People sometimes ask if the point of the Living Inquiries is to realize near the end of the inquiry that there is no inherent self. Well…that is one thing that can happen. But you might also find a kind of deep self-love when you stop using inquiry to change your experience. This paradox of no inherent self to be found and also a delicious loving of ourselves as we are in the moment never needs to be reconciled intellectually. It is just grokked in experience when we stop using inquiry to change ourselves and our experience and merely allow it all, asking simple questions along the way in a non-violent, loving, accepting way.
– Scott Kiloby
Self-love is very simple, and yet not always easy (to notice). It’s a love for what’s here, as it is. A simple, ordinary, quiet love for sensations, sounds, smell, taste, words, images that are here now, as they are.
Initial version…..
Self-love = love for what’s here…. sensations, images, words, sounds, tastes, smells, responses to all of it (also sensations, images, words). Love for what appears as a self. Love for self as the human self, the me, what a thought says is me. And love for Self as the whole field of awareness and it’s content, and what allows it all. (And that love is not – only – a love of that idea, but of the field of experience as it is now.) Even, finding love for frustration, anger, resentment, hopelessness, despair….. Finding love for what appears absent of love.