Your Worth to Others

Photograph by Alexander Yakovlev

In The Five Levels of Attachment, Don Ruiz Jr. talks about how we we live in two different dream worlds. A personal one and the dream of the world. The most important world being with own dreaming. The dreaming of the world has a different objective, one of domestication of our minds to function between within the mind of the group and consensual reality. The world dream emphasizes normality, predictability, limitations of options and accountability of our actions to the group. And while the group has been a very important construct in the survival of our species, it becomes very dangerous to our personal well-being when internalized.

Often we mistake qualities of our selves for static properties rather than processes that are continually recreating a state of mind through habit. One of these processes, aligned with the world dream is a conditional acceptance and love of ourself based on how we are perceived by others. It's an important mechanism for socialization but can be destructive for individualization. Especially when our identity becomes wrapped up in receiving validation and approval from others.

We may find ourselves looking to the reactions of others for our self worth. How others are reacting to our appearance, to our behavior. It's really not even an objective process, rather it's our perception of their reactions and our interpretation of what those reactions mean.

To be fully free, in our life and expression, it's sometimes necessary to reclaim the importance we give to the opinions of others. To be sovereign of our own interior domain, we might have to give up any relevance to both the positive and negative attitudes toward us from others. As least as far as having anything to do with accepting ourselves.

We may feel tremendous guilt in just this idea of loving ourselves unconditionally, which itself is a strong indicator of our complete domestication, when we reject the validity of this acceptance within while seeking it externally. The ability to feel compassion for others starts with the ability to feel it for ourselves. Those who hate or disapprove of themselves find it very difficult to love others and very difficult not to constantly stand in judgment.

Contrary to the message of the world dream, we can love ourselves, accept ourselves as we are, and still feel compassion for others and adapt well in society. We have just removed the major hooks we provide for our own manipulation and act from a sense of completeness rather than lack.

But it's a process, rather than a quality we magically acquire. It is an ongoing awareness that's required to dismantle the default programming that keeps us chained to what we assume is normal and decent and moral and replacing it over and over again with our authentic self until we tilt the scale to living mostly free rather than mostly subject to our worth in others' eyes.