Mark 12:30-31
30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
No, we are not commanded to love ourselves. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" means to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself, meaning not to love yourself more than you love your neighbor.
I think I failed to communicate my intention in my response to you. I was deeply moved by your post, and I was not intending to be confrontational or accusative in any sense of the word. I was intending to be helpful. I apologize that I came off otherwise to you.
To clarify what I what I meant above here, my post did not say to love yourself
more than your neighbor. To love ourselves more would be "narcissistic" in nature, or perhaps a better word to use would be self-facing or self-focused, which is the nature of the ego-self. Scripture says in the verse we both quoted, to love your neighbor
as yourself. That means
equally so.
We are to love others with that same love of yourself, that we receive from God Himself. That's why it is the second commandment. Loving God is the first, as God is the Source of that Love. The second commandment is wholly dependent upon the first. The realization of that Love within ourselves, and for ourselves, comes from God -
not from ourselves.
To give a personal example of what this means. The first time I experienced that Love, was when I was 18. I had a near-death type experience where I experienced a confrontation with the Infinite. The experience was that of absolute, unconditional love, where who I was as a person was absolutely seen, utterly exposed with nothing hidden in shadows, yet fully accepted and loved despite how I may have seen myself or believed about myself. Everything was naked and bare before the Absolute, which "saw" me as I was, and despite that, fully embraced me as I was in all my shortcomings and self-loathings and shames.
That led to rivers of tears gushing out of me, releasing everything I had been holding inside, in a torrent of
release. That led to unimaginable Joy and Love, flowing into me from the whole world, and then gushing out of me to the world in return.
THAT, to me is exactly what the two commandments signify. "Love God" first, surrender all you are to that Love and receive that Love to yourself, embracing yourself
as God sees you; ie, "as you Love yourself" as the verse says. That means,
with God's Love; nor with your ego's idea of love of self
. From there, you now naturally, overflow that Infinite Love that wells up from within you out to others: "Love your neighbor as yourself", with that same Love that you receive from God.
That same overflow of
abundance, is accessible in every moment of every day of our lives - if we avail ourselves of it. I had, and still do, deny that to myself through the cares of this world, living in the ego-self instead. This is the normal human condition. But it is not the limits of what we may have, and that is the whole purpose of the teachings of the great spiritual masters. "I have come that you may have life, and life
more abundantly," said Jesus.
Self-loathing, is self-facing, or self-focused. I used the word narcissistic, but did not intend for that to be confused with excessive self-love in a clinical sense of the word as a disorder, but rather the natural ego-self condition of the human being in its "fallen" state, so to speak. I'll use the word ego-self, or self-focused instead. That is something common to everyone, and what the spiritual path is meant to overcome so that we may indeed "love others as ourselves", as Jesus and scripture teaches.
We are to love ourselves, with the love that God loves us. That is the teachings of Jesus.
I hope this clarifies what I had intended to communicate.