This is part of a series I’m doing on the intersection of nonduality and Native wisdom. It’s important to kind of watch the series in order, because often the pieces by themselves don’t make sense. You’ll find it on my channel on YouTube, and you’ll also find it on my website in order.
This particular video goes along really well with the one that I did yesterday, which was adding in the context of finding complete unity. We started seeing, in that video, how our innate selfishness (which is actually what causes our division) can lead to crazy spirituality. How that innate selfishness starts turning into self-importance in our mind.
Seeing the entire unity of the universe can be a good step towards reaching the nondual state, a state where you are not separate from everything else, if you acknowledge your selfishness… and manage to avoid it.
All human beings have an innate selfishness because we have hunger, we have all sorts of desires. Not only do we have this innate selfishness, but it is possible to enhance that selfishness throughout our lives by the way that we’re taught and we’re raised. A person can be raised to be less selfish; a person can be raised in a way that makes then more and more selfish.
That’s what’s cool about selfishness… we can see it an even manage it. Even though it’s an innate aspect of being a human being, it can be learned. Anything that can be learned can be unlearned.
We tend to get an emotional reaction to this, ‘I’m not selfish!’
Yes, you are; we all are.
Disassociate yourself from that crampy emotion around selfishness and just admit it, ‘Yeah, I’m selfish.’ When you see it, now you own it. You’re becoming a self aware human. It’s a degree. It can be managed. There are probably times in your life where you’re more selfish and probably times when you’re less selfish. There could easily be people you hang out with that make you more selfish and make you less selfish. It’s not a defining part of who you are. It’s a learned behavior.
Start moving yourself in every way that you can out of selfishness and towards the non-selfish. Try to notice if you’re always thinking about yourself, add something else in. Sometimes it’s too hard to do this around other people because everybody else is selfish as well. Depending on how close you’re hanging out with other people, and what’s going on, if you try to live a life that’s unselfish, you can get used and abused, right? because everybody else is selfish.
That’s no excuse not to try to be a decent human being.
Maybe start doing it with puppy dogs, right? They love us no matter what. Try being open with a non-selfish being: trees, plants. Start tending a garden, work on your yard. Maybe just simply clean your kitchen. That’s a non-selfish act, right?
Do small things for people as much as possible. Open the door for somebody, smile and say hello. Sometimes just that one little unselfish act can mean a ton for somebody else. Somebody that you don’t even know. Walking down the street, give them a smile, hello, it’s an unselfish act.
Start working on your own selfishness because there’s a magic point where you start realizing, ‘Oh, I am part of this living being that’s going on, that’s humanity.’ You realize that your interaction with the world makes a huge difference in what is going on around you. A ripe inner soul can grow out of us by simply focusing on unselfish moments throughout our day. The more we do this, the more we relax into being a human being.
There’s so many things possible: pick up the phone, make a phone call to somebody, send a letter, send a postcard to somebody. There are so many little unselfish acts we can do.
And as we do these things, we bloom as a human being to the point where Enlightenment itself, the nondual state itself unfolds. Enlightenment is the state of total unselfishness. That’s because the false self, the thing that we’re constantly trying to protect when we’re being selfish, has fallen away.
We are nothing but the actual person living our lives. There’s not two of you, there’s just one. Selfishness is always about division; there’s me and there’s you, there’s this and there’s that, there’s me and there’s mine. Or when that’s one, there is nothing left but the total integrated self.