We’re ego and soul, and yin and yang, opposite forces, characteristic of duality, struggle inside us.
One of the most compelling challenges in my spiritual life has been to really understand the motives underlying my own feelings and actions. One of my teachers said a long time ago that a healer’s actions need to be motivated by what he called “pure intentions.” However, since subconscious forces drive us, how do we know what our real intentions are at any given moment?
For example, the most generous gestures could be driven by the need to please others or to be loved. An action could give us stature to the eyes of others but only our inner core would know how many pints of selfishness our generosity hid.
But this is not a new dilemma for me.
At 15, I was already a snob philosopher who could swear with no shame that she understood Socrates pretty well. Plato’s writings got me thinking about the essence of life, about beauty and goodness and I pondered what would be the best way for me to achieve some kind of utter kindness, selflessness, integrity… only to come to the conclusion that achieving this utopic perfection would on itself be tremendously self serving because I’d be striving for it basically to feel good about myself.
So, is selflessness really possible?
I follow the great egalitarian philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in that man is born good but the pernicious influence of human society and institutions corrupts them. I also believe with Daoists that we are born with wisdom, trust, faith, love, peace and joy and life experiences makes us learn anger, grief, fear, mistrust, resentment.
But be what it may be, we’re still made of ego and soul, and yin and yang, opposite forces, characteristic of duality, struggle inside us.
Maybe our life is about bringing light into our darkest places inside. Maybe it’s about increasing our awareness of our true essence. Maybe enlightenment is this consciousness of our wholeness, which is made of contradictions, about keeping a constant awareness of our oneness in the midst of our perception of division and differences.
The question then is not if selflessness is possible but if we could increase awareness of our interconnectedness.