Curating Our Social Media Profiles

Continued from yesterday…

The egoic mind, subconsciously, looks for ways to be loved. Since we spend so much time with our parents and our siblings in those early years, we take on traits similar to theirs in an attempt to gain their love and acceptance. To hide our insecurity and shame, we create a false self that the ego assumes will be accepted and approved. We shape ourselves into whomever we think we must be to earn love.

Maybe that’s why we spend so much time carefully curating our Instagram and Facebook profiles. Taking a hundred selfies and winnowing them down to one, we apply the right filter, and then upload the photo in hopes of reaching a record-breaking number of likes.

Needless to say, the more we try to create a persona that we think will be accepted and loved, the more we actually reinforce the mental narrative of separation from love. Love is no longer the oneness that we share with God and one another, but instead becomes the pursuit of the ego.

The conceptualized self has exchanged awareness of the union of love with earning love and acceptance based on how well we can perform. As children, we therefore obsessively ask our parents for their approval:

     Did I do good, Dad?

     Do I look good, Mom?

     Are you proud of me?

Experiencing reality through a fearful perception, we want answers to the ego’s nagging unconscious prodding: “Am I enough for love?”

To be continued tomorrow…

Adapted from chapter 4 of Awakening To I Am Love by David Youngren