Selfishness [7] – Love and service

The dawn of love facilitates the death of selfishness. Being is dying by loving.

If you cannot love one another, how can you love even those who torture you?

The limits of selfishness are created by ignorance. When a person realizes that he can have more glorious satisfaction by widening the sphere of his interests and activities, he is heading toward the life of service.

At this stage he entertains many good desires. He wants to make others happy by relieving distress and helping them. And though even in such good desires there is often an indirect and latent reference to the self, narrow selfishness has no grip over good deeds. Even good desires may, in a sense, be said to be a form of enlightened and extended selfishness; for, like bad desires, they too move within the domain of duality. But as the person entertains good desires his selfishness embraces a larger conception that eventually brings about its own extinction.

Instead of merely trying to be illustrious, arresting, and possessive, he learns to be useful to others.

-Discourses, 7th Ed, p 13

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