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Why Do We Hate Ourselves?
I want to share an idea, a feeling, a fundamental which has been developing… most of the world’s religions and spiritual systems are flawed because they teach a hatred of the human, mortal form.
Why do we hate ourselves? To be more specific — why do we hate our human bodies? In an existential sense, not in the glance-at-the-mirror, “I hate the way I look,” sort of way. Why does every spiritual system regard our mortal form as something to be “cast off”, “transcended”, “surpassed” or left behind by some kind of soul or energetic body? Is it simply fear of death? The idea that our body will inevitably “betray” us?
My Roman Catholic upbringing held all its usual unhealthy attitudes about sex, guilt, fear and the human body. Yet, oddly, there was one way Catholics respected the body — when it became a corpse. In what always struck me as a sort of gruesome zombie apocalypse scenario, the Church said there would be a mass, bodily resurrection at the end of time. This is why Catholics shouldn’t get cremated, you see — you deny the doctrine if you do. A twisted regard for our mortal form? More likely, a love of Doctrine.
For that is after death. In this life, for Catholics, your body is not your friend. There’s the whole prevalent idea of “Mortification of the Flesh” — “the ‘killing’ or subduing, especially through ascetic practices, of unruly or…
