Basic goodness

This morning I want to share with you a passage from John Welwood's book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening. This passage is about our attitude toward ourselves:

The Dalai Lama and many other Tibetan teachers have spoken of their great surprise and shock at discovering just how much self-hatred Westerners carry around inside them. Such an intense degree of self-blame is not found in traditional Buddhist cultures, where there is an understanding that the heart-mind, also known as buddha-nature, is unconditionally open, compassionate, and wholesome. Since we are all embryonic buddhas, why would anyone want to hate themselves?

Chogyam Trungpa described the essence of our nature in terms of basic goodness. In using this term, he did not mean that people are only morally good - which would be naïve, considering all the evil that humans perpetrate in this world. Rather, basic goodness refers to our primordial nature, which is unconditionally wholesome because it is beyond conventional notions of good and bad. It lies much deeper than conditioned personality and behavior, which are always a mix of positive and negative tendencies. From this perspective, all the evil and destructive behavior that goes on in our world is the result of people failing to recognize the fundamental wholesomeness of their essential nature.

What surprises me is the number of people I've encountered who actually believe it is somehow virtuous to hate themselves. Ironically this position usually results from the person having an idealized self-image which he or she is then unable to manifest perfectly. Letting go of that unrealistic ideal brings us into an appropriate humility and makes it then possible for us to accept ourselves unconditionally.