Evolution of Love 2

🌹 JOURNEY TO SELF REALIZATION 🌹

Three kinds of selfishness- Evil, Good, and Sacred

We should , however, clearly distinguish the three kinds of selfishness: evil, good, and sacred. Evil selfishness is that which actuates a man to seek his own comfort by destroying the comforts of others. To be rich at the cost of others’ loss is sin, and is against the interests of the higher individual Self of the person who engages in such selfishness.
To delight in hurting others’ feelings by carping criticism is also evil selfishness; this malignant pleasure is not conducive to any lasting good.

True and good selfishness motivates a man to seek his own comfort, prosperity, and happiness by also making others more prosperous and happy. Evil selfishness hides its many destructive teeth of inevitable suffering beneath the apparently innocent looks of temporary comfort-assurances. Evil selfishness encloses one in a small circle and shuts out the rest of humanity. Good selfishness takes everybody along with one’s own self into the circle of brotherhood.
Good selfishness brings many harvests-return services from others, self-expansion, divine sympathy, lasting happiness, and Self-realization.

Good selfishness should be practiced by the businessman, who, by sincere, honest, wholesome, constructive actions and labors, enables himself to look after his own and his family’s needs and provides a useful service to others. Such a businessman is far superior to one who thinks and acts only for himself, with no regard for those he serves or those dependent on him for support. The latter is acting against his own best selfish interests; for according to the law of cause and effect, he himself will in time attract suffering.
The wealth of many misers is left to relatives, who often squander it on wrong self-indulgences. Such selfishness, in the end, helps neither the giver nor the receiver.

To avoid the pitfalls of evil selfishness, one should first follow and establish himself in the pattern of good selfishness, wherein one thinks of his family and those whom he serves as part of himself. From that attainment, one can then advance to a practice of sacred selfishness (or unselfishness, as ordinary understanding would term it) in which one sees all the universe as himself.