SELF-ESTEEM, SELF-DECEIT, SELF-ACCEPTANCE, AND FREEDOM

Interestingly, when people are asked if they are a good person, 95-98% answer affirmatively. But by what standard have they come to this assessment? We have objective standards and measures to determine our height, but what do we have to measure our goodness? It seems that we have merely deceived ourselves into believing in our surpassing moral superiority, as many parallel studies indicate:

·       In one study of nearly a million high school seniors, 70 percent said they had “above average leadership skills, but only 2 percent felt their leadership skills were below average.” Another study found that 94 percent of college professors think they do above average work. And in another study, “when doctors diagnosed their patients as having pneumonia, predictions made with 88 percent confidence turned out to be right only 20 percent of the time.”

·       25% of college students placed themselves in the top 1%, relative to their ability to get along with others.

·       84% of Medical Residents thought that Doctors influenced by gifts from pharmaceutical companies, but only 15% of the respondents thought that they would be so influenced.

·       Psychologist Shelley Taylor writes, “Normal people exaggerate how competent and well liked they are. Depressed people do not. Normal people remember their past behavior with a rosy glow. Depressed people are more even-handed…On virtually every point on which normal people show enhanced self-regard, illusions of control, and unrealistic visions of the future, depressed people fail to show the same biases.” (Positive Illusions, p.214)

However, if and when depressed people recover, they become just as self-deluded as the “normal,” according to Taylor. We don’t suffer from a low self-esteem but an inflated self-esteem.  While we universally struggle with feelings of guilt, shame, inferiority, or just gnawing self-doubts, we tend to compensate for these painful feelings with self-aggrandizement, but why?

However, the more we inflate ourselves, the more we need to justify our inflated esteem against the assault of our feelings, and the more scaffolding we need to maintain our façade that we are significant and worthy of love and respect.

But wouldn’t it be easier to just accept and present ourselves as we really are and to admit our crying and insatiable need for success, validation, and love? Instead, it is a burden to carry around our weighty façade wherever we go and to incessantly have to prove ourselves! We crave freedom, but we have imprisoned ourselves with our own unseen shackles – a ball and chain heavier than any made of iron.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we place weights upon our back that we cannot bear? It is not just a matter of proving ourselves to the world; before all else, we need to prove ourselves to ourselves so that we can accept and feel good ourselves. However, this self is not really who we are. It is a falsely constructed self as demanding as a corpse that always needs to be refreshed.

We are told to love ourselves, but we longer even know the self that we want to love. Besides, there are constant emissions from our conscience, like gases from a septic tank, which contradict the image we have created. This means the we are in a continual and tiring struggle with ourselves to suppress the truth.

What then is the answer? Many have become workaholics, addicted to the hope that enough accomplishments will neutralize the stench. President Lyndon B. Johnson obsessively built monuments to his “success”:

• According to one commentator, “It is a curious footnote to history that long before he ran into trouble, Johnson had turned central Texas into a living monument to his heritage and his journey to the summit (the L.B.J birthplace, the L.B.J. boyhood home, the L.B.J. state park, the L.B.J. ranch and more).” (George Weaver, “The Significant Life,”  22)

The Doors’ Jim Morrison faced this struggle for freedom in a different way. His conscience wouldn’t be silenced by self-denial, money or success. Instead, he believed that his conscience had to be saturated and cleansed by self-indulgence until it was wiped clean. He was convinced that this would result in freedom and spiritual purification:

·       “Sensuousness and evil is an attractive image to us now…It’s like a purification ritual in the alchemical sense. First you have to have the period of disorder, chaos, returning to a primeval disaster religion. Out of that you purify the elements and find the new seed of life.” (Quoted from “Hungry for Heaven,” Steve Turner, 96)

Instead of freedom, death claimed him.

If servitude is the incessant need to maintain our front or image, freedom is not having to. It is the freedom to simply accept ourselves as we are, warts and all, and not have to worry about what people might think! But how? Don’t the dreadful feelings and psychological demands that percolate up from the unseen deep need to be addressed?

They must, but they can’t be covered over! The remedy has to penetrate to the very source of the infection. I would now like to suggest a remedy that will directly address the infection. However, we first have to understand our ailment before we can address it appropriately. It is called “sin.” It is both an affront to our nature and conscience and also to the One who has given us our conscience.

Our conscience is a fire alarm. It tells us of a moral problem that has to be addressed. It serves us like our pain receptors that alert us that we must remove our hand from a hot stove. However, in the case of the conscience, we do not appropriately react to its alarm. Instead, we usually tell ourselves that we have done the right thing and, therefore, do not need to apologize. It is like refusing to remove our hand from the burner, insisting that we have placed it just where we want it to be.

We stubbornly refuse to acknowledge our guilt, and it becomes a life controlling infection that putrefies everything else:

·       All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the spirit. (Proverbs 16:2)

The Lord “weighs” us by allowing us to reap what we’ve sown. Consequently, we have to make peace with our Creator by acknowledging our sin and asking for His remedy. However, coming to the Lord is like a mouse coming to the cat. Jesus explained it like this:

·       And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

The judgment is this – we condemn ourselves to the darkness of the cave. I had been a cave dweller, feeding upon endless self-delusions of grandeur. It was only the love of God that had coaxed me out of the cave and into the once painful light of the truth about myself.

I now bask in the light of the forgiveness of Christ and the eternal assurances of his love. It is this love that has enabled me to be transparent and to even laugh at myself:

·       If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31-32)

This is freedom.

THE BELIEF THAT WE ARE DIVINE

A new self-realization group was just advertised on MeetUp. It is one of many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such groups around the New York City area alone. Its claim is quite typical:

·       A glimpse of your True Self, a Reality without fear or obstruction, experiencing bliss and divinity as your very Core. Join for discussion, delicious vegan food, and energy transmission.

I have nothing against vegan food or conversation. However, the claim “experiencing…divinity as your very Core” requires some examination. How would we know when we are experiencing divinity as our very core? None of these groups ever seem interested in providing any evidence that divinity is what we would be experiencing. Perhaps it would just be a matter of wish fulfillment. After all, the idea that we are God is very appealing, especially to us humans who are perpetually seeking anything that will boast our self-esteem.

In fact, a wealth of studies have revealed that we are masters of self-delusion:

·       “In one study of nearly a million high school seniors, 70 percent said they had “above average leadership skills, but only 2 percent felt their leadership skills were below average.” Another study found that 94 percent of college professors think they do above average work. And in another study, ‘when doctors diagnosed their patients as having pneumonia, predictions made with 88 percent confidence turned out to be right only 20 percent of the time.’” (Abcnews.go.com; “Self-images Often Erroneously Inflated,” 11/9/05)

Many such studies demonstrate that self-delusion is pervasive, perhaps even normal. Although we have the inner resources for self-knowledge, we seem to lack the willingness to use them. In “Positive Illusions,” psychologist Shelley Taylor sums up the evidence:

·       “Normal people exaggerate how competent and well liked they are. Depressed people do not. Normal people remember their past behavior with a rosy glow. Depressed people are more even-handed…On virtually every point on which normal people show enhanced self-regard, illusions of control, and unrealistic visions of the future, depressed people fail to show the same biases.” (214)

This demonstrates that these “self-enhancing biases and illusions” are entirely human and serve to explain why we flee from true self-knowledge. It’s just too depressing. We are simply addicted to the pleasure of having an inflated self-esteem, and we will reject anything that might threaten our comfortable addiction. And what can be more self-enhancing that to believe that we are God!

We so love to elevate our self-importance. In light of the reality of pervasive self-delusion, can we trust our “experience of self” and conclude that we are God? Hardly! Nevertheless, on Western college campuses, there are no shortages of students who believe that they are God or god. When I ask them to prove it by just performing a slight miracle, they demur, but this inability doesn’t seem to upset their convictions.

However, the collective wisdom of the ages should give us some hesitation about our convictions about our true identity.

·       “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.”― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

·       “People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

·       “It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.”― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

·       “We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.”― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools

·       “So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment.”― Criss Jami

Jesus taught extensively about self-deception – our hypocrisy of judging and correcting others, when we are even more self-deceived than they (Matthew 7:1-5). He diagnosed the cause of self-deception, which arises from our love for the darkness of self-deception:

·       And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

It might even be worse today. We are taught that believing in ourselves and elevating our self-esteem, apart from any consideration of the truth, is a virtue. We are told, “If it works for you, go for it.” It seems that the test of our beliefs is whether or not it makes us feel good, at least temporarily.

However, there is always a cost for believing the lie. If we do not see accurately, we will eventually crash. What do we tell our wife when she accuses us of treating her badly?

·       We are God. Anything else is illusion, or

·       You need to experience “divinity as your Core.” Evidently, you haven’t experienced it yet.

Neither response will promote reconciliation. Psychologist Roy Baumeister had extensively researched the relationship between high self-esteem and performance, suggesting that there are hidden costs:

·       Recently, though, several close analyses of the accumulated research have shaken many psychologists’ faith in self-esteem. My colleagues and I were commissioned to conduct one of these studies by the American Psychological Society, an organization devoted to psychological research. These studies show not only that self-esteem fails to accomplish what we had hoped, but also that it can backfire and contribute to some of the very problems it was thought to thwart. Social sector organizations should therefore reconsider whether they want to dedicate their scarce resources to cultivating self-esteem. In my view, there are other traits, like self-control, that hold much more promise. (http://imaginefirestone.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/RethinkingSelf-Esteem.pdf)

If you are God, there is no longer a need to learn or investigate. Everything you need is found within. However, there are important lessons to be gained by investigating the nations that have lived with such beliefs for centuries.

In “The King of Knowledge,” a very literalistic commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita, Prabhupada, the late head of the Hare Krishna Vishnavite sect of Hinduism characteristically wrote:

·       The hospital making business is being conducted by the government; it is the duty of a disciple to make hospitals whereby people can actually get rid of their material bodies, not patch them up. But for want of knowing what real spiritual activity is, we take up material activities.

However, if we believe that the only reality is spiritual or that we are all God, then we have eliminated any rationale for attending to the needs of others, especially if our physical bodies are real but illusions that interfere with the spiritual.

How had this thinking affected its place of birth – India? In “The Book that Made your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization” Indian scholar and Christian convert, Vishal Mangalwadi, wrote about the negative effects of Hinduism on India:

·       Our monks did not develop technical aids to improve their eyesight. They took pride in closing even perfectly good eyes in meditation. (108)

If this material world is illusory and the only reality (monism) is that we are part of the universal God-Consciousness, these ideas put the kibosh on learning and technology:

• This attitude toward knowledge could not create and sustain an academic culture where peers and students could challenge, reject, and improve the medical techniques they had received. Thus, India had intellectual giants but our religious tradition failed to build academic communities. Individual genius, knowledge, and excellence in technology are insufficient to build a medical center. (311)

Mangalwadi also claims that Indian religions couldn’t provide an adequate rationale for compassion – a necessary pre-condition for the practice of medicine:

• A person’s suffering was believed to be a result of her or his karma (deeds) in a previous life. In other words, suffering was cosmic justice. To interfere with cosmic justice is like breaking into a jail and setting a prisoner free. If you cut short someone’s suffering, you would actually add to his suffering because he would need to come back to complete his due quota of suffering. (312)

Ideas come with a hidden price-tag, and in regards to monism, the price is devastating. Believing that we are God might be self-elevating at first, but so too are street drugs. Only later will they demand payment.

CAN WE FIND SELF-KNOWLEDGE FROM WITHIN?

It is undeniable that we can find truth by looking within ourselves. We can detect our pains, tight muscles, and feelings. We also have the capacity to know right from wrong. As many agree, we are wired to know moral truths. However, can we attain wisdom and accurate self-understanding by looking within?

Here is where we encounter great differences of opinion. The highly acclaimed spiritual guide and mystic, Ken Wilber, comes out in favor of finding the truth within:

·       The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation…the whole point is to re-member, re-collect, and re-discover that which you always already are. Indeed, the soul's duty in this life is to remember. The Buddhist smriti and sati-patthana, the Hindu smara, Plato's recollection, Christ's anamnesis: all of those terms are precisely translated as remembrance… And so, the soul that finally remembers all this, and sees it however vaguely, can only pause to wonder: How could I have forgotten? How could I have renounced that State which is the only Real State.

Any self-knowledge depends on remembering, but are we able to do this without bias?

In “Stillness Speaks,” mystic and New Age Guru, Eckhart Tolle, suggests that wisdom and self-knowledge are attainable merely through stillness and self-observation:

·       Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.

Although, self-knowledge is theoretically available from within, these writer claim that it is not so easy:

·       “Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.” (Jodi Picoult)

·       “The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.” (Voltaire)

·       “The author concedes that humanity had the fatal tendency to shape truth to our beliefs rather than beliefs to the Truth.” (Frank Turek)

Why do we run from self-knowledge? It is just overwhelmingly painful. In “A Study of History,” Arnold Toynbee expressed his reservation about self-knowledge:

·       Unless we can bear self-mortification, we shall not be able to carry self-examination to the necessary painful lengths. Without humility there can be no illuminating self-knowledge.

As many point out, true self-knowledge is humbling. It shows us who we truly are. As a result, many psychologists have observed that normalcy is self-delusion. One representative study reported:

·       “In one study of nearly a million high school seniors, 70 percent said they had “above average leadership skills, but only 2 percent felt their leadership skills were below average.” Another study found that 94 percent of college professors think they do above average work. And in another study, ‘when doctors diagnosed their patients as having pneumonia, predictions made with 88 percent confidence turned out to be right only 20 percent of the time.’” (Abcnews.go.com; “Self-images Often Erroneously Inflated,” 11/9/05)

Many such studies demonstrate that self-delusion is pervasive. Although we have the inner resources for self-knowledge, we seem to lack the willingness to make use of them. In “Positive Illusions,” psychologist Shelley Taylor sums up the evidence:

·       “Normal people exaggerate how competent and well liked they are. Depressed people do not. Normal people remember their past behavior with a rosy glow. Depressed people are more even-handed…On virtually every point on which normal people show enhanced self-regard, illusions of control, and unrealistic visions of the future, depressed people fail to show the same biases.” (214)

Perhaps pain isn’t so bad? Perhaps it’s even necessary! Sadly, once the psychological torment passes, these aggressive tumors return.  Taylor confesses:

·       “When depressed people are no longer depressed, they show the same self-enhancing biases and illusions as non-depressed people.” (p.223)

This demonstrates that these “self-enhancing biases and illusions” are entirely human and serve to explain why we flee from self-knowledge. We are simply addicted to the pleasure of having an inflated self-esteem, and we will reject anything that might threaten our comfortable addiction.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister has extensively researched the relationship between high self-esteem and performance:

·       For three decades, I and many other psychologists viewed self-esteem as our profession’s Holy Grail: a psychological trait that would soothe most of individuals’ and society’s woes. We thought that high self-esteem would impart not only success, health, happiness, and prosperity to the people who possessed it, but also stronger marriages, higher employment, and greater educational attainment in the communities that supported it. (http://imaginefirestone.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/RethinkingSelf-Esteem.pdf)

• Recently, though, several close analyses of the accumulated research have shaken many psychologists’ faith in self-esteem. My colleagues and I were commissioned to conduct one of these studies by the American Psychological Society, an organization devoted to psychological research. These studies show not only that self-esteem fails to accomplish what we had hoped, but also that it can backfire and contribute to some of the very problems it was thought to thwart. Social sector organizations should therefore reconsider whether they want to dedicate their scarce resources to cultivating self-esteem. In my view, there are other traits, like self-control, that hold much more promise.

Baumeister, Wilber, and Tolle each share the same goal – having accurate self-knowledge. However, it seems that this goal is obstructed to such a degree that the disciplines of remembering, self-reflection, and stillness are incapable of breaking through, and perhaps we don’t even want these disciplines to break through.

This is where Jesus’ words can offer us a renewed hope. One night, a Jewish member of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus, came secretly to question Jesus and was told that he wasn’t even ready to hear the answers:

·       Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3)

According to Jesus, real truth, although available, is not attainable unless we are reborn of God. Elsewhere, in His final moments, Jesus startled His disciples with a teaching that must have seemed over-the-top to them:

·       Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:4-5)

It is terribly humbling to learn that we “can do nothing” apart from Him. It is something that we will not allow ourselves to see, without entirely destabilizing our lives. At all costs, we will resist it.

However, this truth, embraced by AA, has made the difference in many lives so broken that they were ready to receive it. Let us all be so broken!

DOES PSYCHOLOGY UNDERMINE MORALITY?

In “Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality” (2015), psychiatrist and essayist Theodore Dalrymple has written that it does:

·       Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures.

Psychology not only regards us as a product of social and genetic causation, but it also communicates a materialistic worldview in which our values have no objective basis. Instead, we are told that our values are relative to the material causes that have produced us.

With these materialistic assumptions in place, we are doomed to see ourselves as nothing more than materials and the result of material causes. How degrading!

Dalrymple reveals that:

·       The fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind.

How does clinical psych cause self-obsession? Simple – it claims that you have the resources within yourself to change. You just have to learn how to unlock these resources. One way is to believe in yourself by building your self-esteem, and this requires a lot of self-obsession and self-reconstruction.

Why? Life is difficult. We need hope to get out of bed in the morning. Without God, hope inevitably centers on the self, and this will cause us to obsess on whether or not we can bear the weight of this hope. This turns out to be a costly hope.

In contrast, Jesus taught:

·       Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Consequently, I no longer have anything to prove to myself. This is because I am no longer the source of my hope. A great relief!