Chronic Self-seeking: Love’s Enemy

 

Selfishness is the mask we wear to hide the vulgar lines of our fears and insecurities. We, self-pitying, covering our self-fulfillment, justify our self-conceit under the stated principle of practical tools of survivability in a dangerous world.

Long before you fight to earn respect, try it with self-respect. Self-respect increases with decreasing selfishness. But most often we stand for self-pity, taking selfishness as the mark of our achievement. Mark my words, it’s nothing but an effort to maintain a false position.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

Well, selfishness is the real life manifestation of an inconsiderate nature. And the symptom and the disease both point to a bigger reality, lack of loving kindness.

In the natural scheme of things, it's a walk on the tightrope of giving and taking. Trees draw nutrition from earth and give back fruits, foliage, oxygen and more. We humans have a tendency to take more and give less. It’s perhaps an off-shoot of our oversized brain. But then don't you think being take-oriented has turned it into an unnatural stampede, toppling natural cycles and dislodging natural laws. It's literally a big house on fire and everybody running around to gather as much as possible.

Quite ironically, we term such mad frenzy as the mark of progress and development. Guys, most of the time we are simply running away to find solutions to the problems created by us only. If you put greed in the forefront as a collective goal at the largest level, all endeavors turn counterproductive and leave us with two more problems with every solution we find. After a time, the pool of problems becomes so large, having crossed the critical limit of sustainability, that progress and development amount to be mere futile efforts at finding solutions to the mountain of problems.

Little do we realize that salvaging petty things doesn't matter anymore if the house itself has burnt, another matter that we always contrive morally better-sounding justification for our chronic self-pursuits. But it requires no brains of a mathematical genius to realize that in a scenario where everybody is shooting off to grab the cake, what will be the result.

My humble words might sound dull in front of the dazzling sun of enlightened selfishness. But believe me it has turned the scale too lopsided to survive. Loving kindness is the counter-weight. Policies at the institutional level should drive cumulative excellence instead of pandering the inconsiderate self-seeking mad rush. We need to learn to give away, let it go beyond a point for our peace and larger gains at the collective level.

Joyce Meyer: “If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!”

Self-restraint carries its own type of sensuous luxury. Try it. You will find it better with a less full tummy than a burping, gas infested glutton. Centurions are the ones who are meager eaters, not gluttons. Nature gives signals. If a bit of self-restraint in eating can add decades to one’s age, why cannot restraint in your life's force turn your path into the shady, wooded, luxuriant vales where happiness and love are in abundance? Here you find your soul. There you were definite to lose it. And the biggest loss is not to feel, know and discover one's soul. That is why chronic self-seekers die a miserable, regretful death. They realize what have they missed.

Sharing my friend's message during a metro ride in the morning on her way to office:

“Started my day on a good note by offering my seat to a heavily pregnant woman....she was leaning against the pole and looking so exhausted at the start of the day....such robust young and old men, shameless enough not to even ask whether she would sit...they just pretend not to have seen....such small things tell you to what extent people are selfish for their own comfort....Even other women are so insensitive....looking away so that they don't have to offer a seat....”

Do you find such petty selfishness worth it? I think most of us find it repulsive while reading. Unfortunately, we flow along the tide apathy while we get tested for this in real life.

Believe me, an act born of such loving kindness keeps our day fragrant. Ask those who decided to look the other way. They will need more effort to keep the truth buried under false pride and petty vanity. They will have to divert the gaze from the real self to retain the false ego. 

Well that proves my diagnosis of the commonest of the common Indian trait of petty selfishness. A result of too much of population and forever falling short resources, I suppose. Everything falls short of expectations including metros, buses, roads, jobs, bread, butter, forests, water, land, sky, etc., etc. The list is endless. Overpopulation is one of the biggest social maladies. People just never have enough. It breeds discontentment. A sinister apathy for the cause of fellow sufferers in the crowd creeps in. It narrows the vision. It clogs the spirit. It veritably dehumanizes the collective self. Individuals merely follow the suit.

Caught in the tentacles, you just cannot see beyond the small platform of your own struggle. It breeds very unhealthy personalities. Clinging to their own little grabs is the skill they get versed in over the years in their lives. Then it becomes a very selfish mass, the terrible self-seekers incapable of grasping the civic sense of any cause that lies outside their own.

People get basically so absorbed in their own world that the senses, which allow them to perceive the world around, don't work at all when it comes to their fellow human beings. This attitude is criminally callous. Very unfortunately, we Indians seem to be very tiny hearted. There are hundreds of little incidents daily that prove it more and more.

Herein exists our chance to grab greatness. The mere fact that you decide to come out of the inconsiderate club, and be more sensitive, considerate and loving for a bigger cause, will set you apart, making you an achiever in itself. Come, grab your chance of greatness! Only this much triumph will be carried forward by the karmic DNA of your soul in the journeys next. The mountains of gold will remain on earth to be recycled and claimed for a false sense of victory over the generations.