Self-worth vs. self-value

"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth . . . is potentially to have everything." -Joan Didion

• I have been reading sentiments like that for years, and all I ever got out of it was that it is nice to feel good about yourself. My search for enlightenment gave me a flash of insight when I read this quotation today. I have always had a good sense of self-worth, have always thought I am important to me. Yet I have spent much time since puberty feeling suicidal. The dichotomy has always puzzled me. I wear my seat belt when I drive, but at home I would sometimes want to take drugs and die. Just now I realized what the problem is. I valued myself, but I have had absolutely no sense of the worth of myself. In other words, the value I place upon myself has no relation to what my true worth is.
• If I say that certainly I'm a great person, that's the value I have placed upon myself. But what place do I hold in the grand scheme of things? What is my intrinsic worth? And do I have an intrinsic worth? Am I worth something above the value that I or others place upon myself? Am I worth something even without that valuation? To date, the answer to those questions must have been "No," or I have thought that it was "No." Even though I value myself, I must think I am worthless, because I have felt the urge to extinguish myself. If I had thought that I had worth, rather than avoiding life, I might want to have it more abundantly and not cave in to the pressures of the relative values we place upon ourselves and our commodities.
• I choose to accept that as a finite being living at this moment in infinity, I have an intrinsic worth just by existing. If that is true, then everything else that exists or has existed has intrinsic worth, and we should adjust our attitudes about them accordingly and stand in awe of creation and marvel at the miracle that is ourselves.
• If that is not true and I have no intrinsic worth, then it doesn't matter if I live or die, or have ever existed, or live forever, or if anything else was ever created or came into existence.
• I believe, though, that if we try to think back to before the sperm met the ovum we will see that we cannot think back that far because our selves did not exist then, and because we did not exist, there was no knowledge of any part of creation because we were not there to acknowledge it or experience it. It might have existed, but the net effect is that it did not exist. Therefore, as individuals we are essential for the existence of the universe.
• If that ain't intrinsic worth, I don't know what is.

Belief vs. Reality

". . . [We] believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact, we're slip-sliding away." -Paul Simon

Enlightenment quotation

Pema Chödrön in The Sun magazine, January 2005:
"The first noble truth of the Buddha is that people experience dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong. We feel this dissatisfaction because we're not in tune with our true nature, our basic goodness. And we aren't going to be fundamentally, spiritually content until we get in tune. Dzigar Kongtrul, my teacher for the past five years, says that only in the West is this dissatisfaction articulated as "Something is wrong with me." It seems that thinking of oneself as flawed is more a Western phenomenon than a universal one. And if you're teaching Western students, it has to be addressed, because until that self-hatred is at least partially healed, people can't experience absolute truth."