In the search for self-improvement, we aspire to develop the desirable and get rid of the undesirable. We want to create happiness, success, love, peace. We look to develop the qualities we like about ourselves. And whenever we experience setbacks—hurt, failure, heartache, restlessness; or we still contain undesirable characteristics, we continue looking, and we look harder, in new places, with new eyes.
And this is where we go wrong. Our search for improvement is misguided because the improvement we look for is unattainable in the shape and form we seek it in. Success includes failure. Happiness includes unhappiness. The good includes the bad. One can only exist if so does the other.
We find liberation from the undesirable in us not when we make sure that it isn’t within us, but when we accept that it is, and understand that it’s impossible for it not to be. The unappealing qualities of people that hurt, abandon, destroy are in us, too—or at least the potentiality for them.
This does not mean that we are bad people—it means that we live in a world of relativity, in a world of polarities, in which light cannot exist without darkness. Sound cannot exist without silence. There’s no good without bad—and they are, in fact, the same thing. And the degree to which we understand this and see that this duality is a fundamental constituent principle of human nature is the degree to which we can find real peace.
The conventional quest for pure happiness, pure inner self, pure peace is the search for the absolute—i.e. we want the desirable but not the undesirable; we want balance without disruption, the good without the bad. And that’s why it doesn’t work. Because we’re searching for what’s impossible to find. There are no absolutes in a world of relativity and to disregard this is to try and prove something that’s against the laws of nature.
Our self-judgement is based on the illusion that we can prove that there’s nothing wrong with us, which in itself is based on the illusion that it’s wrong to have “undesirable” qualities.
The degree to which we understand that on the human level we cannot harbour only the appealing and the degree to which we accept the unappealing within us is the degree to which we align with the desirable and have the influence of the undesirable dissipate.
People’s instinctive response to being told what to do is resistance. And this is what self-judgement does to the parts of us we judge—it pulls them to the forefront and etches them on even more deeply. Because whether we’re making ourselves or someone else wrong, wrong-making enslaves us to what we’re making ourselves wrong over. It is when we accept the unacceptable and love the unlovable within us that, ironically, we start to find respite from them.