Being able to love ourselves truly and authentically requires us to silence the voices that have come from ‘out there’ and that now play in our heads, telling us how things are and how they must be. From our first breath we have absorbed, both consciously and unconsciously, the world views of the people around us. Because many of these people have authority, and because we were too young to do otherwise, we accepted what they said.
Experience soon teaches us that a lot of what has been conveyed to us as truth is actually not true for us. That many of the opinions, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, stereotypes, mores, customs, traditions, habits, and even rules, laws and ‘commandments’ (including the entrenched Biblical variety) are nothing more than that, and they do not in fact constitute truth.
They are not truth because they do not apply in all situations and under all circumstances, which must be the hallmark of a notion that is absolute. Even the most stringent and authoritative conventions, including such dicta as ‘Thou shalt not kill’ are only true in certain contexts. Killing in self-defence has long been accepted as both lawful and morally justified throughout the ages. And this is just an obvious example of the subjectivity of our civil, religious, social and political codes.
Post-modern theorists, including Jacques Lacan and Mikhail Bakhtin, have effectively challenged the notion of of objective truth. Lacan demonstrates how the meanings of words and language ‘slip’ according to context, showing that what we so often have accepted as truth is nothing more than individual perspective shaped by culture, religion, class and caste.
The only place absolute truth can exist is within us. It is therefore crucial for us to learn to become familiar with the voice of our truth. We spend so much time ignoring or silencing the truth that arises naturally within us, substituting what we feel and, if we have sufficient experience, know to be true with all else that merely parades in this world as truth.
I can remember one experience that made me realise my own truth. I was trying to buy a house in north London in an area where there were many Hassidic Jews. I had grown up in an area of Melbourne where I had a lot of Jewish neighbours and I felt a great affinity with, and affection for, Jewish people .
But alongside these feelings I had absorbed a prejudice from my father. For many years he had worked with wealthy Jewish businessmen and it was his opinion that Jewish people always looked after their own, over and above anyone else.
At one point in the house-hunting process I started to become frustrated. It seemed to me that Jews tended to sell to other Jews, thus locking me out of the market. My frustration increased to a point where I voiced my father’s bias to my solicitor, saying exactly what I had been told all my life.
There was silence on the end of the line. In quiet horror I realised that my solicitor was Jewish. I felt sick. I knew I had not been true to my true self. I realised in that moment that I didn’t truly believe what I had said. I was merely articulating a part of me that had been created and fashioned by the important people and influences of my life.
When I got off the phone I turned to the spiritual texts that had sustained me all my life, particularly when I was in emotional turmoil. This is the verse of the Bible that confirmed my own truth:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galations 3:28)
At the time I was in my late 20’s and trying to cast off the social, religious and political pressure that told me that men were better, and deserved better, than women. If I was so keen to ameliorate the artificial differences culture imposed on the sexes, then it was incumbent on me to see the equally false differences that seemed to divide different religious, national and cultural groups.
In that moment I knew what my truth was. I called my solicitor and apologised. He was clearly surprised. He told me he was about to call me and tell me he could no longer represent me, but then my heartfelt and sincere apology caused him to change his mind. He even went so far as to say that he had never had anyone apologise for, and retract, their blind prejudice and he was extremely touched and grateful for it. We both felt and were blessed by this healing.
Only love is true. In fact love is synonymous with truth. That is why loving ourselves leads to knowing our true selves and our own truth.
