Unquestioned meaning perspectives almost always if not always get in the way of our access to acceptance generally and to unconditional positive regard, compassion, and forgiveness specifically. These meaning perspectives begin early and insidiously. We don’t know they form, and we don't they're there. The simply form as a result of our learning in life, wanted or not. They can also form through the learning we get from later traumas as well. Not only do they exist within our thinking, they exert enormous influence on the way we see the world, what we think about the world we see, and how we act in the world. Meaning perspectives function conceptually. They have decided what the world should look like before we even see the things we see each day. In that way these meaning perspectives make endlessly binary judgments about ourselves and the world around us. They tell us what we accept and what we won't accept, what's unequivocally right and what's unequivocally wrong. That makes for a defensive and closed attitude toward anything outside the meaning perspective's conception of how the world should work. Such an exclusionary point of view alienates us from anything and anyone in the world that fails to exist in the manner dictated by our meaning perspectives. It even alienates us from ourselves, our becoming self.
Out of such alienation we build an identity that makes form in the world. Returning to the child we left playing with too many scattered pieces, we find the child feels a powerful need to create form out of the seeming chaos of these pieces. In that meaning perspectives can already define the nature of the pieces and the nature of the form they take, the child looks for a way of making sense out of the defined pieces and form. Instead of becoming the self we seek existentially out of our actual experience in the world, we create an identity based of the externalized definitions and forms that meaning perspective provide. We assume an ego to defend our identity we developed to define ourselves. Our ego denies us our existential search because it closes us off to the openness of the existential search as it makes endless judgments about the world. In such an ego, we soon feel and believe in the empty truth of the scarcity model that the dominator model defines as an essential part of the world. Scarcity encourages an egotism that can function as apparent selfishness and greed. This encourages and increases our alienation from self and others through an inherently judgmental point of view which closes us to the world of possibility and learning. Our identity and ego serve in positive ways in our whole being but not when they dominate through the limiting power of meaning perspectives which close us off from the world and our becoming self.
Unconditional positive regard, compassion, and forgiveness and their associated acceptance come out of openness. Meaning perspectives preclude such openness. When our meaning perspectives put us in the position of making a judgment, weighing things we experience by an arbitrary measure, our regard for anything, positive or negative, is inherently conditional. That eliminates unconditional positive regard. Compassion asks us to open fully to another's need. When we make judgments about the worthiness of another or ourselves for our compassion, what we express ceases to be compassion and becomes, at best, pity and, at worst, contempt. Judgment never forgets, so it never forgives. Judgment inevitably uses past mistakes for current judgments, and it closes itself to who or what it judges because it judges through a higher purpose of its own. Acceptance observes and makes no judgments at all. It accepts who and what it sees as they present themselves and remains open to them whatever else may occur. These elements of openness, unconditional positive regard, compassion, and forgiveness and their associated acceptance, also work toward ourselves. If we are to search for our becoming self, we will need such openness because the search for our becoming self will inevitably come with mistakes as do all problem solving processes. Judgmental meaning perspectives interfere with that process, but we have learned these judgmental processes instead of what we might have learned about ourselves. As we searched to experience our becoming self, many influences brought judgmental meaning perspectives into our lives and made them definitional to our lives thus deflecting and redefining that search.