Badness

We must fully accept ourselves for who we are before we can service the world.

And in order to fully accept ourselves, we have to love ourselves even if we are “bad.”

We must pretend the whole worlds absolutely hates us

and still choose to love ourselves.

We often are told from the beginning that we should act with service and generosity to the world,

which is true, of course.

But we cannot get there unless we see ourselves in a vacuum,

in a bubble completely separate from anything else,

and love ourselves entirely with no exterior verification or validation.

We must love our evil parts, the parts that others may not like about us.

We must forgive ourselves for all the “bad things” we may have done in our past.

And once we finally are able to accept all of those things,

once we realize that we are simply humans with limitations, mistakes, and misinterpretations of our higher intellect,

and we finally are able to live in peace within a world where everyone may in fact hate us,

we can emerge from that fiction

as our true, objective, authentic, human self.

Furthermore, with that new profound acceptance,

we come to find that there are people who don’t hate us even when we are the “bad” version of ourselves.

In fact, those people are meant for us.

Just as we are not all meant to marry each other, we are not all meant to be each others supporter.

And only when we find those people that love our true selves

we finally find raw support and true safety.

We find it easier to express our true self to more and more people,

further and further away from us,

because we have our community, and our inner selves, as support.

And then, finally, we can act with service to the masses.

To the entire world.

Because we feel safe.

So yes, it is important that we use our one life to serve the world,

to create meaning,

to give,

to make the world a better place.

But we cannot do that without initially being selfish,

or as the Dalai Llama calls it, “wise” selfish.

We must teach our children that service to the world is not the priority for obtaining happiness,

but a byproduct of the happiness that we receive when we service ourselves first.

We must be hated (or pretend that we are hated)

so we can be accepted.

We must be bad

in order to be good.

If everyone fully accepted who they truly were, “evil” and all,

with every part of their soul and body and mind,

the world would be in its most natural, loving, perfect state.

We just have to be bad first

to realize, deep down,

that we are not bad at all.