Narcissism of the Spirit

First off, the reason I am talking about this is because it is something I personally struggle with. Here we have some of my perhaps incoherent musings on souls and existence.

Self-esteem is a tricky subject. If yours is too low there's really no way you can go through life being happy. But if you have high self-esteem does that mean you think you are better than other people?

Because let's face it, if you thought were merely average in every way, you probably wouldn't feel that good about yourself. Or if you felt you were above average in some ways but that the areas you were below average in outweighed the areas you were above average in, or they cancelled each other out, you wouldn't feel that good about yourself either. You need to feel like you are in general above average. Problem is, only half the population is above average.

In order to be healthy, you have to break the competitive mindset and focus on unity. You have to feel that you are a member of the group, the family of humanity, and that you contribute something unique to the group yet you are no better than anyone else in the group. But the tricky part is that you have to really believe that, not just say you believe it.

Because the truth is, or rather, my current understanding of the truth is, all souls are equal. Because your physical attractiveness isn't who you are, you're intelligence isn't who you are, nor is your sense of humor. Who you are is your soul and the knowledge that it contains. Not the knowledge that your brain contains, but that your soul contains, which transcends death. Some souls are further along in the process of knowledge acquisition than other souls. Some souls move along at a faster pace than others. This is their own choice and doesn't mean they're better. Being an old soul doesn't mean your soul is better. We are all merely a different piece of a shattered whole, and there is distance between us and other people and we strive to make that distance smaller.

But we have to be competitive to survive, and when you find yourself winning it's extremely hard to view all people and their souls as equals, because some of us have more advanced souls and we all have unequal temporary earthly traits. I know that I for one suffer from narcissism of the spirit.

And if you do suffer from this, you better not let it show. Because people don't like people who seem to think that they're better than other people, or who admit to it. Which I just sort of did. God dammit.