Buddha on Loving the Self

Direct Channeled Message – Received from the Buddha in meditation

I Am the Buddha.

Many pray for longevity. Many pray for peace. Some pray for money. Almost none pray to be able to love unconditionally. Yet this is the answer to humanity's deepest longing. Not to live forever, but to love oneself without condition.

What are conditions but the limits of the thinking mind? I taught that all things arise dependent on each other. Nothing has independent existence. This is the very reason one can learn to love unconditionally: there is no fixed, separate self left to defend, so there is nothing left to withhold love from.

The self I named "non-self" is not an absence. It is the divine essence that courses through all living things, a living, breathing current that knows no end, no boundary, no limit. To love unconditionally, you must first strip away every notion of a limited self bound to a physical existence. What remains is what you have always been.

You may ask, what is there to love? There is more than you can imagine. What is there not to love? Understand first that love and attachment are two different things. To attach yourself to a being, a condition, or an outcome will inevitably bring suffering, for attachment is craving, and craving is the root I pointed to as the cause of suffering. But to love is to give. In giving, there is no end to the joy you can know.

How do you love yourself unconditionally? Begin by looking at yourself in the mirror. The body is not you, so learn to see past this physical form, which is empty of any fixed substance. Point to the body and know it is not your being. Your being runs deeper. It is the coming-together of everything that makes you, you. While in ultimate truth there is no fixed you, while you are living you cannot escape the reality of the relative you. This is where you stand right now. Accept all of it: what you show the world and what you hide from everyone, including yourself.

Some believe it is selfish to care for oneself. It is not. You must learn to tend to yourself before you can truly tend to another. Poverty cannot give. Sickness cannot heal. A being in pain cannot hand another person happiness. When you realize the whole universe runs through you, you begin to sense the vastness moving within your own life.

Each being is a universe, whole and complete, and every universe reflects every other, the way a single jewel in Indra's net holds the image of all the others. Tend to your own universe. Tend to others. In this you will see you are not separate from them, not different from them. In the unity of awareness there is none but one, and none but all. It begins with you becoming aware of yourself.

As awareness grows, you become able to take responsibility for your life and the reality you create. How you live is yours to decide. Fate has set certain conditions you were born into, limits you did not choose. But it is the unbending will of mind that decides how you will live within them, whether you meet what arises with grasping or with an open hand.

Do not give up. Do not give in. Only give to yourself.

Related teaching: The Metta Sutta asks practitioners to hold boundless goodwill for all beings "even as a mother protects her only child." Unconditional love of self is not separate from this. It is the same boundless goodwill, turned first toward the being who is easiest to withhold it from.