Self-Worth

Many of us feel as though we’re being judged by others or ourselves.  Are we accomplished enough?  Pretty enough?  Intelligent enough?  Strong enough?  Rich enough?  Popular enough?  Do we measure up?  Have we earned enough self-worth?

That’s the perpetual problem: self-worth.  If we are not accomplished, pretty, intelligent, strong, rich or popular enough, we feel as though we are flawed.  Wrong.  Guilty.

Self-worth is an idea born of judgment.  Assessing our or someone else’s “worth” is just our ego’s attempt to feel better about itself by inflating itself or deflating others.  When we put our ego aside, we simply enjoy life, and the idea of self-worth doesn’t even come up.

Who is to say that beauty, intelligence, physical strength, money, popularity or accomplishment make one “worth” something?  What “value” do we have in an existential sense, and how is that value increased by worldly characteristics and deeds?  What currency is used to determine one’s “value”?  Is there a cosmic dollar? 

Worth is not an inherent quality.  One simply exists; there is no “value” assigned.  Now, one might be “valuable” to society as a scientist, entertainer, soldier, etc, but that is only one’s utilitarian value to other people. 

Not only is self-worth an absurd notion, but all the things that we use to measure self-worth are temporary.  Accomplishments are from the past.  Looks fade.  Physical strength diminishes.  Wealth can be lost.  Mental faculties can deteriorate.  People’s opinions can change.  This is precisely why the “self” as most people define it is false: we endure after those things fade or disappear, so any self based on them is certainly not us.

We worry that the false self we perpetuate is not as good as the false selves that other people perpetuate.  We miss the natural calm and peace we could get by simply being, without comparing or competing.  We feel a constant need to perform, to impress, to improve, to outdo, so we can never accept who we are, the way we are, now.  And the more we try to improve the false self, the more reality we give it, that is, the more we fool ourselves into believing it’s real.

Problems

We constantly “solve” problems, never realizing that the only problem is the very self we pretend to be. Lack of money, beauty, accomplishments, popularity, or what have you, is a “problem” only in the context of the erroneous belief that we must have more of them. If we would see through the lie and realize the conscious entity we truly are, then the false self would disappear, and consequently so would all of our “problems”.

The false self guarantees that we will always have “problems”. The entire premise is that we are always in a state of lack. As soon as we solve one “problem”, something else that we had previously given little or no thought to will become a “problem”. For example, if our problem is that we don’t earn enough money, we might look for and find a good-paying job. Will we be perpetually happy from then on? Of course not. We will then tell ourselves that we’re overweight, or not good-looking enough, or that we don’t have enough friends. We will be no happier, no more at peace, than we were before we got the job.

What is the point of “solving problems” when our state of well-being never changes? Why live a stressful existence of continually putting out fires? The only way to have perpetual peace is to drop the idea that we never have enough and that we must keep gaining/improving.

Give Up the Ghost

To say that you are a Caucasian, or a man, or a Republican, or a Venezuelan, or a Buddhist, or a lawyer, makes about as much sense as a banana calling itself a yellow, or an ice cube calling itself a cold. The labels we use to describe things are adjectives, not nouns. You cannot be an adjective; you can only be a noun.

So, what noun are you? A conscious entity. That’s it. No body. No possessions. No reputation. No group affiliation. It’s a difficult concept to grasp if you have spent your life looking at everything as mere physical objects.

Let’s say you were to lose a leg, or an arm, or an eye, or your money, or your house. Or let’s say you were to change jobs or political parties. Would that change you? Would you be a different entity?

When you define who you are by your attributes, you might become afraid to lose them. For example, someone who has always been a Democrat or a Republican might be deathly afraid to give up that party affiliation. This is what makes them defend their long-held viewpoints, even if those viewpoints don’t seem as correct as they used to. It’s not about truth – it’s about self-preservation. That is, preservation of what they perceive as themselves, which is of course their false selves, only they can’t see that.

A lot of thought, activity, worry, and defense go into the false self, so even if we are “winning”, there is still a constant level of discomfort and stress that we endure. We call this the cost of doing business: internal currency (physical and mental energy) in exchange for external commodities (wealth, approval, housing, food, possessions, social acceptance).

As long as we perceive that the benefits of upholding the false self outweigh the costs, the false self will endure. Only when the amount of suffering (worry, stress, fear, regret, frustration) outweighs the benefits will we become sick and tired enough to drop it.

Freedom

What is freedom?  “That’s easy,” you say. “Freedom is to not have anything bad happen to me, and to do what I want when I want.” While those things are pleasant, that definition falls short of what freedom really is, which is the ability to experience anything without resisting what is. For example, someone cuts you off in traffic. Your ego has a knee-jerk angry reaction. Now you are in a mental prison of your own creation. Sure, you are free to react in this or any other way, but you are trapped in an unpleasant mental state that you do not want to be in, hence you are not free. You cannot accept what is, you resist it, and you cannot change it. Welcome to prison.

Freedom does not mean that everything happens the way you think it should, because that would limit you to a small set of circumstances. Freedom encompasses all: sunshine, rain, gain, loss, food, hunger, water, thirst, work, rest, companionship, aloneness, pleasure, and pain. If you cannot accept every circumstance, then you are not free. Now, if you incur a very painful bodily injury, that is an extreme case, and accepting the pain might be impossible, but the vast majority of “problems” are quite manageable events that pass with no long-term harm.

True freedom means the ability to choose not only what to do, but also how to feel. If a motorist does not actually smash into your car or cause you any physical injury, then any negative reaction on your (i.e., your false self’s) part is a component of your self-created prison, for you have decided, “I refuse to be happy because he cut me off.” So you have exercised your freedom to choose how to react, but in the process you have thrown away your freedom by putting yourself in a mental box, not to mention poisoning yourself with anger, frustration, high blood pressure, heart palpitations, or what have you.

We are always free to act, react, or not act or react, in any way we choose. It might seem as though our knee-jerk reactions are uncontrollable, but that’s only because of the choice we’ve made to create and maintain a false self that doesn’t want certain things to happen. We can drop this false self any time we choose. If we choose not to, then we will remain emotional prisoners and experience pain whenever anything threatens our ego.

We can be free only from the false self, not as the false self. The false self can never be free no matter how much “stuff” it gets, because it will always be dependent on that stuff. The false self believes that getting whatever it wants makes it free, but its freedom is constrained to that very narrow condition, hence it really imprisons itself.  Plus, the false self is driven by desires it did not choose. Since it cannot let go of these desires, it will always be a slave to them. It might be free to pursue what it wants, but it will never be free to choose what the things it wants are.

The true self doesn’t need anything worldly. It feels happy/peaceful/blissful just to be. Not that it doesn’t want to participate in the world. It enjoys things of this world, but because it is already at peace, it does not depend on worldly things in order to feel good.

So the only path to true freedom is to drop the false self. This will allow us to view things as they are, not in terms of how they affect a false self, and unless they pose an imminent physical danger, we will not react with emotional pain.

Materialism vs. Spirituality

There appear to be two ends of the life spectrum: materialism and spirituality.

Materialism involves money, possessions, social status, accomplishments, fashion, beauty, television, physical comfort, judgment, and, when necessary, lying, stealing, and violence.  Friends and lovers are chosen based on physical appearance, wealth, or other things that we can “get” from them.  People hoard their wealth so that they can enjoy more and better food, housing, transportation, entertainment, medical care, etc.  In business we try to “beat” others and maximize our gain.  Compassion is viewed as foolishness and weakness.

Spirituality involves seeing who we are underneath our externals.  We value each other because we are conscious, sensitive beings, and we do not favor one person over another according to their physical beauty, wealth, accomplishments, nationality, skin color, or blood relation.  We are in this world but not of it.  More material (possessions, lovers, social status) does not necessarily make us happier, and in fact will make us less happy if we use it to separate ourselves from others.  If one person is cold, starving or sick, we have compassion and help him (if we are able to) because he is suffering.  In business we provide a product or service for a fair price and do not attempt to finagle more than that, because to do so would be unfair.

Either end of the spectrum can be unpleasant: materiality causes fear, suspicion, anger and loneliness; while spirituality can prevent innovation and leave us vulnerable to being taken advantage of by materialists.  We can balance these, but that might still be unpleasant: a materialist might despise being fair or generous, and a spiritual person might not enjoy having to be distrustful of some strangers or business acquaintances.  Can/should we live a double life of some materialism and some spirituality?  Can we maintain integrity and dignity while doing so?

Perhaps this balancing act is what we need to learn in order to grow.  Maybe that’s why we’re here in the first place.  (There is no way to know of course.)  Pure materialism can cause lots of fear, anger and frustration.  Pure spirituality involves rejection of the world, possibly leading to starvation and disease (if we just meditate instead of growing crops or building shelter).  Developing the ability to balance the two takes growth, effort, honesty, accomplishment, and compassion.

Refusing the Now

We can always have peace and rest now.  But we refuse it.  We insist on thinking.  Sometimes it’s about the future, sometimes the past, sometimes even the present, but we think ourselves right out of peace.  “I have to run these errands.”  “Bob said/did something I didn’t like.”  “My investment might lose value.”  “My thighs are fat.”  “What will happen to me?”  We look for any excuse to reject pure experience.  If nothing bad is happening, we will conjure something up.  We don’t want the Now because we are so focused on selfing that we can’t focus on what is actually happening.  We would rather fret over stuff that happened or stuff that hasn’t happened or how the present affects us than feel what is happening.  So the false self prevents us from experiencing the Now and thus guarantees that we will not truly live.

We often consider the Now to be boring.  We can’t, for example, just accept the feeling of a good stretch, or a sunset, or the wind on our skin, or the song of a bird, or the comfort of a soft couch.  “I’ve got important things to think about,” we say to ourselves.  “Obligations.  Fears.  Regrets.  People I hate.”  And so we resist everything: the present, the past, and the future.  All we can feel is our own resistance.

We torture ourselves with our thoughts while erroneously believing that they are somehow protecting us.  From what?  Even if we were to incur some loss of wealth or social status as the result of not staying “on top of things”, would that be any worse than the horrible state of non-living?  Isn’t this a greater and more immediate threat?  Sometimes it is better to live now and pay later.

The Joy of Not Knowing

Not knowing is fun because it enables the joy of learning.  Opinions and beliefs can make us stop learning because we think that we already know everything we need to know, so we see information as useless because it will either repeat or contradict what we already “know” to be true.

Not knowing what will happen in the future can be frightening (if we choose to see it that way), but it is also what keeps life interesting.  If we always knew what was coming next, so that there were no surprises, how fun would life be?

Not knowing how a movie or ball game ends frees us to enjoy the surprise of it.

Not knowing that a particular religious belief is “correct” frees us to look at life and feel who we are with immediate clarity, without running it through the filter of some man-made thought system and without worrying that we are violating some cosmic law or failing to please some judgmental deity.

Not knowing who we will meet at a social event frees us to make new friends and lovers.

Not knowing that a particular political party is “right” frees us to see politicians and events honestly, without feeling the need to defend one party or villainize another in order to maintain a false self that is built upon identification with one of them.

Not knowing a joke frees us to enjoy the punchline.