Monday, January 01, 2007

Selfishness as an Impediment to Change

Hi Sibylle,

I have been seeing "SELFISHNESS" (in Japanese, "Wagamama") as a major impediment for change to happen. In spite of the fact that this highly dangerous microwave radiation is doing serious damage to the planetary health, most people — even when confronted with these facts — are still not willing to alter their addictive obsessive behaviors. Why?

Interestingly, I have noticed that this fellow Aurobindo seemed to have talked a lot about this aspect of people's personalities:

"Our actual enemy is not any force exteror to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism."

http://www.sriaurob indosociety. org.in/sriauro/ aurolife. htm

identification with the infinite and the eternal. Aurobindo is expressing the same idea when he says that in psychic life selfishness must be discarded, but in the spiritual life there is no sense of the separate self. Aurobindo insists that it is not annihilation of the individual but its transformation which is the end of integral education.

The third dream was a world-union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind. That unification of the human world is under way; there is an imperfect initiation organised by struggling against tremendous difficulties. But the momentum is there and it must inevitably increase and conquer. Here too India has begun to play a prominent part and, if she can develop that larger statesmanship which is not limited by the present facts and immediate possibilities but looks into the future and brings it nearer, her presence may make all the difference between a slow and timid and a bold and swift development. A catastrophe may intervene and interrupt or destroy what is being done, but even then the final result is sure. For unification is a necessity of Nature, an inevitable movement. Its necessity for the nations is also clear, for without it the freedom of the small nations may be at any moment in peril and the life even of the large and powerful nations insecure. The unification is therefore to the interests of all, and only human imbecility and stupid selfishness can prevent it; but these cannot stand for ever against the necessity of Nature and the Divine Will. But an outward basis is not enough; there must grow up an international spirit and outlook, international forms and institutions must appear, perhaps such developments, as dual or multilateral citizenship, willed interchange or voluntary fusion of cultures. Nationalism will have fulfilled itself and lost it militancy and would no longer find these things incompatible with self-preservation and the integrality of its outlook. A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race.

http://www.sriaurob indosociety. org.in/15aug. htm

In the words of Sri Aurobindo, MAN is selfish. He even says that he was selfish. The human organism is created as a selfish creature. Ego is developed to justify it. ALL our thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, and acts are the expressions of that ego and that selfishness. Each time we give expression to such an act or thought, we fortify our ego, instead of destroying it.

http://www.motherse rvice.org/ Essays/Prayer% 20as%20Consecrat ion.htm

Sri Aurobindo provides the seeker with a road map to discover the truth of his theory and their true Nature. The broad principles of the search he advocates are:

1. Man must begin by detaching from his surface personality, time, space, ego and selfishness.

2. Man must disengage from the constructive consciousness of the mind and its divided awareness.

3. Man must discover his psychic center which is the secret entrance to the ascending grades of higher consciousness.

4. Man must climb back to and station himself in the Supramental consciousness where he will rediscover the Oneness of Existence.

5. Man must act from a poise of consciousness that permits him to live in Status and Extension simultaneously.

6. Man must act from that center as a point of self-conscious manifestation to transform life on earth to that of heaven on earth -- God in manifestation.

http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Sri_Aurobindo

he says that in psychic life selfishness must be discarded, but in the spiritual life there is no sense of the separate self. Aurobindo insists that it is not annihilation of the individual but its transformation which is the end of integral education.

PEACELOVECOMPASSION JOYLIGHTWISDOMTRUTHSTRENGTH

paul




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