In this post I am going to give some clarification about these two terms which cause a lot of confusion here in the English speaking world and often due to that confusion, we don't work effectively on ourselves in these areas. Which is really not a helpful thing.
Self-Respect
This term is very clear and is not held in confusion. It is either the case of knowing or not knowing what it means. In both English and Spanish the meaning of this word coincide. In both life and in the work the meaning of this term agree one with another. Only that the work gives it a spiritual dimension.
Self-Love
Lots of confusion. Like self-respect it contains a 'self' and a virtue in this case - 'love'. So logically it has to be about a virtue directed towards oneself. Which is all fine. The question is which 'self'? If we see 'self' as really what self is - the Real Being in us, then self-love is love to the Being in us. But if we see 'self' as the false self the 'myself', then we have self-love as meaning love for the ego and the personality in us. Which is where Gnosis comes in and explains that self-love is really an ego that brings us all much suffering. The famous - the ego of self-love. But when self-love refers to the self as the Real Being it is something sublime and a great remedy for much of our sufferings that come from the egoic self-love.
In normal English usage 'self-love' is understood to mean to look after ourselves in all respects. It can sometimes have a negative connotation where that refers to conceitedness or selfishness. In self-help circles it is to accept and love ourselves just as we are which has some positive aspects to it, in the sense that it changes the negative way we see ourselves, but it needs to be raised to a spiritual octave to become truly transformative.
In summary, it is better to differentiate between the two by saying, 'love for the Real Self 'and love for the 'false self'.
Self-Compassion
Lots of confusion. There is the real compassion for ourselves that kicks in when we falter or fail in something and works in us to help ourselves to get up and repair. Then there is the type that is negative that only wants commiseration and wants to wallow in sadness, misery and in the state of having failed or fallen short or not being good enough etc. This negative type likes to wallow in sadness and make things worse even but does not want to look for the remedy and make efforts to accept the failure and get out of the hole. But the real self-compassion sees our errors, has compassion for them in the sense of not judging them and then has the love to work to get ourselves healed and out of the hole. It is very much like how a doctor works. The doctor works to understand the illness and then work to get the patient better no matter what it is or how it happened.
From the Gnostic point of view whenever self-compassion is mentioned we all think of the negative type, the self-wallowing type. So it is good to understand that Gnosis talks about the need to eliminate the negative type of self-compassion which is full of judgement and sadness and not remedy and hope.
In summary, we should call them real self-compassion and egoic self-compassion. Or another good word for egoic self-compassion is self-wallowing.
End (5315).
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