It is good to be together in the sanctuary at Riverdell and with friends online. There is so much happening in our world that is worthy of note. There was the Goodness Me Wellness Festival in the dell with all kinds of great music and other activities. I understand we shared over forty Attunements. Yesterday in South Africa, Berry Behr hosted a meeting of faith leaders with the Dalai Lama’s representative at Novalis in Cape Town.
There are many things happening in our world worthy of note. We are here to allow something to come to focus in the middle of all that.
Last week, we were celebrating the vastness of Being and the nearness of Being. The presence of Divine Being is not only something that is cosmically vast. It is near to us and present for us. And then we were considering something else, which was the movement of spiritual power in our lives, and in the world in which we live. I would like to consider that with you here this morning and consider a particular dynamic that’s important if that’s really going to happen for us.
I want to speak for a moment of Moses. In our culture today, when someone mentions Moses, we think of the lawgiver. Perhaps we think of Charlton Heston and the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments coming down from Mount Sinai. But Moses was far more than a lawgiver. He was a man who had a profound spiritual experience, portrayed as standing before a burning bush—a profound encounter with Reality that went deep for him. And then he sought to share that experience.
He was not only a lawgiver. He was a profound teacher. One of the things he taught found its way into Jesus’s teaching as the second greatest commandment. It appeared first in Leviticus. And it is the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.
At first, it’s a curious expression. What does it actually mean to love your neighbor as yourself? Does it mean your neighbor is yourself? Or that you should treat them as if they were?
I want to look into the deeper meaning of those words.
So, what happens in the human experience? Would you agree that there is trauma that is present in humanity, and to varying degrees, in individual human beings? At some level, we have all experienced trauma, some worse than others.
And what happens when there is trauma? Classically, when there is severe trauma, people remove themselves from their immediate experience. They go outside themselves. If the circumstance is particularly traumatic, that experience can be dramatically extreme. But in the everyday course of a human life, it can happen in more gradual, unconscious ways in which we step out of our immediate experience, which becomes too painful to be right in the middle of.
And so we can step back and become an observer of our life experience. The observer can be a bystander, a spectator without a sense of full engagement, without fully feeling what is happening, without committing to be there for what is happening for oneself as a human being. Then beyond that, the bystander can become a critic, looking at oneself and being self-critical. It was your own fault this happened. Why didn’t you deal with it better?
Of course, other people are more than happy to help us with that criticism. And then something funny can happen in the human experience. We can criticize ourselves for being a critic.
When does it end? You can criticize yourself for criticizing yourself for being a critic. In some circles, they call that a step out. We are stepping out of our immediate human experience so we don’t experience the pain of it. But on that basis, we also miss all the juice of it and all the empowerment of it.
Here we come to the only significant meaning of the term self-love that I know.
Self-love. What does it really mean to love yourself?
It means to be with yourself—to say to yourself, No matter what anyone else says, no matter what happens, I’m with you. I’m with myself. I’m here for myself.
And if I won’t be here for myself, how can I expect anybody else to be?
And then, what is the ultimate act of self-love? Isn’t it to fully enter your own human experience—to step all the way into it with all our human foibles, all that’s happening in our world and happening to ourselves. And more importantly, with all that is transpiring through oneself. This is loving ourselves so much that we are going to enter fully into that human experience, feel it all, be with it all, and love ourselves through it all.
Sometimes the spiritual experience is looked at as moving higher and higher. And sometimes it is. In the human potential world, it’s better and better every day. Continual improvement. This way of being is not like that. It’s not moving higher and higher. You might even say it’s going lower and lower. It may seem like a lowly thing to be human. And yet we are human beings. Yes, with divine spark, but we are human beings. When there is humility in the face of whatever challenge and whatever trauma we have known, there is a willingness to take on that lowly thing of being with our own human experience and loving ourselves as a human being, no matter what happens.
Through all the successes, through all the screw-ups, through all the enduring of whatever is happening in life—I’m here for you. Totally. Committed.
That is a very different life than most people are living. There can be an attempt to be of service to other people. I’m going to be kind to my neighbor. I’m going to be generous. I’ll be of service one way or another. How does it come off if a person has not been willing to be of service to themselves? To love themselves? And then they are trying to love their neighbor? Doesn’t it come off as false? There is a magnanimity that is being claimed, a generosity that’s being claimed, but yet it is without backing.
Moses was a brilliant spiritual teacher, as was Jesus, who picked up his teaching and carried it forward. And what was it in this matter?
…thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
—Leviticus 19:18
When we truly do love ourselves in the way I have described, we are in position to love our neighbor. We can love our neighbor that same way, not as a spectator to their experience, not as a critic. We can be with them, we can be for them. The spirit of Love that we are knowing can be shared. It can infuse them as it does us.
What happens when we are in this experience? Something remarkable. We find out that in loving ourselves in the way I described, we are loving all people. After all, this is the member of the body of humanity that is closest to us—ourselves. And there is a holographic nature to humanity. All of humanity is in every one of us. When something transpires for one of us, it is happening for all of us.
We have the imprint of all humanity in our individual experience. And so it is handy when we are loving the human being who is closest to us—ourselves. When we are loving ourselves, we are loving all people. And then that love that we are having for all people can flow between us in the sacred hospitality we share.
Sometimes the human heart cries out in the face of trauma. Ouch! And the heart appeals to the thinking capacity: Save me! Save me! Then the solution the mind finds is to flee from that experience that a person is having. The person becomes, as we say, besides themselves, not fully in their own flesh. Of course, physically, they haven’t gone anyplace. But emotionally, they have. Spiritually, they have.
Spiritually, they are not quite there. They are, as we say, living in their head—living as a bystander, an observer, and even a critic. And if they’re doing it to themselves, they are likely to do you the honor of doing the same to you.
It might seem indulgent to love yourself—perhaps a soft, new-age notion. And perhaps we think a person should get a grip and simply be tougher.
But if we know someone who is not loving themselves—and therefore not really loving anyone else, no matter how hard they try—wouldn’t we all say, Give us a break. Take it easy on yourself. Love yourself. We’ll all be happier if you do.
Love yourself, because it all works when we love ourselves. When we love ourselves, we are loving each other automatically. We don’t have to try.
What is the usual human ethos about loving one another? Doesn’t it go like this? Even though I judge you harshly, I’m going to love you anyway. How magnanimous!
We are here to, first of all, love ourselves. And then in that act of loving ourselves is the template for loving each other. Not some kind of faked love, not some kind of half-hearted attempt at love. Just the natural state.
We are meant to be in our human experience. And in that experience, we have to deal with the opposing forces in our own life. Yes, we have challenges. But we can be here for ourselves in the middle of those challenges, whatever they may be.
The truth of any human being is that they are made in the image and likeness of Divine Being. So we do not have to try to be that. We do not have to attempt to meet any standard of perfection we have in our mind. Living a fulfilled life is being humble enough to fully enter our human experience and be ourselves. Then we are not perfect according to any standard of human culture. We are perfectly ourselves. We are loving ourselves.