"Selfishness & Selflessness" is a dummy moral duality created to keep you tangled up in thought. The plain fact is that everything that we do is necessarily self-ish; it is all about enhancing the experience of my being.
For instance, when you are in a relationship with someone, it is because it makes your life profound. That is all you are going after. Well, sometimes things may not go well and it may end up becoming a mess. But as far as your intention is concerned, you are trying to make the experience of your life profound in some way. This applies to everything in life. There is nothing that we are doing for someone else. Everything that we do is necessarily self-ish. It is just that depending on our level of perceptivity, one can be superficially selfish, or profoundly selfish.
Spirituality is quite upfront about it. The Samskrita term for spirituality is Adhyatma, which literally means ‘pertaining to myself’. It is all about you. Spiritual sadhana is for your sake, and no one else’s. If you need to engage in the world, it is for your sake. If you need solitude, that is also for your sake. If you think you are seeking God, that is also because you think you will be blissful and liberated when you get to God. You would have not sought God if you had been told since childhood that you will be miserable with God. So finally, with your spiritual pursuit, it is your experience of life that takes a radical jump and becomes sublime, no one else’s. Spirituality is absolute selfishness. But the apparent paradox is that when it is absolutely about you, it is absolutely not about you, because when your experience becomes overwhelming, what you presently call as yourself would begin to crumble and dissolve in that process (or as you often say, you will be 'blown away'). It is absolutely selfish and absolutely selfless at the same time.
What people usually call as selfish in the world is not truly selfish. It is constipated selfishness which is partly about you-the-person, and partly about someone else. You pay attention to yourself (for e.g., when you buy a new house) because you want others (especially those who you consider as your rivals) to pay attention to you. Similarly, when you pay attention to someone else, it is because you want their attention. Your attention and energy are always split, and therefore muffled (in other words, it is confined to the plane of relativity). When people do not get anyone else to do this with, they invent a ‘God’ in their head, and make sure that the game continues.
This division is rooted in the core division of ‘me’ and ‘that’ which is the foundation of thought. You know that to create the world of computers, you need a minimum of two distinct entities – 0 and 1. You need one 'difference' to produce Data, and from that root difference, an entire
world proliferates. To give another simpler example, you need a minimum of two colors – black and white – to produce a picture. Out of that fundamental difference can arise the whole world of pictures. Similarly, your psychological framework is also a structure of data, and that too needs a fundamental 'difference' to build itself upon. And that difference is furnished by the division 'me' and 'not-me'. Your entire psychological content can be generalized into these two boxes, isn't it? They are the two bits that make-up the whole mental structure. And these two entities exist only in mutual reference. They do not have an existence of their own.
What you presently consider as your 'person' is also a combination of these two bits. You necessarily exist relative to something. So, your psychological existence is always a knot of these two bits. Psychologically, you can neither be absolutely selfish, nor absolutely selfless, but you must necessarily be a jumble.
The selfishness-selflessness moral-duality is the most fundamental trick to ensure that this jumble continues. It never allows this knot to be undone. If the spiritual longing bothers you and makes you contemplative, if you gravitate towards ‘?’ and self-inquiry, mind will pull you back by showing you the morals of being selfless. It will accuse you of being self-centered for being concerned with the question ‘What am I?’, and tell you that you should instead think about others and live for others, that you should worry about the problems of the world and all such blah. It will not allow selfishness to become absolute. At the same time, if you forget yourself and offer yourself towards the wellbeing of the world, and if selflessness crosses a certain limit and you gravitate towards ‘♥’, mind will pull you back by showing you the morals of self-esteem, self-worth etc. It will tell you that you need to think about yourself, that you need to retain your uniqueness and all such blah. The mind keeps you stingy in both selfishness and selflessness. It does not allow your attention to fully gather upon the 'me' bit, nor does it allow the attention to be fully retracted from it. Because, either way the fire of Life will blaze and the drama of Thought will end. Either way, thought will be dethroned. Whether you hold onto ‘What am I?’, or you let go of ‘What about me?’, the result is the same – the play of data will suspend, and you will be Mind-Blown.
So, selflessness and selfishness are not dualities in the sense of good vs bad as usually depicted. People draw that moral line however convenient to them. It is a dummy duality created by thought to keep you tangled up with it. What is actually good is stretching either of them absolutely. And what is bad is remaining constipated with both of them.
Note that I am speaking of selfishness and selflessness as two things only from our present standpoint, and in terms of the two approaches that we can take – either hold onto 'me' bit absolutely, or let go of it absolutely. But in terms of their eventuality, both of them are only about enhancing the experience of your being. In this core sense, there is really nothing that one can do that is not self-ish. Whether you inquire into yourself, or you melt yourself away, the eventuality is a radical jump in what you are. You come to experience yourself beyond bits of data. And that transforms your whole life, because when you say 'experience of my life', it first and foremost refers to how you experience yourself. When that takes a quantum leap, your whole life takes a leap.
You have been very superficially selfish all this while. It is time you notched up your game. It is time you explored spiritual tools and methods towards becoming absolutely selfish.
Comentarios