My biggest disappointment in myself, at age forty-three, is how little I’ve been able to get into the roots of my poor self-concept. Self-acceptance, let alone self-love, is so difficult, so tricky. Yet since acceptance and love of another is impossible without it, the lack of self-acceptance represents the deepest obstacle to peace.
The tricky part is that I want the self-acceptance to be based on a felt inner reality, not on meeting other people’s perceived expectations of who they feel I should be, or who they need me to be for them. It takes wisdom to separate these two very different types of self-acceptances.
I believe the poor self-concept I suffer is also suffered by millions and millions of people, enough to weigh down the consciousness of the planet to the level of serious stagnation and collective depression. To compensate, people still cling to the false and remote hopes that wealth will bring happiness, that revenge will be sweet, that sex will lead to love, that power will create security, that lazy, secure, dull lives will be rewarded with eternal bliss after death, that worldly achievement will represent proportionate inner attainment.
Until we discover, individually and collectively, our true worth, and through that worth, rediscover the magic of existence the way a loved child perceives it, we will not know ourselves well enough to want to survive the twenty-first century.