What do you think about the statement, “Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.”?

If you have accepted your flaws so that no one can use them against you, you still have one more flaw remaining; the flaw that you are afraid of others and their opinions.

As a person who is truly interested in ending my suffering I would look further into the whole nature of fear. When there is fear, there is defense, attack and all it’s strategies. So one of the strategies born out of fear is that I should accept my flaws, because no one can use them against me. Well, people will find other means to go against you, don’t worry. It is the nature of thought to compete and pull down others in competition. So till this basic structure of competition is in place, no amount of superficial strategies is going to grant you freedom from fear.

What are you fearing? Is it not the fear of failure – failure in all it’s aspects. Failure of earning money, failure in getting respect, name and fame; failure of getting social approval. So till the one has not gone past this fear, one can keep inventing strategies and actually one will do just this : invent strategies all the time. Our entire mind’s energies are trapped in fear related strategies.

If one goes deep enough into this, one sees that fear is related to desire. If one has no desire, one also has no fear. Fear and desire are two sides of the same coin. If I do not have any desire for success, I have no fear for failure. When I am not seeking anything from people, I have no fear from people. Now what is one of the roots of desire. Isn’t it that I am always trying to become someone or something? What am I trying to become? Aren’t all notions of becoming, conditioning which society has implanted in us. Since childhood, parents, society and institutions of all kinds have filled us with notions of competition, success and becoming. Can I question all these notions? Can I ask myself whether life is really all about psychological becoming, becoming a successful person in society in some way or another? Os is life something much more, something vaster and more beautiful than this ugly society man has made out of it’s desire and competition. To ask such a question means one has to become psychologically alone.

When one has become psychologically alone, not seeking rewards or success of any kind because one has seen the utter falsity of it, such a man does not live with the lurking shadow of fear. He may work in this world but his work is not born out of a desire for success, comparison and competition. He works because of love. A love which is born only when one has done away with the opposites of fear and desire.