HONOURING YOURSELF

If we do want to start to honour ourselves, to take back our power and
to begin to live more purposefully, then we need to understand some
fundamental things.


From beginning we are taught to conform. Identify. Be sympathetic of or mindful of what others think and feel and feel. And of course this right and good. But in terms of your inner journey, this a big block. The inner journey being a completely new departure, which does not really conform to, or fit with your old world. But what usually happens is that people carry on in old mode, by applying a value system where it no longer appropriate. A good example is our adult value system. Or what we believe to be true as adults. We often apply this to our perception of our childhood world, completely forgetting that a child does not have an adult value system, obvious as this may seem. How this translates is simply that a child will feel things which the adult will find unacceptable. An adult will say truly, that I do not feel any hatred towards family members. This is true for the adult. And yet as a child it may have been very well the case that the child did feel this hatred. In this way we falsely apply a set of conditions to an inappropriate location. If we say I can’t jump 20 feet in air. That true. But if we were on the moon, it would be patently untrue.

Thus, honouring yourself, is to put yourself first for a change. To allow yourself to be honest about what you may have felt as a child and to do this without prejudice. Also it means in everyday life, not to take such an adult view of what we say we are feeling. Truth is, and one most people would prefer to ignore is, that we need to go thru dysfunctional in order to become functional. Mostly, people just want to embrace a more positive healthy option straight away. And this often encouraged or seconded by self-help literature which, in order to be successful or effective will stress the positive, the wholesome, the beneficial, over the evil ‘negative’. It will always encourage you to think there are formulas, answers, solutions to things and not, sometimes long and difficult processes that may last for years. This is not to say, and I repeat NOT, that positive wrong or bad. No. Positive good. What I’m saying is you can be positively negative. Think. I’m saying we can put our dysfunctionality to good use and that is kinda cool, and what artists have always done. What I’m saying is you should build your church on a rock and not on a shifting sand . And that rock is truth. Think. Truth may not be P.C., but it is truth. And here truth is that if we feel something, that thing must exist. Be in us. Have an origin. To ignore it because it’s bad, not productive, negative, is the height of stupidity.

In the Magician, a novel by Somerset Maugham, the hero meets a magician in Paris. Hero finds magician a disreputable, repulsive character. He makes point of showing his contempt and disgust of him. This result is bad consequences. Read the book. It cool! Here though we can see how very aware Maugam was of the view we take of the dysfunctional, here seen in shape of repulsive magician, and how we shun what we consider unwholesome, negative and bad. And how this results in us having problematicos!!! Think. We could just as easily be non-judgmental and open, for will our condemnation of something, change anything? Answer of course is no. The ‘evil’ magician remains evil wether we condemn or shun him or not. As Osho points out in ‘yoga:the science of the soul’, the world runs on prejudice. We develop beliefs, inflexible opinions and dogmas. We learn to shun, to label, to judge, to be against, often purely on reflex, with no personal experience or knowledge to back it up.

To honour yourself, start by recognising the true nature of what we term society. Culture. Civilisation. These slippery terms we have for that strange sea we swim in. For wether we like it or not , people simply do not create social structures which encourage or enable us to uplift ourselves. Social structures are self serving and exist simply to keep on existing. That is all. Our world may well help us to achieve, live, succeed, make art, be poor, whatever, but it does not encourage or help us to transcend. In truth, it probably does the exact opposite. It suppresses, it indoctrinates, it censors; people become asleep, and this sleeping sickness can take many forms, be it clever, stupid, religious, new-age, scientific, you name it. So truth is, awareness eclipsed at birth and then ruthlessly suppressed until death. Think. This is our world. It’s not a political theory it’s a fact. If you say there are no facts, no truths, then understand this. The person who is saying that has had their awareness eclipsed at birth and then ruthlessly suppressed, meaning…that person is asleep!

Now this is a radical truth. By you need a radical truth to deal with a radical situation. This does not mean however, that people are intrinsically evil or that society bad, or we need to be political extremists carrying bombs and stuff. That would be stupid. On the one hand is our understanding. On the other hand is the action which results from that understanding. We needn’t ‘act it out’ if we realise, understanding the nature of society, is to understand what has happened to ourselves, and therefore it is we who have to change, and not society. To say we should change society is to take the symptom for the disease, as we are the creators of society ultimately, and it’s as Shakespeare says, ‘the fault is in us, Horatio, in that we are underlings’. Like Caliban, we see the ills of society and raging at our mirror scream, “No. It’s wrong! It can’t be allowed!” The very first step in honouring yourself is to know, it must be allowed, yet we must still know it shouldn’t be. For as long as we continue to deny the essential rottenness of social systems there will be no progress. Whilst at the same time recognising the need for social systems! It is of course an anomalous situation. A contradiction. A logical impossibility. An impasse. The way forward is the way back. This is radical thinking. It is honouring yourself, a thing you haven’t done until now.

Having written this I then watched Simpson’s episode where Ned Flanders loses his home in a hurricane and undergoes a ‘Job’ like crisis of faith. He ends up in the nut house and undergoes therapy. Turns out Ned’s problem is, yes! You guessed! He has never honoured himself. Having all his life suppressed his anger because his hippy parents couldn’t discipline him, it resulted in his bonkers episode. So you see. When a thing is so obvious it has become a joke in the Simpsons, isn’t it time we gave it careful consideration?

Wha da ya mean?! You don’t like the Simpsons! Really. Bah, humbug!