Love of self is the necessary condition enabling us to obey that commandment of Jesus: to love others; to love one another. We cannot love others until we have laid this foundation of being able to love ourselves. Or to put it another way, the degree to which we can love ourselves is the degree to which we can love others. We need the ego to love ourselves; we need the ego to love others. We particularly need it to love others, because we need to be able to see the other as “other”. We can’t make that leap out of our own limited world view, unless we can see the other as being other than us.
( Aspects of Love 2, by Laurence Freeman )
