Symbols of the world's religions

               

THESE TWO PHASES ARE CONTINUOUS WITH EACH OTHER

Meher Baba

 
The desires which enter into a constitution of the personal ego are either good or bad. Bad desires are ordinarily referred to as forms of selfishness and good desires are referred to as forms of selflessness. But there is no hard and fast line dividing selfishness from selflessness. Both move in the domain of duality and, from the ultimate point of view which transcends the opposites of good and bad, the distinction between selfishness and selflessness is chiefly one of range.

Selfishness and selflessness are two phases of the life of the personal ego, and these two phases are continuous with each other.

Selfishness arises when all the desires are centered around the narrow individuality. Selflessness arises when this crude organisation of desires suffers disintegration and there is a general dispersing of desires with the result that they cover a much wider sphere.

Selfishness is the narrowing down of interests to a limited field; selflessness is the extension of interests over a wide field.

To put it paradoxically, selfishness is a restricted form of selflessness, and selflessness is the drawing out of selfishness into a wide sphere of activity.

Selfishness must be transmuted into selflessness before the domain of duality is completely transcended. Persistent and continuous performance of good deeds wears out selfishness. Selfishness extended and expressed in the form of good deeds becomes the instrument of its own destruction. The good is the main link between selfishness thriving and dying. Selfishness, which in the beginning is the father of evil tendencies, becomes through good deeds the hero of its own defeat.

When the evil tendencies are completely replaced by good tendencies, selfishness is transformed into selflessness, i.e., individual selfishness loses itself in universal interest.

Though this selfless and good life is also bound by the opposites, goodness is a necessary step towards freedom from the opposites. Goodness is the means by which the soul annihilates its own ignorance.

From the good the soul passes on to God. Selflessness is merged into Universal Selfhood, which is beyond good and bad, virtue and vice and all the other dual aspects of Maya. The height of selflessness is the beginning of the feeling of oneness with all.

 

DISCOURSES, 6th ed, vol 1, pp. 30-31
1967 © Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust

               

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