I remember being told that in order to progress spiritually, we need to become Selfish. Selfish with a capital ’s’. The capital ’s’ changes the entire meaning of the word from a bad quality to a good one.
We all know what selfishness with the small ’s’ means and I’m sure at some point in our lives, we have all been selfish. Whether it was with sharing toys when we were young or when it was sharing time as we got busier. However, this is, to some extent, inevitable and sometimes even the best option.
To give a brief background of the question I pose here, in Karma Yoga, Swami Vivekananda discusses how ‘our duty to others means helping others, doing good to the world’. However, later on in the chapter, he throws a curve ball, saying that the world will be perfectly fine even without our help. To provide some clarity, he adds
As a boy, I had some white mice. They were kept in a little box in which there were little wheels, and when the mice tried to cross the wheels, the wheels turned and turned, and the nice never got anywhere. So it is with the world and our helping it.
So, you may ask, why should we even help anyone? This was discussed in an earlier post and it was concluded that our helping the world doesn’t end up helping the world, as the dog’s tail curls back to its original state, but helps us move forward spiritually.
Swamiji writes that for our helping the world, ‘the only gain is that we get moral exercise’. To my understanding (which could be completely wrong), this is what Swamiji defines as being Selfish, a quality that helps us grow spiritually. I understand that, in the end, what I do to help others simply helps myself attain oneness. Although I’m far from attaining oneness, I find it hard to swallow that in the end, all we are working toward is our own spiritual growth. To me, this seems selfish- yes, the bad kind. It’s as if even in spirituality, it’s a dog eat dog world (no intended connection to the dog’s curly tail, of course).
‘It was between you and God… never between you and them anyway,’ says Mother Teresa in her famous poem, Anyway. My question is that although it was only between God and me, what about them? We are all spiritually advancing ourselves our own pace while the rest of the world goes at its own pace whether it be faster or slower than ours. How can we all attain oneness when each of us are spiritually advancing at our separate paces? Theoretically, if Person A is spiritually growing and is in the path of attaining oneness, what about the Person B, who leads a life in which characteristics such as materialistic and worldly values prevail? Is it right for Person A to spiritually advance himself or herself, while Person B remains attached to temporary pleasures? Is there such a thing as Selflessness?
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