Vanity: A Server of a Lacking Self-Image - (3565)

Purpose

What do we have vanity for? Always for a reason, there is a reason for everything in our psyche,  and to serve the ego I would say is that reason. 

Essentially to serve the interests of some particular egos. To serve the self-image in our pride and to serve our lust. 

Vanity by observation goes hand in hand with pride and lust. A little scary to accept, as it seems to go against our decency, but yet upon deeper observation it is true. Ah deep down in an unspoken kind of recognition we all know that it is true anyway.

What it Does

Vanity checks that a person is looking their smartest, coolest, funkiest, sexiest, most spiritual, most centred and collected, (depending on what one values) to have the best chance of impressing someone in particular or others in general.

Vanity is the one that is in charge of arranging one's appearance. Vanity is the one that often accompanies us while clothes shopping. It is there with us at the gym, or it is there making us cool, calm and collected while everyone else is panicking.

Even a married person may have vanity and lust, and present oneself with the vanity and pride combination just so to feel attractive, to feel mysterious and interesting to others, to feel able to turn a head etc. Not to do anything but just 'to feel', and that feeling goes straight to feed one's self-image, that I am likable, lovable, good, fine, worth something etc.

Void of Lacking

When we deny vanity this chance of impressing others we feel that we are missing out on something.  On some kind of satisfaction of putting our best foot forward or representing ourselves properly and well. Mind you we only really feel like that when there are particular vested interests behind looking good. We could not care less about looking good for grandma. 

How is this void of lacking filled? For us if we know how to fill it we can peacefully begin to do away with vanity.

We can do away with it slowly when we see that impressing others is not as important as what truly being is. When we try 'to be' we find the work of how to truly 'be'. It is better to be strong than show others that we are strong.

I don't know what this quote means. Is it a positive connotation or a negative one?

Yet we maybe strong but we still want to show others that we are strong. Then in that case we are not strong in our self-image yet even though we are. So it is a matter of bringing our self-image to match our reality.

Imagine that the vanity of a man with lots of muscles may be sad because he did not get the chance to remove his shirt at the beach. So vanity exists to show, but always for some purpose. The man is muscly but his vanity just wants to impress others. It is the need to impress others that is behind his vanity. I ask myself, isn't the fact that the guy is muscly enough? Why be so hang up about showing his muscles to others when he has them? Well maybe he worked to get them not for himself but to show others. Why? Because he needs something, he lacks something. He lacks being able to feel positive towards himself, which is due to a lack of self-remembering and work.

Sometimes you see very vain people suffering a lot and thinking negatively about themselves. All due to this defect in vanity that does not allow themselves to feel positively towards themselves. Instead the mind takes over and wants themselves to have a certain rigid weight, look, appearance, style, presentation, persona, ability etc. etc.

By vanity showing something to others we 'feel' something. That which we 'feel' is valuable to us. It fills a lack in our self-image. It is not valuable to others, so we are often when vain unfriendly or disinterested in others - i.e. selfish. As soon as we fill that gap in our self-image that vanity has nothing to serve so it floats around aimless. 

The use of vanity in our psychological work is that it shows us the gaps, holes, lacks, deficiencies in our self-image. It is worth studying very closely our vanity.

Impress Others

Vanity seeks to favourably impact the thinking of others, relative to ourselves. I mean vanity wants to impress the minds of others to think positively about ourselves in a certain way. Those 'certain ways' being what we hold dear to ourselves in our self-image. Note, it is not too concerned about impacting the feeling of others. That is self-love and self-importance's domain.

We may just want to see ourselves as reliable, dependable, responsible, and so vanity will wish to impress others to think that we are those things. The truth is others will think what they will. It is only ever ourselves who want to think that about ourselves. In fact we only want to think that when we do not have those things. So we can see vanity is related to fantasy. 

In doing away gradually with vanity - comes what? FREEDOM! Vanity is an inner compulsion to impress. So much effort goes into impressing. We all know this intimately all too well. 

In the image of the Real Being there are not these lacks. Self-remembering as always is our turn to remedy.

End (3565).