Selfishness

While I was working with a client, the subject of "selfish" came up and she asked me, "What is the definition of selfishness" and I found myself responding "All the negative, self-pitying, self-doubting, self-sabotaging energy you expend". Her mouth dropped open and she exclaimed, "Wow!, that makes so much sense, but tell me more." I continued to explain that when we spend our time and energy in those destructive ways our energy is not available for service either to ourselves or others. Using our energy in judging others or ourselves is to squander our birthright, so to speak, because our power lies in the inherent energy of love that lives within us. When we use that energy for other purposes, we are being selfish. In other words we are using our energy for destructive purposes; therefore, we become a drain, not only using our own energy in self-destructive ways but also sucking positive energy from others rather than sharing our positive, life supporting, creative energy with them.



An example of this might be: You find yourself angry or resentful or you suspect you are being undermined by someone. You make up some story that seems to indicate to you or prove to you that your story is true. Then you call the person or text them or shoot off an email with the accusation only to discover that the story was not only not true but only a figment of your imagination. But by that time the damage has been done. Feelings are hurt and the relationship suffers. This whole process is an act of selfishness. You want to justify your imagined hurt or supposed hurt by making up a story and picking, perceiving and provoking the evidence in your own imagination and then send out the accusation convinced you are justified in the act.



The reality is the story is imagined to fit your own mis-perception of self imagined as truth. Look at all the time and energy you have spent on this folly, when that same energy might have been used to be in service creating a loving energy within that flows out into the world utilized as creative energy. Which, by the way, is well spent because it comes back to you in the same way. Lovingly!



Just watch the news reports and you will see this foolery being played out in almost every story. This person said this and this person did that and hours and hours of "investigation" are utilized to discover the "truth". How selfish this all is. It sells, it gets ratings, it's entertainment. That is the telling part. It sells - greed comes to mind. It is no where more evident than in the "reality" shows. Self-indulgent, selfish use of energy is rampant around the globe-- it is the "victim" and "perpetrator" -- the opposite ends of the continuum. Without the perpetrator there can be no victim. That energy keeps the suffering, the refusal to hold oneself accountable for personal use of energy going. The planetary mind made up of the thoughts of everyone on the planet is filled with prepetrator-victim energy. It seems to be the excuse for every suffering.

I think is was the Dalai Lama or was it Buddhism that says something to the effect that to have too many thoughts is a source of suffering or something like that. When our minds whirl in what I call "the buzzsaw mind" we are not thinking but just ruminating over the same old story, the same old hurt, the same old unrealized dream. Neither the hurt nor the dream can be resolved nor realized in this manner. This is "selfish" use of thought energy. It is also important to remember that thoughts are things that effect other things.



Is this living in choice? No, of course it isn't. And perhaps that is the payoff. The reward. I no longer can be held accountable for my reaction to what I perceive the other has done to me or what I have done to myself or to them. "I have "earned" the "right" to live in self-pity, lack, and suffering", just may be the justification that that reaction is right and proper.



We never do anything that we do not think is "right, proper, and justified" in any given moment given what we think we know in that moment. That is the reason regret is so overrated. So, rather than surviving in self-pity for what might have been or could have been - seeing that in that moment you did the very best you could with what you knew at the time is enough. It is enough because that is all you knew to do at the time. Now, perhaps, you can see something different and that means you see something else is right, justified, and proper today. See how that works out and keep moving to the next moment of wisdom - follow it and see where it takes you.



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