If you feel self-loathing or self-hate a lot of times people will say you have to love yourself.
However when I've been told that many times in the past all that has done is made me upset. It just made me think of all the things I hate about myself and made me feel sick to think I should "love" any of it. In a lot of ways "to love myself" was a most terrible suggestion for someone to make to me. I hated myself and felt justified in the hatred of myself.
The problem here is one of identity. I can not be any of those things that were coming to my mind. I am not my experiences, my memories, my body, or even my personality. I can confirm this by meditating on each part of me and imagining doing away with it. Am I less myself for having lost a finger? Am I any less myself for having lost a memory? Am I any of these things which are ephemeral? How can I own a thing and yet be that thing? None of the things which belong to me are me.
I decided I wanted to experience death. I became identified with the eternal void. I am nothing I thought. Deathless, persisting, all-pervading… the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I saw in this void all the qualities that constitute God. The void contains everything, can't be destroyed, endures forever, is the birthplace of the whole universe, is the origin of all things, is spaceless, and timeless, etc. Yet my mind wasn't clear still. The void wasn't dead. It had tremendous power, omnipotence, to hold and birth the world. This is when I became identified with the spirit; the will; the awareness. Soon after I realized the principle of dynamism – of life. I became aware of my own freedom and my limitations (were an essential part of that freedom) in a new way, aware of myself as a continuity with all-being, and aware of the heart-power to fix within my center whatever I might experience.
All this suicidal ideation, this wanting to die, was and is only perverse because of the terrible confusion. There is no self to put to death, I am an immortal spirit; only that which belongs to me may undergo the dissolution. Dissolution only occurs by transmutation, changing of the vibration. Only parts of me had to die; or in other words face the inevitability of new life. At this point I had already been reading for a long time on the occult and even engaged in the practices, it was half-conscious and stumbling about. I had to start over again from stage 1 of IIH, this time knowing what I am actually doing, and not merely getting results haphazardly and wondering why I'm stuck half the time.
There is the "self" and the Self. The Self is real, enduring, eternal. It is the actual you. The self is a toy, a vessel, a thing through which the Self manifests and experiences. There is nothing wrong with Self-Love in the highest sense for it is the love of God. As for self-hate, the lower self is a collection of very confused influences, and needs to be molded to be an acceptable expression of the divine principles. This is the Great Work.
I began to separate the wheat from the chaff; knowing that some of the things I was identified with and belong to me were unworthy. Only the things which pained me had to die, to be released – or transmuted into the opposite polarities. I began to create the hermetic black and white mirrors and to swing the pendulum of awareness to modify my attributes, utilizing the akasha, building up momentum that fuels dynamism.
I become so much better at letting my mind become very clear. I let out the muddled thoughts, discharging them all, so the mind quickly becomes silent. I am disengaged from my thought process, just a dispassionate observer, my emotions are controlled and at rest so there is nothing fueling the formation of new thoughts. I let my mind stay clear like this; sometimes for hours and other-times a few minutes will suffice, and it wouldn't matter if I was engaged in any sort of work throughout the day. If some thoughts were necessary or some words had to be spoken, they would be brought forward and out, and the mind would be clear again and not stir unnecessarily.
When the mind is clear of dialog (chatter) awareness naturally intensifies - but mostly outwardly. The lightness and rest found in a proper void is not yet obtainable at this stage as the senses of the body antagonize you. This is the part in every mystic's path where he comes to hate his senses. The mind is taking in the world strongly but deeper levels of thoughts are perceptible like subtle currents in an ocean, you can feel them being pulled in through the thought-centers. In order to escape the tyranny of the bodily senses another set must be developed. This takes us to the second stage of hermetic development where the meditations upon the higher senses (which mirror the lower) begin.