Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Selfishness or selflessness


 Ultimately, everyone is trying to be happy and they think they need some people to share themselves with.. that is human tendency anyway. And yes, sharing with people can make a huge difference in one's life. Take any relation, for example, mother-child relationship. People say that it is the most unselfish relation.. but wait, think about it. Why does a mother care for her child so much? Because she has made that child her whole world and she gets happiness out of it.. so she wants to take care of her child. But, of course, there might be some amount of selflessness. Say for instance, when a child is just born or a few weeks old, she takes a lot of care, spending sleepless nights, just so that the child gets good sleep. It is her responsibility anyway.. But I am not sure if I have to call it selfishness/selflessness/love..

 Tell your mom or dad something that they dont really agree with, will they still treat you the same loving way? Never. You will be the cause of great distress to them. They would still care for you, but you would be the one on whom they will let out all anger. But that is understandable..since poor thing that your mom is, she is helpless, who can she share herself with other than you? And tell her something she feels happy about, and now, all of a sudden, you can see all the love pouring on you. 


We talk to people, spend time with them, lots of time. Why? Because we enjoy doing it. We like their company. As simple as that. And when we find people who fit better into the kind of personality that we would like to share ourselves with, we tend to enjoy the earlier company much lesser. That's human tendency. Infact, we might find the earlier friends much sillier. Such things do happen. After all, our mind today is not the same mind tomorrow. If you enjoy something today, you need not enjoy the same thing tomorrow. Everyday, you create your own world and you enjoy your own things according to your needs. So, you really do not know if this world that you see today is a part of your imagination or if you  yourself are a part of the imagination of someone else's world!


People use this word called "selfless love". I really wonder what that means at all. If someone loves someone else, or something, it is because, again, they feel happy about it. It is again, for happiness. A dad cares so much for his daughter, out of the so-called love, because he needs her, and he has made her happiness as his happiness.. If there is nothing that can make a friend happy, and if there is nothing that you will get out of such a friend, and nothing that you should expect, would you still love such a person? If you do, then you are really selfless. There is nothing that you truly want, because you are complete in yourself already, you are at your peak of happiness already. That can happen only if you have realised the ultimate goal of life, that is true and permanent happiness, not before. If you are experiencing such selflessness before that, it only means that you are in some kind of a hallucination!

At the end of all these experiences, then comes this grand-old question. What is life? And why are we here! And the question has a quite grand-old answer too!
If we look at it from our current plane of existence, we only have to say that, our so-called nature is "imperfect" and we are here to let the karma work itself out. In the process, we go through these experiences, and the grand hope is that, we learn something out of these experiences, which hardly is the case. Anyway, we have to learn, now or later. And unless our nature evolves and becomes completely free, there is no escape from these experiencies. So, we better learn.

WE need to evolve, and all relationships have to evolve. Why? To set ourselves free, to become independent of anything and anybody. 
And only then, you will be able to truly enjoy that feeling of solitude!