What do you love about you?
One of the most popular principles of life is: love your neighbor as yourself. This law is common in almost every culture (religion) and society yet people find it very difficult to love others.

Historical records and psychological studies have shown that we do not obey this law; humans across the earth love their friends and relations but are vicious to those they consider enemies.

Why is it difficult for us to love our neighbor? It’s not entirely difficult to love the other person, we tend to love in return for something, material or immaterial. We tend to love those who support our views and biases about life, offer us support in times of need, and protect us or join our cause against people we consider enemies etc. and we tend to hate those who criticize us or have different ideas and definitions of life.

When people support our prejudice and bias, it becomes easy to love them. It does not matter anymore whether they are our next door neighbor or a person across the ocean. Similarly, when they have a different point of view of life, we tend to dislike them irrespective how close they are; we are quick to dislike whoever calls our beliefs to question.

On a general level, the love we feel for other people is conditional; certain conditions must be met before we can love others; we unconsciously create criteria to be met before we can show kindness, respect, and other attributes of love, and show the opposite of these to anyone who falls short of our conditions.

Why is this so? Why is our love for others conditional? There’s no definite reason why we behave this way, it is natural. In fact, it is safe to think that even the love we have for ourselves is conditional, because we tend to love ourselves better when we have certain things or achieve certain marks in life, and feel disgusted with ourselves when we do not meet these conditions.

Basically, it is easy for us to love others but only as long as they meet the conditions we set for ourselves. In fact, we can even love (admire) others for meeting our unconscious conditions even when we are disgusted with ourselves for falling short, and it becomes difficult for us to love those who fall short of our conditions because we tend not to love ourselves in such situations.

Another reason why it’s difficult for us to love others is because we do not know what we love about ourselves. The love we have for ourselves is usually natural; it’s no different from the love an animal has for itself.

We tend not to apply rational and critical thinking to loving ourselves by properly analyzing our person to recognize reason(s) to love ourselves, in fact, we often pick offense when we get critically analyzed. The love we have for ourselves is automatic and myopic, and occurs irrespective of the knowledge of self.

Why do we need to love ourselves rationally? It’s important for us to critically analyze ourselves because this reveals our true nature. If we can do this, the love we will have for ourselves will be genuine and beyond situations; a love based on the knowledge gained from self-judgment and realization.

Critical and rational love for ourselves empowers us to grow, because we are able to detect faults and defects in our person, and this create the motive for change. Although growth is constant, positive growth can only occur through rational and critical love for ourselves.

HOW TO LOVE OURSELVES CRITICALLY:
It might seem easy, but rational thinking and self-criticism is one of the most difficult things to do; we try as much as possible to avoid it. We would rather analyze others than ourselves, and this is why blaming others is almost automatics for us. It’s safe to say no human can accurately critically analyze themselves and the love we have for ourselves is never completely rational.

We need knowledge to for rationality, we can only properly criticize ourselves if we know what is right. For no one will be able to criticize themselves if they do not know a better way to behave, and do not see a reference for comparison.

This aspect is what the gospel of Christ fixes in everyone who believe in him, and Jesus is set for us as a reference. Through diligent study and obedience, we would gain knowledge about right and wrong, and use the life of Jesus to measure our progress.

For example, a person who finds it difficult to forgive can study the command on forgiveness, especially the part where Jesus commanded that we should forgive as much as seven times seventy times (7 x 70) a day. If such a person diligently obeys this command, they will become a very forgiving person, and they can measure their progress with Jesus who prayed for forgiveness for those who killed him.

Whoever has come to understand the gospels, and has known how Jesus behaved can criticize themselves when they fall short and disobey the gospel. And as they focus on Jesus as their reference, this will give them a clear angle for self-judgment.

IMPACT OF RATIONAL SELF-LOVE:
Rational love is intentional because it takes a certain level of strength to criticize one’s self and this also gives us the strength we need to love ourselves irrespective of situations. It gives us proper knowledge of ourselves and helps us recognize endearing attributes in ourselves, and also helps us recognize these attributes in others.
If we are able to love ourselves unconditionally, this will give us the understanding we need to love others unconditionally too. Our love to other becomes reasonable because it’s based on an endearing attribute we find in them.

This kind of love helps us overcome our biases that hinder us from loving everyone equally. It also helps us to continue to love people even when they hurt us, and also helps us recognize endearing attributes in those who we dislike.

So then, let us all get knowledge by rational and intentional approach to knowing Christ and obeying the gospel so that we might know and love ourselves. Let us also apply this same approach to others. Let us not be bias in our love, let us not be blinded by our own ideas and beliefs to love those who agree with us and dislike those who criticize us.