WHY IS SELF-ESTEEM IMPORTANT?

You are more sure that you exist for you experience it directly than you are that others exist and you are more sure that others exist than you are that God exists. This tells you that you must do all that you do simply because you love yourself. You come first as far as you yourself are concerned and it cannot be any other way as what you are most sure of has to come first. This is nothing to be ashamed of because you cannot help it. It has not hindered the philanthropists and saviours of the world. Why should you want to be ashamed for proper self-esteem makes you of more benefit to other people and yourself not less? Would you not rather be a person who lives a life of amazing kindness towards others but who does it for self-indulgence than one who tries to get nothing out of it and does very little?
 
Realising that you are your own God is the first step to inner transformation and so is realising that when done properly it will bring absolutely no harm to anybody else. Your realisation will revolutionize your feelings and cure many of your mental sicknesses and weaknesses if it is allowed to. Know thyself!

To put God’s will before people you see and touch is to degrade yourself. You need to live among these people so they come before God and to consign them to a place of humiliation is to do the same to yourself. So you come first and others second and you must love yourself in being good to them and leave God off the equation for there is no need for him in the equation anywhere. What putting yourself first and others second simply means is that you help them to make yourself happy – you are after happiness so you are putting yourself first no matter how much good you do for them. That’s all. It’s nothing sinister.
 
To do good to others even partly because God commands it is to do wrong for you could do it wholly for the sake of indulging yourself by seeing them happy which is the only right reason. To put those you see and touch before a being whose goodness you are less sure of than theirs is unreasonable and unjust. It is calling on them to look upon you as unimportant as you consider them to be. It just happens that God’s will might have some benefits so to say that God’s will is what is important is to say that if it did a lot of harm you would still put it first perhaps using the excuse that there is a mysterious plan involved.

To value means to consider important.

You cannot value others if you do not value yourself.  It has to start with you.  Unless you see yourself as important though different from others and see that difference as making you important, you cannot trust others.  You will fear they will not value you at all or that they should not.  You cannot offer yourself to them.  If you offer them anything it is not you.  To see yourself as dirt and to offer yourself to them is to offer them dirt not  you.  So if you do that you do not value them.  It then is because you value you that you honour yourself by valuing them.  Valuing others is, in plain and direct language, valuing yourself and nothing else.  Others are valued as extension of you and are made about you.  What I value is myself and my happiness and I value others in the sense that I want them to be okay so that I can reach my happiness through being friends with them and helping them. I may love myself alone but that does not mean I am an island. I am a social creature and need to in communion with others. So strictly speaking I really only value myself and get pleasure out of them and it is the pleasure that makes them important to me not them. If I value my jade ornament because it is old and not because I think it is pretty then strictly speaking I don’t value it but my esteem for its age.
 
When you do good for others without self-esteem or valuing yourself you are in effect offering them what you think is tainted goods. That is very far from valuing them. If you help others without wanting them to help you if they could, you do not want them to do good and so you do not really love them for doing good is good for them. Valuing others is a selfish thing but it is good selfishness and not unbalanced or bad selfishness for we are trying to value others and going as near as we can to do it and that is why it is praiseworthy. Unbalanced selfishness destroys the health of its victim in many insidious and clever ways.
 
Everybody has self-esteem. People who claim not to have it do have it but it is just channelled the wrong way. Their depressions and fears all stem from self-love for if they did not love themselves they would not feel sorry for themselves and would not be afraid to be hurt. When they realise this, self-transformation can be achieved quicker.

When you can do whatever good you do to please other people or a God and can get the same results by doing it only to please yourself then you should please only yourself. You can do good better by loving only yourself.