The definition of selfishness should always come up in the study of all things spiritual. No matter what subject from which your approach is, at some point selfishness must be related to it. The matter can be self help, emotional healing from traumatic past events producing dysfunction, or even religious studies in such disciplines as Christianity. There is no concrete universal right view on selfishness we all can agree to and practice in the manner that religion for example proposes. What you seek is the understanding of it from your perspective how it relates to you in your station in life right now. From what angle do you need to understand selfishness so that it grows you spiritually?
The reason for that is selfishness is very personal, like the size and type of shoes you wear, we use this example a lot in these pages because it is of great relevance. For some applications, such as convincing someone to follow a religion, it is beneficial to convince them to give up their identity if they want to be accepted into a religious organization, such as Catholicism or Mormon circles. Southern Baptist Convention for example would define selfishness as always bad in every situation. They claim to be the closest to God of all religions. If that is you, then join them with our blessings.
At the other end of circumstances, as in a self help group in emotional recovery work, selfishness would always be seen as a precious attribute in putting one’s life together after a horrific childhood of abuse. In these two instances, selfishness plays entirely opposite roles in a person’s life. This is our first point, which is the relevance to the individual, which is you, in how you see selfishness, and what role you need it to play in your life.
If you are prone to boundary violating behavior where you damage other people, then selfishness, or acting selfishly as you see it, for you is bad, and life damaging to others. Boundary violating behavior is not selfishness, this is in fact the lack of selfishness, which is harmful to others. Selfishness would keep you in your boundaries and you would not steal from others.
If you have limited understanding of your boundaries and you allow others to violate your world, then acting more selfishly for you is good. In both situations, the acts of violating boundaries are the symptom, and the cause is misuse, misunderstanding, and disregard of selfishness. Put simply, acting selfishly outside of your boundaries is bad and life damaging, and acting selfishly inside your boundaries is good and life enhancing. That is easy enough to grasp, but to do that, we need to understand other subjects also. And the first is who we are, and what constitutes our boundaries.
You cannot defend and care for ground that you cannot tell where it is. Once we understand the whole world of who we are and what constitutes our world we are to live in, then we can give ourselves moral permission to fully live and thrive in our own complete world. We cannot till and care for a garden when we do not know where it is and of what it consists. The subject of selfishness is big and defines all of this.
When you were born you came into this world being more than an individual. You also came into existence with a life path designed just for you. In it were the situations and relationships as classrooms to teach you soul lessons only you had to learn. You were placed in history at a specific time for the purpose of fitting into society when your gifts would benefit others who need you in their lives as well. In a nutshell, you are you, your life path, and the relationships in it are to teach you, to grow from them. These three things are integral to you, because they involve deep responsibilities to each. Your role of selfishness then involves understanding all these areas.
In the area of you, that is easy. Take care of yourself physically, advance yourself to the highest level you can academically, socially, financially. In your life path will be all the opportunities to advance in the same areas just mentioned. Your life path, including your present station in life, is part of you and you have every moral permission to defend it from outside intrusion, and grow yourself in it. How can we think of our life path and our relationships as part of us? Because our life path, the experiences we had in it and will have, including all our relationships, are part of our world, and that is most definitely a part of us.
Learn to see these three areas as yours because they are you. Yourself, your life path, and your relationships and acts with others in it are what make up your world. So, if what composes our world is greater than just us a single person, isolated, then how do we define our boundaries in all this overlapping complexity? Without knowing our boundaries, we cannot act out our selfishness in a life enhancing way. Confusion over boundaries is life damaging. Selfishness is often confused with a person damaging and stealing from others what is rightfully the other persons. Selfishness is just as rightly a person bettering themselves to be the greatest doctor they can become to do the most good in a community healing the sick. To do that the doctor must understand their life path, and the settings in it to create and live in their world. They must sense themselves first.
Being selfish is always good, and that responsibility extends into defending our life path, our friends, and relationships in it. Now the next question you may ask is how do we see and know what is ours in our world and what is not in our world? Since we all pretty much interact in the same space in community, and do the same behaviors, how do we tell what is relevant to us and what is not relevant? We all interact near the same things, a church, grocery store, flower shop, lumber yard, school of dance, hobby shop, motorcycle dealership, and so on. So how do we know what of those things are part of our world, and we can selfishly interact in our best interests in going there?
To be selfish in defending our boundaries, ourselves, our world, and building our relationships, we cannot tell just by looking at all the stuff in the overall world around us. We need to look at all the stuff around us with a certain specific set of glasses to see it clearly. God gave us those glasses when we were born. For many of us, those glasses were stolen from us when told we are wrong, or we do not deserve them because we are unworthy. Those glasses are, seeing things through our own eyes, and not someone else’s, or life’s eyes. Seeing things through our own eyes as the unique person we are is the first sacred act of pure selfishness that energizes our entire life into unfolding. It happens the second we start doing it. Seeing things through our own eyes allows us to see what things ours are, and more than that, energizes us to become the highest form of person we can be in our own life.
As said above, we all interact near the same things, a church, grocery store, flower shop, lumber yard, school of dance, hobby shop, motorcycle dealership, and so on. To an unselfish dethroned abused person, all these will look alike, and they will needlessly wander. But to a selfish, self-centered, self-focused self-empowered person, some things will stand out. The ones seeing things through their own eyes will act selfishly in their own self-interest. In the setting mentioned above, a selfish person seeing things through their own eyes, likenesses would happen. A person who loves flowers would go into the flower shop, a person who loves wood and woodworking as I do would be passionate about the lumberyard. A parent with a young daughter would enroll their daughter in the school of dance, and a person loving to build model airplanes or make dollhouses would quickly find the hobby shop. All these different interactions in our community happen because of selfishness acted out.
When we act in a truly selfishness manner, we are accepting God’s gift of who we are from God. In adding to our stature by learning, growing, and sharing the highest self we can become, that is the greatest gift we can give back to God, Humankind and Eternity, which is ourselves.
Just for the record, this is an emotional and spiritual encouragement ministry. We are selling nothing here and are not at the present time even set up to take donations, and probably never will. Your healed life is our reward enough, and we are very pleased with that. If you want to, please share your strength with others in your future so our nurturing can live on.