#4 Calming the inner-judge
When one has only ever known oneself as an individual who’s felt importance varies based on how they are treated by others and from the materialistic messaging received through their devices and society in general, the individual experiences frequent states of emotional vulnerability. This creates inner-insecurity, where it is easy to be unsure of oneself and led down life paths that can continually reinforce the message that your existential worth is relative to ‘outer varying material factors’, which leads you away from the truth-based knowledge of your true value. In this modern world, the choice to move in directions that accelerate a disconnect between ‘who one thinks they are’ compared to the truth of ‘what they are’ has never been so easy and optional. Basing your identity and, therefore, life experience on how others judge you in relation to material factors, puts you on a path that inevitably will have high rises that are coupled with intensely deep lows. When our identity and, therefore, ultimate beliefs about oneself are constructed by such superficiality, we internalise the judgements we receive from the ‘outer’ based on the overemphasised value we place on shallow critiques, which results in creating a powerful inner-dialogue that mirrors these judgement.
This means, if you see yourself ultimately as a material creature, you are extremely susceptible in forming beliefs and thoughts that can destroy your world from the inside out, as you become a self-judge always holding yourself to standards based in the material world. Often these standards are completely unrealistic to hold as they are based on the information one obsesses over communicated via their devices. These devices encourage people to post information that paints a picture-perfect illusion of what their life is actually like. Then, when such info is consumed by others, thoughts of self-ridicule based on judging oneself up against the over-inflated material standards communicated causes emotions of contraction that seem to confirm one’s existential ‘lack’. This can result in the forming of a warped untrue perception of self-identity and perception towards others, causing individuals to compete and react with their own posts of a filtered airbrushed version of their life. Or the individual may simply recoil inwardly as a result of overwhelming self-judgement, as one longs to achieve such unachievable heights of materialistic joy but harbours a sense of lacking worth in relation to this human-generated illusional promise that prioritising materialistic values is the pathway for lasting life-fulfillment.
We can see here how placing materialistic aspects of life as the highest values that make up our identity is a recipe for becoming your own worst merciless judge in life, based on unrealistic standards that run in an opposite direction to the truth of your infinite worth. This is a recipe for sustained ever-present suffering in one’s life, as we know one’s inner ancient emotional Self will always signal a disapproval towards delusions of one’s worth being materially based. The fact is that there will always be an inner-judge as long as we are internally metaphysically constructed by ‘values’. The presence of values equates to an emotional need to fulfill such values, which is where the ’judge’ comes in to play to ensure you embody and make choices that align with such values. The judge exists to make one aware of when they stray off the path towards the fulfillment of conscious and unconscious values via negative emotional signalling. The unified value at the centre of us all, that is our infinite worth, is hierarchically of higher ordered compared to the ‘materialistic’ values of life. So, when one sees themselves and others as fundamentally material creatures, the resultant construction of one’s life-values will often be out of alignment with this deep set of naturally occurring values. The inner-judge, in the form of incessant thoughts, can become relentless in its signalling of discontent, which is a sign that one’s ego is becoming to entrenched in beliefs of lack and materialism.
When one’s conscious values align with the silent truth of your unlimited value, the judge is still present, but this ‘judge of truth’ is balanced with a presence of forgiveness. The reason for this is, if you live a life that acknowledges the infinite worth of your own and other’s lives and, thus, work towards the betterment of the greater structure of life via sacrificial selfless choices and actions, then this judge will only signal disapproval when one starts to perceive oneself and make choices that misalign with this ‘true perception’. However, if one makes honest mistakes on the pathway aligned with one’s true worth, then the inevitable feelings of self-judgement will be simultaneously met with forgiveness, which helps the individual integrate the rich learning afforded through the process of ‘mistake making’ and, in turn, continue in this ‘correct’ trajectory of life with increased refinement.
Therefore, to alleviate an overwhelming felt sense of inner-judgement, we must explore consciously the reality of one’s own true boundless value in order to embrace the presence of forgiveness that is as equally powerful in helping individuals unfold the truth of their nature and unimaginable potential from within. The first conscious act of forgiveness towards oneself must come in the form of viewing oneself accurately, as most judgement you actually receive from within stems from the ignorance one has towards their own unlimited worth. To view oneself with limited worth is possibly the biggest mistake one can make in life, setting oneself up to be the recipient of one’s own self-constructed avoidable suffering. Therefore, to calm this inner-judge means to first perceive oneself correctly by agreeing with the knowledge and wisdom this judge has of your infinite worth. This will allow the judge to respond with forgiveness for previously seeing one’s worth through a ‘lens of lack’.
This simple yet profound acknowledgement can be extremely freeing with emotional feelings of truth, meaning, purpose, wholeness and positivity, which is essentially an internally ‘given reward’ for correcting one’s self-perception. This process also might stimulate emotions of grief, as this initial process of transformation results in previous structures of one’s personality, that were upheld by beliefs in ‘lacking worth’, to weaken and possibly break down and dissolve into the greater structure of true values that such self-delusion has always been nested within. It is this transformation that ‘Infinite Worth Meditation’ encourages.
Before we begin focusing on the practice of meditation itself, we need to put some more focus on this emotional process of forgiving oneself for believing in limited relative self-worth. In order to facilitate this process, one must embrace a deep sense of gratitude towards oneself. Being grateful for what you are is extremely important in order to see yourself in the light of truth. The two most direct expressions of Self-love an individual can act out is first gratitude for one’s opportunity to experience this embodied life and towards ‘life itself’, which then allows you to, secondly, harness the courage that this Self-love at your core allows for. Courage is the central quality of life that promotes the unfolding of true potentiality. However, gratitude towards Self and truly identifying as a ‘being of Self-love’ is essential to consciously identify as, in order to maximise our experiences during meditation and before we can fully unleash our unique personalised potentiality upon the world.
Therefore, I will present 5 indisputable self-evident reasons you are infinitely worthy and important, which will help us develop the required gratitude towards ourselves that reflects the essential process of self-forgiveness, setting us up perceptively to then focus on the practice of ‘Infinite Worth Meditation’. In the following paragraphs I will outline the first inarguable reason you are of infinite worth. In the following blogs we will discuss the other 4 reasons.
Reason you are of infinite worth #1: The Innate Self-Valuing Structure of Life
There are many mysteries about the ‘nature of life’ that we are yet to unlock. One of the most perplexing characteristics of life, that is completely taken for granted, is the fact that all life must abide by two dominant biological laws (values); the need to survive as an individual and the need to preserve the collective group one is a part (species). This fact of reality is an explicit axiom of the biological model, ‘information metabolism’, formulated by the late polish psychiatrist and philosopher Antoni Kepinski (Kępiński, A 2001). Biology itself is the study of ‘how’ life functions, which is completely hinged on life’s innate drive to fulfill these biological laws. However, the study of biology in our modern era, steers clear of the question of ‘why’ life functions based on these laws, as this is observed as a ‘given’ aspect of reality and also takes one down a philosophical line of questioning, which steps outside the bounds of understanding the material science of 'how' biology works.
Therefore, the study of biology largely overlooks the inherent significance of these two laws, which the existence of life as a whole completely depends on. Though, one self-evident conclusion we can easily draw in relation to the nature of life, given these two biological laws, is that ‘life itself’ is a self-valuing phenomena. These laws make it clear that the central function / behaviour of life is ‘to keep life alive and going’, which implies that life is imbued with the knowledge of its own value. That is to say that all life is innately structured to function according to its individual and collective inherent worth. What is even more perplexing is the fact that this internal structure of self-value was already present and completely functional from the beginning of life’s inception, almost like life itself grew out of a pre-existent metaphysical structure of self-value woven in to the fabric of the universe itself. This ancient structure of self-value is the nature of your ‘being’ as an embodied expression of life, which makes it self-evidently clear how your worth, is immeasurable from a biological perspective.
These two objective universal biological laws orientate the behaviours of all living organisms, including our specie group of course, between self and collective service. All creatures, in different ways, balance their attention between these two equally important aspects of life, requiring all organisms to act in self-preserving and sacrificial ways for the betterment of the individual and collective whole they are a part. This forces individuals to ‘do their best’ naturally to play this ‘game of life’ and strive to continually utilise life-opportunities this game consistently presents. In other words, all life is driven by the love life, as a unified phenomenon, has for itself.
The word ‘love’ might seem inappropriate, as we generally associate the act of ‘love’ with human-related behaviours. Our understanding of the nature of love within our experienced reality, beyond the intimate interpersonal connections formed amongst family and friends, breaks down quickly. However, when we reflect on the true characteristics of what love really looks like, it is undeniable that acts of sacrifice, where an individual’s behaviour is controlled by the biological need to protect others of the same specie group (or others from another species group in many cases), even if oneself must experience pain and / or possible death, are the highest forms of love life can express.
All living organisms, to some extent, express sacrificial behaviour to contribute the overall fitness of their species group. Even aging single celled organisms will systematically shut themselves down in a programmed suicide for the overall health of its larger community, preventing the inevitable environmental pollution of a slowly decaying body that could negatively effect the surrounding population. This sacrificial cellular process is essential for multicellular organisms to live, such as humans (Williams, A, 2011). Although, we must add that many sacrificial behaviours found throughout the kingdom of life will often, in a round-a-bout way, benefit the individual in a self-preserving way also, which demonstrates the complimentary nature of these biological laws to keep life alive and thriving as a whole.
As humans, we often don’t give credit to these acts of sacrifice demonstrated throughout the animal kingdom, as we generally only value sacrificial acts that are decided by conscious choice, which our specie group, given the exponential levels of self-consciousness we exhibit compared to any other specie group, most clearly demonstrate. When any human sacrifices their own life or safety for the ensured safety of others, an act of love of the highest regard has occurred and is remembered as the ultimate act of heroic courage. In the human world, these behaviours are revered because it requires one to supress selfish urges in order to act selflessly, aligned with the biological law to sacrifice for the greater good. Think about your own experiences of ‘love’ in your life. When humans act to honour the innate value recognised in others, which leads to behaviours that reflect ‘selfless giving’ and oppose ‘selfish taking’, love is felt through the reciprocation of value expressed between two or more individual people. When we reflect upon these behaviours in animals that lack our self-consciousness, we can see that such behaviours are not a conscious choice but controlled by a fixed internal biological value system, which still reflects the same presence of love we find in our human relationships.
Therefore, I am trying to make it clear how the presence of ‘love’, which is incomparably the most important thing in our lives, has its basis in the 3.9 billion year old fact that life, as a ‘unified being’, exists to love / value itself in order to encourage its own self-propagation of unlimited possibility through the diverse embodiment of a near infinite many individuals and related species groups, all internally driven to honour the value of life individually and collectively. This fact of reality, therefore, makes it abundantly clear how you, as an individuated expression of ‘life itself’, are of unspeakable worth to the whole evolving undivided structure of life.
References
- Williams, A, 2011, Evolutionary conundrum of the day: Single-celled organisms kill themselves, viewed 10/3/22, <scienceline.org/2011/07/evolutionary-conundrum-of-the-day-single-celled-organisms-kill-themselves>
- Kępiński, A 2001, Melancholia, Krakow: Literary Press
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