Self-Absorption Narrows Your World

Dreaming Of Money – A Short Story

I was at sixes and sevens in my dream, trying to forecast my income and outgoings. As I woke up in that half-awake state of unconstrained consciousness where I often receive many truths from beyond this veil, I suddenly had a vision. I saw a destitute older man in India. He was sitting alone in a dusty, dilapidated street, wearing a dirty, threadbare shirt and loose pants. Although he was thin and probably hungry, this was not the worst thing he had to contend with. Somehow I could feel his desperate loneliness and feelings of abandonment. I knew he had no family or friends, and I could see in his eyes that he felt all alone in the world.

 I could hugely identify with the man’s sense of acute loneliness, especially after what I had lived through over twelve years ago:

A year after my late wife, Cushla, died, I began to feel an intense sense of grief and emptiness. I had been going in and out of the denial stage of grief and holding back my desperate sadness when the dam I had constructed around my psyche burst wide open one morning. I was overwhelmed with waves of loss and loneliness. I felt I had lost everything that mattered.

Now in the dream, with the help of the spirit world, I could somewhat vicariously live through the intense sense of isolation the older man was experiencing. What’s more, I was relatively enlightened enough to appreciate the universal loneliness of humanity. It was as if I could sense the whole world’s pain.

Then I heard an inner voice: ‘Pat, you’ll have to stop obsessing about  money and worrying about your finances.’ I’m convinced the voice was from the spirit world, probably the Holy Spirit, and not just from my ‘higher self’. There was definite, clear, but gentle chastisement in the message. At the same time I ‘heard’ it, my mind was downloaded with wisdom from above. I was aware that I needed to do something. I sensed  God needed me to help Him with His work. He had sent me a vision of the older man to wake me up from ruminating on my petty concerns and pay attention to the sufferings in the world.

Like me, many of us consider ourselves heroic and selfless, but we are often delusional regarding our ability to make sacrifices. Sadly, we are also so focused on ourselves and full of fear that we are unaware of the unconscious drives that hold us back from being our higher selves. Worrying about having enough money in the future is my Achilles heel. It’s an irrational and needless worry because I’m relatively financially secure. Nevertheless, I wasn’t conscious of the fear until it was brought sharply to my attention in that lucid dream I described above.

Some Obstacles To Altruism

Delusions And Myths

Most of us want to do good somewhere in the recesses of our minds. But frequently, we do the opposite. This sorry state of affairs is often caused by our lack of awareness regarding the extent we hurt others and how delusional we are in estimating our own degree of self-absorption.

Moving from the heavy burden of carrying the false self to freedom is a lifelong task. To begin the journey, we need to get to the root of the problem by developing insight and awareness into selfishness. In  his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, the author, Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton, throws down the gauntlet regarding erroneous views on ‘having a good time’:

‘I believed in the beautiful myth about having a good time so long as it does not hurt anybody else. You cannot live for your own pleasure and your own convenience without inevitably hurting and injuring the feelings and the interests of practically everybody you meet.’ He continues with even more unfashionable directness: ‘As a matter of fact, in the natural order, no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasure.’

Lack of Awareness

If we want to grow, we have to seek the truth about ourselves even when it’s painful. And one of the most painful things to do is to own up to ourselves about our motivations and ‘good’ intentions. We regularly convince ourselves that we are helping others when really we are looking after our self-interest. The good news is that being aware is often enough to motivate the change needed for us to become more honest regarding our intentions and become the best version of ourselves. If we fail to do this, our attempts at kindness, charity or sacrifice can become another form of self-obsession.

In his book, Awareness, the mystic, Anthony De Mello, gives us eye-opening insights into hidden motivations regarding self-interest. He says that there are two types of selfishness:

‘The first type is the one where I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself. That’s what we generally call self-centeredness. The second is when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. That would be a more refined kind of selfishness. The first one is very obvious, but the second one is hidden, very hidden, and for that reason more dangerous, because we get to feel that we’re really great. But maybe we’re not all that great after all. You protest when I say that. That’s great!’

Some people might protest even more if they read what DeMello said earlier in the same chapter: ‘Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism’. Later he expands on his controversial statement:

‘You know the inner pleasure you have while doing acts of charity. Aha! That’s right! It’s the opposite of someone who says, ‘What’s so great about what I did? I did something, I got something. I had no notion I was doing anything good. My left hand had no idea what my right hand was doing.’ You know, a good is never so good as when you have no awareness that you’re doing good. You are never so good as when you have no consciousness that you’re good. Or as the great Sufi would say, ‘A saint is one until he or she knows it.’ Unselfconscious! Unselfconscious!’