A Little Bit of Light Dispels Alot of Darkness: Self Love or Narcissism: Marc Gafni
Happy Chanukah:
Self-Love is Not Narcissism (I am God )
The master Menachem Mendel of Kutzk said that a decent person never deceives others. I would add that a special person never deceives himself.
To say that you are anything less than you at your best, at your most wondrous and beautiful, is to deceive yourself, deceive others, and to deceive God. In the end though, the greatest deception is to think that you are separate.
Whenever I talk to people about self-love — which is, after all according to most authorities the most important injunction and the goal of the entire biblical project— there is always a group that gets upset. It sounds narcissistic, they claim, or it will lead to selfishness.
So let’s take a moment to make two clear distinctions. Narcissism is to be in love with your external self — your mask. This is not a good idea because sooner or later masks fall off and then you are left loveless. Self-love is to love your insides — your Holy of Holies.
Selfishness is to narrow your circle of caring until it only includes yourself and perhaps those that directly affect your well being. Selfishness is then a narrowing of your identity. It stems from the failure to see your interconnectivity with circles beyond yourself and ultimately with all of being. That is definitive non-erotic thinking. Self-love, by contrast, is not self-centered at all; rather it is ultimately expansive.
Furthermore, self-love is radically erotic in that it is the experience of being interwoven within the great fabric of being. It is the deep intuition that the world is a unified, loving consciousness in which you participate. The only true sin, from which all else flows, is to deny your greatness.
Ultimately, the answer to who I am is “I am part of God.” It is the only humble answer to the question you can give. To think you are not lovable is the ultimate arrogance because it says that you are independent of God. All loving, as we shall see at different levels of depth during the unfolding stages of our journey, is about freeing us from the lonely prison of our ego fortress where the only rule is brute survival and competition.
marc gafni
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