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13:18

(In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

Ego fixation and its engine narcissism are strictly compensatory phenomena. These conditions are driven by fear and ignorance rather than by consciousness and reason. What gets the ego fixation to allow in the spiritual experience is the growth of ethical self-love as the correct way to confront the dramatic subjective experience. Self-love is thus the antipole of banal narcissism. The most common logical error about self-love is otherwise that it should require that one passively waits for an emotion. The background to this is the delusion that all forms of love are feelings and nothing but feelings. But at least self-love is different in comparison with other forms of love in several respects. Partly because it is a logical imperative and not a sought-after effect: there is one relationship in life that you can never opt out of, that you must learn to live with, and that is the relationship with yourself. Partly because self-love is fundamental for all other forms of love – it is the passions’ own Higgs field – love of others and of life gets its power from self-love and not the other way around. On the other hand, narcissism is based on self-contempt and is nothing other than compensatory behaviour on top of this self-contempt – a clear sign of self-love that is deficient.