Self-esteem test (esoteric version)

Probably the most stolid, though I believe valid, definition of “self-esteem” is: to be holistically integrated from the beginning of one’s life. It’s to have the full range of sensation and emotion – feeling – rather than its suppression and repression owing to birth trauma or childhood trauma or abuse or neglect. Those insults cause a child’s feeling to be poisoned, blocked,* questioned, diluted, minimized, buried, killed. What sense of self will he have then? If she is loved, accepted and valued “as is,” feeling will remain the person and the feeling person will have “e-motion”: free un-second-guessed outward movement in the world.* That is self-esteem. There is bound to be intrinsic, “means” success: curiosity, creativity, accomplishment, even if it is not success by “ends,” by conventional standards. And thinking will be not moored, uncolored by pain and will be free, objective.

This is how you see if you have self-esteem, by sensing beneath your résumé, your ideas of yourself, body sensation that you interpret in some self-defined good way. There has to be a core identity there, the alpha-and-omega of it. This is akin to the ending of Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact, where Dr. Arroway has set her supercomputer to investigate the transcendental number pi:

After a few more lines, an unmistakable arc had formed, composed of ones. The simple geometrical figure had been quickly constructed, line by line, self-reflexive, rich with promise. The last line of the figure emerged, all zeros except for a single centered one. The subsequent line would be zeros only, part of the frame.

Hiding in the alternating pattern of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle – another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in.**

Self-esteem cannot be Nathaniel Branden’s definition:

Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind, in our ability to think. By extension, it is confidence in our ability to learn, make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change. It is also the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment – happiness – are right and natural for us. The survival-value of such confidence is obvious; so is the danger when it is missing.***

How could a core sense of self-value be so complex and so populated by poorly defined and circular terms such as “competent,” “confidence,” “effectively” and “appropriate”?

We have to ask if beneath all the sedimentary layers of the adolescent’s and adult’s coping persona, at the first silent sense, is there an unmoving pulse, photon-like, a painless nameless name? Or is there instead merely pain that turns to fear when one’s eyes – the same eyes now as our baby’s – open, and the world is strange? One will be a true self, the other, not.

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* https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08873267.2010.485911. “Emotion refers etymologically to movement (i.e., e-‘motion’) and, because muscles are organs of movement, armoring is understood to inhibit feelings and their emotional expression (e.g., pelvic muscular tensions block both sexual pleasure and performance) analogously to how psychological defense mechanisms are seen as operating.” Re: Alexander Lowen's work.

** Contact, Carl Sagan, Simon and Schuster, 1985, ending.

*** http://www.nathanielbranden.com/what-self-esteem-is-and-is-not. “Dr. Branden is known as the ‘father’ of the Self-Esteem movement. . . .” (Wikipedia page on Branden’s book, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem).