I know that the sentence in the title appears to be a paradox right how can selfishness bear selflessness but I will attempt to convince you that this is actually the case and that it's not a paradox at all and the easiest way to start thinking about this fact is our own idea of us maybe being too selfish and that we should do more for other people um that we should not live for ourselves that we're in a society and that we should contribute to it but whenever we do try to do something to help others
to make someone else's life better we find the process very slow very frustrating and it seems like we're not getting any results and we quickly burn out as opposed to those people that we see sometimes around us or maybe in the media who have been doing selfless work for decades who've been involved in all kinds of Charities whether formally or informally in their personal lives even and that are every move of theirs seems to be a a selfless act helping someone else improve someone else's life and we wonder how do they get all this energy
all this patience and all this endurance to live like this constantly when we can't even do it for a short amount of time and that's a very very important and valid question the thing is the question assumes something that's not actually the case it assumes that people with a lot of energy and patience and endurance can live like this and that if you don't have those qualities which some people think are inherent either you have it or you don't then you can't engage in this work you can't live like this you're going to be more
of a parasite to society than anything else but that's actually not true um they don't have more energy and they don't have more endurance well they might but it's not inherent and it's not necessary what happens to these people is they stop doing the work for the fruit and instead they do the labor for Labor's sake and they don't look for the fruits of their labor and you might say well okay that's easier said than done but how does one actually achieve that whenever I do something nice I certainly do look for a result if
people don't thank me if they if they're not grateful if they don't somehow reward me whether with praise or anything else eventually no one would want to help people like that but that's not true because that's looking for the fruit of your labor and the way to stop doing that is to realize that nothing good or bad exists outside of you because if it was truly good were truly bad it would be inside of you it's the same thing we apply to happiness if we start to look for happiness in a job in a career
and money and relationships only then guess what the everyone who has the power to give us a job or to not give us a job everyone who has the power to give us money or not to give us money has power over our happiness and I've asked this question question before here and it's a question that you should always ask yourself when you pursue something that you think might be beneficial for you is is this something that can be taken away from me is and am I fine with happiness being something that can be taken
away from me what a terrible world it would be if happiness was something that we don't have we don't own inherently that can be taken away from us or given to us as someone else pleases everyone who is Happy everyone who's leading a fulfilled life and everyone who is doing labor for Labor's sake and not for the fruits of their labor knows this everyone who does that looks for all the good and the bad inside of them if they want to be good people then they say a good person is an honest person a good
person is a kind person a good person might be a generous person whatever it is all these things are completely up to us no one can force us to lie to be a dishonest person if you don't do it you won't do it and no one can make us less or more honest no one can uh Force us to tell the truth more only we can do that no one can make us kind we can go through the motions of what seems to be honesty and what kindness and and generosity looks like but if we
don't really feel it it's not honesty it's not generosity and it's not kindness and if we do truly feel it then it it is ours and it will always be ours and it can never be subtracted or added to by anyone else and that's your true power and that's if you link your happiness to that if you say I want to be an honest person I want to be a kind person then you've unlocked really your key to happiness and your path to happiness because the more honest you become which is entirely in your control
how honest you are is entirely in your control that's how happy you'll be and you will have complete control over your own happiness in that way it's the same exact thing with being selfless when we do selfless acts just for the fact that we want to be someone who's selfless that we want to be someone who does things for other people and who improves everything wherever they go then we will do that for ourselves and not for someone else we will say we'll be generous we'll look for improvements that we can make in our en
environment and our society just because we want to be that kind of person that's exactly the turning point when true selflessness comes from True selfishness because everything we do even though it benefits other people even though of course kindness honesty generosity all these behaviors that we have have benefit everyone around us we're really not doing it for other people we're doing it for ourselves and that's what true selfishness is and that's what true selflessness is because no matter how much praise we get for it no matter how many actual physical Awards or rewards we get
for it or don't we will do the work because we've never done it with the intention of getting a reward but we've done it with the intention of I am a person who is kind I am a person who does not hoard things who does not try to possess things more than they need because they become an impediment to me wanting these things Desiring material objects makes me in in a way uh binds me to other people it gives control to other people over my happiness over the kind of person that that I am over
the Fulfillment that I feel in my life if I desire a material object I desire something that can be taken away from me if I desire someone's favor being liked by someone well then I'm tying my happiness to that person's decisions and that person's control over me but if I say I'm a charitable person I'm I look around and I and I feel empathy with with people and I want to do what I can simply because I'm a human being that has something that they can spare and sees that someone else lacks it that's the
only reason I will take this and give it to them no other reason and the the Fulfillment you get from that the happiness you get from that first of all is nothing in in comparison to anything else it's it's tfold it's infinitely more gratifying more fulfilling than any kind of compliment or praise or prize that you could get and I hope that you now see that true selflessness comes from True selfishness because everything good that we do we do for ourselves we should do for ourselves and everything bad that we do we do to ourselves
if that's the big BG consequence that we can possibly think of if we can train ourselves to see that the worst thing about doing something bad is that we're damaging ourselves that we're damaging our Humanity our soul if you will our intellect that first well we will stop doing it but also the worst consequence is not that someone else finds out and that someone else punishes us it's that we know we did it and it damaged us and it it turned us away from the past path that we had for ourselves imagined and again like
I said the consequence the greatest consequence of doing something good is that we lived up to our potential is that we lived up to our dream of ourselves and the highest possible being that we can imagine ourselves being that we're making progress towards that what's greater than that but also at the same time like I said what's more selfish than that so be that kind of selfish to be the true kind of selfless
