Selfishness

So much debate and energy is given to the word “selfish” or “selfishness.” I was recently asked to write about this in my blog. We are told that, if we are selfish, we are wrong and very much in the Self. Yet selfishness is a subject we really need to explore in detail. I am prompted by one of my own family members who, for many years, I felt was very selfish, indeed. He never took into account anyone else. It was always me, me, and more me! When this began I had great difficulty in coming to terms with it and even more so in that the person was a family member, a male. I struggled for years knowing that he was – as I considered – selfish, and this really disturbed me.

When Maitreya came into my life, he told me that this person was exactly where he needed to be – in his selfishness. In past lives he had lived many nomadic, spiritual lives, taking care of others, talking to people on a higher level (channeling in a way), and living a secular life of poverty and chastity. He had done his work in helping others and now was in the throes of learning about taking, not giving. In this life he had to learn to do things for himself, to learn about earning money instead of having a begging bowl and asking for alms. He had to learn how to earn and pay for food. He had to learn how to have sex with a partner for, in a past life, he had been chaste and never experienced sexual energy. There were so many things he needed to learn about the earth plane. We would say it is selfishness, but to the person concerned, it is learning about life away from the monastery or the nomadic way of life he had experienced prior to his existence in this life.

This whole conversation with my teacher completely changed not only my thinking, but my entire life! Never again did I see this family member as selfish, and I came to understand why he is selfish. It put a whole new slant on life for me. We should be spending time on ourselves and enjoying our own lives. We spend so much time trying to help other people with their lives that we cannot see what we have come to learn in our own life. Once we do see what our own lessons are – and not the lessons of others – then we can move forward with our own lives and our life path.