There is no doubt that the concept of self-love is one of the most misunderstood. Of course, most ordinary people do not even have it in their vocabulary, but it is commonly used among those who are involved in various kinds of therapy or healing work. But what is self-love?

We are born with love to exist, to protect ourselves at any cost. Additionally, we are born with an instinct to seek happiness, wellbeing and the experience of love as an emotional exchange with others, as in giving and receiving. Based on this, we could easily make a false assumption that self-love is given by birth and universal to all humans, but it is not true at all due to our poor relationship with our own self. If anything, the opposite is true. People actually do not like themselves based on dwelling on negative self-image, lack of worthiness, self-criticism, and uncertainty of how other people see us. We ‘like’ ourselves if we gain approval and respect from others, but that is all relative and fleeting. No one feels good enough about themselves.

The way people interpret self-love is purely psychological, like having a positive opinion about oneself. And this is what therapy is trying to do, reverse self-judgment or even self-hatred by reinforcing positive thoughts about oneself. As we all know, this provides very little help, and fundamentally does not work. Humans do not know who they are, and live through their personality which is formed through their relationship with society and starts developing from early childhood. If we are not accepted or loved in childhood we tend to carry the sense of unworthiness throughout the rest of our lives.

To give you another example of misinterpretation of self-love. If you take care of your health, exercise and try to eat good food, is it self-love? No, it is love to live and seeking some kind of happiness in this life.

Self-love is fully intertwined with our spiritual awakening, with awakening of the soul. But the subject is exceedingly complex because even if we awaken our pure subjectivity and realize our Me, we still lack self-love. Moreover, even if we awaken to some degree our heart, we still keep lacking self-love… So where self-love is found and what is really its meaning?

Let’s start with clearly stating that self-love is realized in the heart. However, even though we had a long period of focusing and going into the heart in the teaching, I failed to properly express what self-love is. Awakening of the heart as such does not lead automatically to the realization of self-love. Feeling love is not self-love. Even awakening to pure love is not self-love. Even the realization of the original heart is not self-love.

Pure love is the nature of the heart that eventually emanates into our whole body and the world outside of us. Pure love is the subjectivity of the heart where our individual heart merges with the Divine. But it is not self-love. Self-love is something quite different. Pure love is not emotional, it is not based on emotional exchange, it is not in an active relationship as between subject and object. On the other hand self-love is emotional. But here is a catch: it is emotional but not psychological. You may wonder what is the difference? The meaning of ‘psychological’ is that it has to go through the mind. It is a combination of mental and emotional. So the trap here is that in the pursuit of self-love we tend to activate the mind and through the mind manipulate our emotions in the illusory desire to feel a basic sense of self-love. Such attempts fail miserably.

Someone may seek divine love but without self-love this does not make any sense. You are the very individual manifestation of Self, and you must first create a proper relationship with yourself instead of following your grandiose ideas of universal love.

Before we go any further, ‘who’ is meant to experience self-love? It is the most important question. It is your soul, but we have clarified recently that our soul is ego, the center of intelligence, and this can be challenging for people to accept. But yes, it is ego that is supposed to realize self-love. However, even though the main center of ego is in consciousness, it can realize love to itself only in the heart.

Let me say again. Feeling your heart is not self-love. Feeling love in your heart is not self-love. Feeling the Divine in your heart is not self love. None of these things are self-love at all. So what is?

Self-love has a dualistic component to it, because you need to relate to yourself. You need to fall in love with yourself in your heart. But before this could be even possible, you must feel Me in your heart, which is actually the manifestation of ego, or its own emanation. And then what is needed is a profound transformation of ego so it can activate the deepest emotion towards itself in the heart, and feel that total, absolute, complete and overwhelming love towards its own self in the heart. It is simple, but incomprehensible for most people. It requires meeting oneself on the highest level and actualizing the very essence of love. There is a sense of ecstasy in that love. Do not confuse it with religious fanatics that get ecstatic with their love to imaginary god. This is real, this is you. It is not religion or blind belief. It is a true awakening to who you ultimately are, period. Self-love is the highest emotion that a human being can feel. It is the origin and source of all emotions. This is where emotion remembers who she is in our heart and remembers its absolute love towards oneself. The expected assumption would be that the divine love is higher than self-love, but it is the opposite which is true. By our quest to transcend who we are, we go astray and miss the very reason of our existence as God incarnated – to meet ourselves as love.

Divine love is the impersonal space in the heart the purpose of which is to create the highest environment for the realization of self-love. Self-love is actually the true and ultimate enlightenment to the heart. It is higher than the divine love, or pure love, because it is actually the essence of God’s love for himself, as he awakens to loving himself through or in his creation. You may wonder, how is it so if it’s dualistic in a certain way, and therefore ‘imperfect’? But it is perfect – this is where duality meets absolute unity with oneself, which is what all this is about. But let me ask you in return, how God can know himself without relating to himself? In the inertia of non-duality, God remains asleep. He must awaken and he can do only in our own heart, thereby reaching the peak of his evolution in your heart, my heart and the heart of any true human being as self-love.

All the monuments, huge temples, and shrines of countless traditions and cultures ever built for worship from times immemorial, irrespectively of their rather naive intentions, were not built to humble us into thinking that there is something bigger than us, some inconceivable power that demands our submission. On the contrary – they were built to show us that there is something bigger and inconceivable inside us, the love for our own being, love which surpasses all that exists – self-love. To quote Buddha, while disregarding the common interpretations of the meaning of his words: ‘in the Heavens above and on the Earth below, I alone am the honoured one’.

The meeting of duality and unity is also what our human relations are about. We are so separated from each other that we try to bridge it through emotional exchange. But we are bound to fail and remain separate. But now imagine, just imagine that you truly actualize self-love in your heart and then you begin to relate to others from such a new and wondrous place. Then and only then can you feel the same self-love in the heart of each living being.

I am writing this article spontaneously, so let me say something more. What is this seeming duality in self-love? It is the eternal reoccurrence, the never ending meeting with the essence of who we truly are. It is not a ‘state’ but the ever living love affair with our own self. It is not psychological but it is profoundly emotional. It is the awakening of pure emotion to our own ancient being which is God. And actualizing this constitutes the true enlightenment of the heart.

You seek love, right? By any means. But the only person that can love you is you. How can you expect to receive true love if you lack love for yourself? It is possible to have a meeting of true love with another, but only if this is a soul who feels self-love. This is the simple and unquestionable truth. All the rest is not love but countless compromises that are meant to substitute love, compensating for the lack of it in order to create an illusion of love. This is the reality we are living in. We cannot change it, but we can change the essence of it, which is who we are by awakening to true self-love. One thing is certain, it is self-love that is the meaning of our existence, existence of this universe and the whole of creation. The only way out of Sadness.

King Salomon said that under the sky all is ‘vanity of vanities’ or ‘absolute futility’. Yet in his view, faith in heaven or serving god was the way of this utter meaninglessness. But it is not the imaginary God but self-love that is the way out of this absolute futility. The faith in god is the path of denial, the path of fools. All religions are but the manifestations of the lack of self-love. They are missing the point. Serving God is just a distorted form of absolute futility. Even so-called devotion to God is a betrayal of our heart. What is closer to you than God in the beyond? It is your heart, it is so very close, it is the beloved in you. No need to pray to god in heaven. All you need to do is to feel self-love in your precious and tender heart and this is how you go beyond the futility and desolation of human existence. And then and only then you will know God.