them and says negative things about them, they begin to realize that it's a mind pattern, this self hatred is a mind pattern, and that it's harmful, it's not pleasant, and that it can go beyond it and begin to replace it with more negative thoughts about more positive thoughts about themselves. And having positive thoughts about yourself, that kind of thing would perhaps usually be called beginning to love yourself, to feel good about yourself. But it's not easy, that shift from feeling bad about yourself to feeling good about it. Sometimes it requires a lot of convincing. I would regard loving yourself as perhaps an intermediate stage in one's awakening. But the essence of the awakened consciousness is that you go beyond having a particular idea in your mind that represents yourself as a mental self image that you relate to. Because basically it's ego. A mental self image of who you think, this is what I am. This is who I am. If you want to learn about not having a mental self image, watch your dog or your cat. They don't have an opinion about who they are, they just are who they are. So that removes an enormous amount of problems from their lives. Of course, they don't have the mind activity that creates a self image image in their head. They are pre mind and therefore their life is far less problematic than human life. You can see how wonderful it is not to have a self image. You can look at an ugly dog or an ugly cat, they don't have a problem with that. Even an overweight dog or cat. Okay, no self image. Or a dog that has lost its sexual powers. It doesn't become part of the dog's self image. The dog says and says, oh my God, I can't father puppies anymore. I. I've lost my male power. How dareful. It's not part of the dog doesn't have a self image. If there's no sexual desire, there's no sexual desire. There's no thinking around that. Nothing to do with me, there's no problem. Or the cat suddenly can't jump up this fence anymore. It's getting too old. The cat doesn't say, oh, I've become useless now. What's the point in caring? It just is. It doesn't detract from the self image of the cat because it doesn't have a self image. So how wonderful to live without an image of who you are. Because you are the presence. You are not the form, that's a temporary expression of you, but you are the underlying presence. And when you feel yourself as the underlying presence, you don't need to live through some mental image of who you are. And that's where you go beyond hating yourself. But you also go beyond loving yourself. It's just being yourself, similar to the dog, but it's not a regressive step, it's a step forward for humans. You go beyond the mind made sense of self. You don't fall back to the pre mind made sense of self. You don't need to live through a self image of who you are. The more presence that comes into your life, the more you feel yourself to be the presence. Not some mental construct. Of course, somewhere on the periphery of your mind there may still be some. There is a little bit of a mental construct, but it does not provide the basis for your sense of identity anymore. Of course, yes, you know your body is too thin or too fat. Assess the mind, but that's just how it is, or this or that. Lacking. Yes, it's still. There's some vague self image still there, but it is not the foundation for your sense of who you are. The foundation for your sense of who you are is you are awareness, you are presence. And that's a liberation from the self image. And that's wonderful. So it's not go beyond hating yourself and then also go beyond loving yourself. If you need to go through the stage of loving yourself because you cannot go directly from hating yourself to presence, then do go through the stage of loving and then step beyond that.