(Recorded January 24, 2007 | Listen to the recording)

Hello and welcome to Under Shamash on this Jovian Archive radio theme week of loving yourself. When I began my process as a teacher, introducing Human Design, I had this lovely mantra: "You are unique, you have no choice, love yourself."

So much about the nature of loving one-self seems to be as distant and as far away as any concept is for the not-self, and it's so obvious why. After what was at least a decade of doing a tremendous amount of personal readings with clients, I began to get this taste of how pervasive self-hatred is, how pervasive self-dislike is, which is a better word, actually, and how dark a joke that is. These not-self beings with their general distaste for this aspect or that aspect of their nature. And in fact, that was not who they are at all.

Uniqueness. Everybody is born with a genetic predisposition to differentiate. We are here to differentiate. And yet the way in which we feel about ourselves, that is, the way in which the not-self feels about itself, is layers upon layers upon layers of conditioning that they've been receiving in terms of comparison, basically from the moment that they came into the world. You know, the parental "don't be bad, be good." "Don't be this, be that." You know, all of the conditioning, "why can't you be like this or that?" And on and on and on, and grading systems in schools, and a popularity contest, and attractive miss variations, and all of the various things that emerge in the realm of comparison. And of course, in the realm of comparison, in a world of the not-self in which the pervasive vanity is that anything can be changed, that anything can be made better, that anything can be improved. In a world, in which two thirds of the population have an undefined ego, and are simply committed to proving themselves in relationship to their conditioned field, human beings, as a result, truly do not like themselves.

I mean, they accept, at a certain level, their not-self fate. That is, not smart enough, pretty enough, fast enough, whatever the case may be and never will be, is a possibility that comes to the not-self, but it is never them. And they never truly get to appreciate the beauty of what it is to be them. It's what you meet when you meet your Design, you meet these two possibilities. You meet the possibility that is there for you to love. It's unique, it really is perfect. It is beyond the comparison. When you're operating correctly, as yourself, there is nothing to compare to. Nothing. You can only be correct as yourself. This is it. And in being correct as yourself, the main by-product that anyone derives from operating correctly is you change the way in which you move through space.

That is, you begin to eliminate resistance, life begins to work for you. I mean, most people who have a relative not-self sense of wellbeing, most of that is derived from comfort. Most of that is derived from not being starving, jobless, diseased. In other words, most of the self appreciation — if we can put it that way — of the not-self is rooted in the serendipity of whether they are materially fortunate or not. Again, all of these things have nothing to do with the truth, have nothing to do with the beauty of what it is just to be you. See, the love doesn't simply come from recognizing who you really are, the love is a by-product of watching who you are come to life.

And it is in the security that comes with that. The generator that discovers the essential, perfect truth of their response. Never again is there a place of fear in the decision-making. You know, that "this was a mistake," or "I shouldn't have done this," or "I could have done that." These are just mind games. The deeper you settle into your Authority, the deeper you settle into an appreciation of you, of you. And that when you're operating out of your own Authority, you don't determine your value by what others think about you. You find yourself, you find your strength, you find your beauty.

You begin to settle into what it is to be a passenger, and to accept the “limitation” of what it is that you are: your Design, your Profile, your Cross, your Type, your Definitions, your activations, your Colors, your Bases, your Tones, all of it. And just settle in and watch this quite remarkable creature go through its life with grace. It's something to learn to love. It is the essence of things to love oneself, to love the beauty of what it is to be you in this world. So on this theme week, I'd like to wish you the opportunity in your life to discover this love. It's everything, and out of it, truly out of it comes a quality of love in relationship to the other, whatever that may be, that's very special because it's clean of conditioning.

You are unique. You have no choice. Love yourself.

Ra Uru Hu was the Human Design System’s founder and messenger. Ra dedicated 25 years of his life to the development and teaching of the System around the world until he passed away in 2011.