Selfish

Selfishness:

It, I would define is, the will to further one’s interests over others’, within one’s own moral precincts. It is the instinct of survival that has been tempered by generations of collective thinking and social taming.

I would like to clarify here that I am making a fundamental differentiation between a wrongdoing and an act of selfishness. A wrongdoing is an act of moral weakness. An act of selfishness is of the will, usually with full effect, because you are doing something over the fresh grave of a conflict.

The conflict is with the notion of “sacrifice”. It is moral degradation that asks or waits for a sacrifice. It is lack of strength that makes a sacrifice. A duty is never a sacrifice, to be remembered. Who claims a duty to be a sacrifice is being selfish.

Being selfish is just one of the means to be independent. This is the way that makes independence inevitable. You would have exhibited your preferences, your priorities and your intentions. You would have played your cards. You are exposed, like a diva under the focus lamp, whose shoulder straps have become undone. You can either cover your vitals and be ashamed. Or you can be light as a newborn foal, and celebrate the innocence of being naked. Your pretences have been shooed away by a momentary expansion of your real self. It is now decided! You have been branded!

Let me be honest, very. Simply put, no man can be not selfish at all. Selflessness is in an ideal man. Designed to make a role model for us, at a time when being selfish could have ruined a pack of hunters, who still held stones for weapons. The results of one individual wanting to exercise his interests and choices would be disastrous for the pack. Such hunters became the solitary jungle men, thrown out of the pack, and fighting for survival in a world where individual choices are violated and disrespected.

I need not be proud of being selfish, just like how I am not proud that I can be cold and unsympathetic. I need not feel self-regret and remorse for being selfish, just like how I am in equanimity with my arts and vices.

Selfishness is demonstrated through acts. Words, movements, gestures and decisions. They are the ends churned out by something as unpredictable as a human mind. The dynamics are complex to break down. The concoction is variegated by the essence of so many experiences and priorities.

People lie. People make mistakes. People do stupid things. People do bad things. People hurt. People hurt. Can an individual’s worth be measured accordingly? The answer would be a loud no among our intellectuals. The answer would be a simple yes from an ordinary man. What matters is “what do you think?”



The Personality – Taking the Mind’s Part!

In psychology, personality is a collection of emotional, thought and behavioral patterns unique to a person that is consistent over time. The word itself originates from the Latin word “mask”. Not meaning an apparatus to plot, but as one to typify or portray.

Various schools of psychology employ various approaches to frame a model to explaining personality. Freud used the ego, superego and id as components of personality. There are behaviorist theories, cognitive theories, trait theories and many more.

All modern theories look at explaining personality, where it is an object of mystery that has to be solved. Emotions, behaviors and thoughts are seen as outcomes of a certain type of personality. There seems to be an underlying principle that is ignored when something is explained in context than in essence. But this is science and it stops with the explaining. Psychologists were trying to understand, not to design a way of life. They did not have nirvana or deliverance or afterlife to contend with. Understanding was the deliverable than devising an approach to understand and use it to one’s advantage.

It is more prudent, in my opinion, to look at the cause to frame a theory, than to look at the action/reaction.

The Buddha explains personality thus:

The personality is of five components:
1. The body – as the substrata of being alive
2. The sensory organs – on which the body depends to feel alive
3. Perceptions – as the process of interpretation of the senses thus felt
4. The activities of the mind – as the process of thinking
5. Cognition – as the process of knowing

One leads to the other. Without the body, there would be no living. This is the physical bulk of the personality. The sensory organs feel, vibrate and function their part. The mind performs the arithmetic, gives allegories, recalls examples and finds the best way to act.

Till now, everything is involuntary. The ears will always hear the music, leading to a sense of joy. The joy is the outcome of the mind. It recalls nice things, beautiful valleys, colorful gardens and cute babies. Cognition is the awareness part, where the self reflects, meditates and ponders over itself and its actions. There is a smile that will bloom on the face at the sight of a kitten, which will sometimes be crossed by “why am I smiling?” This is the self, looking at the personality, trying to understand it.

Traditionally religions have been the channels of framing ways to live, act and behave. In turn, such principles were supported by philosophies that explained the self, its mysteries and the life after death. The Aryan race believed in payback brought about by the actions in this birth. Donate, sacrifice, be virtuous, be religious and abnegate.

Escape from passions and desires are seen as a way of freeing oneself from the mires of the personality. This is because the personality and the self are seen as different. The personality is the mortal, while the self or the atman is immortal. The personality is the direction of the urge of the self in this birth.

Cognition is causal. We are aware of something only when the previous four components have done their functions. The processes that take place because of the senses cause it. Cognition cannot be used as an approach to explaining the personality, since it is a part of the personality.

Personality can be explained and understood only by the self, which is an outsider to personality. One cannot know the quality of an apple by being a leaf in the tree. One has to be a farmer. The self has to look at the personality, isolated.

The self is the idea of a unified being which is the source of an idiosyncratic consciousness in a living being. This is called idiosyncratic because it symbolizes the peculiarity of the self with respect to the other senses that reside in the body and the processes of the mind. The latter are there for a specific purpose. But the self? Why must we have a self? It is because we are unable to explain this something. A substance or a mechanism that seems to reside within us, yet apart from us, and which will come closer only by reflection and not by intuition. The self is deduced by logic. The same cold logic of the mind will deduce the essence of man, the self or the atman.

The self is the life that throbs in the heart. The force that moves the universe. The electric field that causes electrons to go around the nucleus. The God that creates life. The destructive force that can churn an ocean. For us who are tangled with the details cannot see the force that is guiding us on our path. The macro can look at the micro with a mere effort, but the opposite to take place needs a different approach to life.

I have gone into such details to enable the thought process of understanding the cause of selfishness. If one thinks he is selfish, his self is looking at his personality. It is the essence of you that is being critical. The personality as such is causal and has acted in the best material interests of you. The self looks at the interests in a different manner, since it is outside the realm of the personality, though it uses the very same cognition to effect this judgment on the individual.

The self is apart from selfishness or any other vices or devise yet contrived by any mind. Such are acts of the cognition. Borne out of the processes triggered by the senses, and processed by the mind. The self is always divine in every being. The overpowering sensations of the mind, passions and desires overshadow the self, the essence of man.

All turpitude and guilt is only mind deep. Deep down we are all-pure. Till we realize and fructify this spirit within us, all movements and productions are sufferings and are illusory.

Are we then to abnegate and become monks ourselves? I venture forth with the answer “ All beings were selected by a self, the eternal one. It formed our personality in response to the touch and vibrations of our senses and our mentation. We have to respond in this world if we are to sail smooth within this samsara. Not everyone can quit family, desires and passions to attain Buddhahood. Nor does everyone believe in the eternal self and rebirth. The awareness of the self will suffice in this age when individual value is corroded more than ever. People run away, break down and actively and passively abandon their responsibility to themselves and the society. It is better to look at the world as a place where the self has chosen to weave its story, around this personality, in this direction”.

The self has to be acknowledged as being present within us. Not everything of us is flesh, blood and matter. There is enough room within our existence that permits the accedence of the metaphysical; of the abstract, the incorporeal and the obtuse. Once this space is accorded to the self, then it is the ego that is being selfish. Any act is a response to a condition that exists, and is the result of cognition, which is causal in nature. If the act evokes guilt, it is the mind again with its response to the situation created by the act. This situation might also be dealt with by a response.

It is by giving up all that the self can be attained. That eternal bliss is not to be attained by us all. We are creatures that respond. We are creatures that are surviving. We want to live. Death for us is pain, not deliverance. Such is the mentation’s reason. Strong enough, in my opinion, to make us go through life, as we deem right.

So let us set aside the spiritual context of selfishness, or any other quality within man that he deems is unfit for public exposition. The spiritual realm is for those who want deliverance from the cycle of birth, death, sins and suffering. We are talking about the justifiability of an act within one’s mind. We are limited to the cognitive. We are trying to make peace with the mind and the self, by taking the mind’s part. The mind is aware of the self and vice versa, and we are trying to synchronize the both by showing the self the very little choice that the mind has to consider. Let the self be sympathetic, let the mind be flamboyant. Let the path be correct. Let us live to be happy, however futile this life may be.

Submitting:

We all submit, rather surrender our choices for something better. We have the choice of redepositing our choices into the “choice” bank. We can draw out new ones. We can change.

I can surrender resolve to pliability. I can surrender truth to falsehood. I can submit to a life of celibacy. I can do anything!

We always go through a period when choices don’t seem to exist, after the surrender. There seems to be an indomitable scarcity of thought, ideas and action; of choices as such. We despair at these times. When the soul feels broken, when the heart revels in a trough, refusing to look up. There again is always the awakening. For nothing can be left untouched by evolution and growth, can it? We look about, and then amazingly, we walk again. We look for fresh choices to make. We surrender old coins that are not worth any longer, in exchange for newly issued ones.

There is a new attitude to this makeover! People do change, I believe for the good. They submit used choices to new ones. They create new vistas to themselves, where they can see a better view of their future. They rejoice the potency of their decision, proud and defiant.

Selfishness is just such a choice, made unconsciously and sometimes consciously. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that it is bred among us as separate entities; as money, as freedom, as desires, as power, etc. The only crime that selfishness commits on the human is that it conquers him unnoticed, when he does notice, he is in a plot inextricably complex and is daringly in the open.

He who exercises his choices with a will scares people of his potency. He plays to his strength, his smartness. He gets what he exactly wants. He makes bold decisions that decide his own fate. He is taking destiny head on. He chooses to have more control over his life than others.

He who is sure is always suspected. He who thinks for his own welfare always draws flak for his seemingly careless attitude. He who is powerful over himself is always belittled in a thousand small ways. He who is smart is always hated. We are not paragons of virtue. Vices rule our unconscious, moderated by again, taming and social instincts.

A selfish individual not only robs people of their interests, but also enjoys them right in front of the disadvantaged, all the more hurt.

Man has been so well conditioned that he will not advance his own interests till he is insecure, cornered. Insecurity may be imaginary, nothing really. He reacts like an innocent toddler clutching at fire. Will he be burnt? Or will he learn to play & revel in its warmth?

Love and Selfishness:

Love. I would not be doing justice to selfishness if I don’t think of this.

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses
Your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So he shall descend to your roots and shake them
In their clinging to the earth.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then as he assigns you to his sacred fire, that
You may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you
May know the secrets of your heart, and in that
Knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s
Peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your
Nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh,
But not all of your laughter, and weep,but not all
Of your tears.
(On love, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran)

Love is a flight toward perfection. We become better with love. We love so that we become better. Self-love is the basic manifestation of love. If it is not within us, it will not come out. One who is deficient in resources cannot give. Love is a conscious effort we make toward someone or something.

Love moves us toward extremities. There is immense happiness, emotions, and passions and there is heart wrenching sorrow and failure too. One who has not loved will never know these extremes. Yet nobody is not touched by love. If love is not perceived in its embracing presence, it is definitely felt in its ghostly absence.

One, who does not perceive love, will be contented. He will have capabilities that will define his boundaries. There will be no wings. There will be no utopia in the mind. There will be no butterflies in the garden. The spring that embellishes the spirit with a sense of bounty will forever deprive the individual of the warmth that is the extra bit of spice that man tastes over the animals.

We usually encounter situations where we must give up something for somebody we love. If I give up something for something for my beloved, I am doing love’s labor. It is duty. It is duty that is performed without the slightest whimpering. We cannot be selfish to those who love because we will be doing our duty by doing what is required to be done. There is a joy to doing this; else we would not do it. Ignoring the self in making such decisions towards depriving oneself can look romantic at that moment, but will always come back and haunt us. Regrets in decisions lead to discontent. Discontent leads to complaining. Complaining will always come back to “sacrifice”.

Must Selfishness be Vanquished?

Now, we will see if this needs to be branded as bad and hounded out of our realm, else if it needs to be tolerated as another eccentricity of the human mind among many others.

Everybody is selfish. It is hypocrisy if this is refuted. It cannot be challenged. We are human beings. We need to advance, grow, and survive, most of all. The advancements and the growth become the proxies for survival when survival is taken for granted. An average man is assured of physical survival. He will normally not be beaten to death or killed by an expulsion from a group. He will live. So now, the struggle is toward a comfortable existence. I need an air conditioner badly. It has become need. It has become a hygiene factor, without which I am not happy. I want to be powerful. I want to control. I will live unless an accident happens to occur.

So we will be rarely in a position where we will be endangering the physical lives of people by being selfish. Not many people get to that position of power and potency. Being selfish will enable you to be in control, if only your conscience permitted you to be happy with the control so achieved. Being selfish will let you have better things in life. Be it a better income, a better job, a better lifestyle.

It is imperative to understand that being unselfish will not give lives to people who are in trouble. It is sometimes bad to be unselfish, just like how it is good to be selfish sometimes. After all, we may not be making much of a difference.

What would we be losing? We would be losing the goodwill of those who were affected, if it mattered to think about their lot. We would be losing our peace of mind if we believe we have been harsh. We would be losing our self worth if we think we were wrong. If this were the case, it would be best to go back on the decision, since this is a weak mind, with weaker principles and controls.

Selfishness is good. Anything that is considered bad is bad and will be regretted and fretted over. I would not call them selfish acts or motives. They are just bad things done at a time when a bad thought asserted itself.

Selfishness is an act of consciousness if planned, within the ambit of our values. If it is unplanned, it is the essence of ourselves that are exposed through an act. In both cases, it is the good part of us that is acting to do us good. It is not sick to be selfish. It is not a base character that calls itself selfish and acts so.

Then are we here to outdo and outsmart one another, one may wonder. Gathering fruits is different from marauding an orchard. So is selfishness different from mindless acquisition. Being selfish means you pick the best fruits for yourself and not wish your neighbor ate rotten eggs. Then, what he eats need not be your worry, if that can be seen as a crime! If you have an apple to spare, you may even be charitable. Up to your appetite.

When selfishness creeps up from behind you, wake up. You may have your priorities wrong or neglecting your interests and well being. If you think you are unselfish, wake up. It is better to be selfish than a hypocrite. Accept it, live with it.

Conclusion:

I am selfish. I am not regretting it. I am at peace when I can say this to my face and to the world. I am not lying.

It takes a change to acknowledge this. It takes an effort. It takes will to assert oneself. Change.

When we look at the cost of a sacrifice, it will always be worth not making it. Who has not regretted a sacrifice sincerely?

For so long, socio religious conscience has had the better of the mind. A thousand chains have bound rationality. Man has become a slave to his own creation – society. Man is today lost in a multitude of fantabulous theories and myths regarding his existence. Man is an intelligent animal, a bit more sophisticated and with more ambulatory options, and definitely a better mental capacity.

In the absence of a physical territory to guard, when food, shelter and sex are guaranteed, when existence is not threatened, such things that were preternatural to our forefathers have become knowledge to us. Times have changed.

Selfishness is the conduit for our instinctual energies to be spent. It is the intent to live, expressed through a thousand proxies. It is human life, with its own eccentricity. The center point will remain the same, but the circle will never be perfect.