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March 1, 2014

The Lie of Selflessness. ~ Robert McNamara

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For some individuals, having no-self and being selfless means asserting no preferences.

The idea of being selfless is a deep inquiry.

At a superficial level, it is an invitation to drop our imperial narcissism, to take care of the people around us and to join the cultures we are immersed in. Sacrificing our personal needs, preferences and interests for the larger well-being of relationships and community is a beautiful expression of selflessness.

At a deeper level however, selflessness involves realizing states of consciousness where no-self is present for periods of time. Discovering a connectedness to an all pervading unity, a stabilization of a mindful state or the absorption into a variety of transcendent states are powerful and catalytic experiences.

I call this the self-without-form. 

Realizing there is a part of us that has no preferences, possesses no agendas, inhabits no form, invests in no personality and participates in no movement is profound and liberating beyond words. Locating this texture of selflessness is a game changer for most people.

Nonetheless, these meditative or contemplative achievements are only states of consciousness. Developing our mind and inducing states of consciousness are two different activities. To confuse these two is a common mistake even some of the brightest minds in human history have made. States are transient experiences while developmental stages are enduring integrative features.

So, while we may cultivate states where our selves drop away, these are always temporary. In time, the state passes and our conventional self returns, along with our personalities, needs, preferences and ideologies governing our experience and collective behaviors as a species. Sometimes the return of the self is for the better, other times it is for the worse.

While these selfless states can captivate the spiritually inclined, most of us are not spending hours a day sitting on a meditation cushion.

As such, many find themselves trapped in different versions of this lie. For these individuals, having no-self and being selfless means asserting no preferences, aspiring to appear especially mindful and aware. It often takes the form of being overly accommodating. A superficial and unexamined acceptance of relationships and surroundings, displayed to others as if some footing in humanity’s great liberation has been attained.

Sadly, exiling preferences, being overly easy going, failing to assert boundaries and enabling the dismemberment of human integrity as a means of avoiding conflicts are not the fruition of our larger capabilities as a species. Instead, they obscure what I call elegance. They entrench less capable expressions of humanity.

These substitutions of selflessness are often attempts to imitate the freedom from self-attachment that elegance demonstrates. Development beyond the autonomous self does bring freedom. It’s the kind of freedom our humanity as a whole might just be starving for. Yet, in our collective hunger for freedom, we often settle for substitutes. Political or relational power captures some of us. Money and economic power shackles others. The spiritual aspirant often seeks a psychological freedom found in states. Regardless, most of us substitute real freedom for easier to handle substitutes.

In studying human elegance, I found that we do indeed create and preserve a sense of self in these highly refined maturities of body, mind and heart. We are not selfless.

First, we can pick up our self-authored, inner guiding autonomous selves and use them. Research shows that those who do are more effective and productive in the world.

Secondly, our elegance is capable of putting these parts of ourselves down. We no longer need to defend our separate and distinct selves in the same ways as when we were identified with our individualistic selves. The needs of the self participating with elegance are no longer confined inside called “deficiency needs”. “Being needs” begin to become central to the self meaning our needs look very different from just about everyone else’s.

All this is to say, elegance can often appear to be selfless.

Yet, in some ways, human elegance—our most mature stages of development—is selfless. But make no mistake my friend, the selfhood that moves with and as elegance is big. In fact, these identities are massive.

They bring a whole new understanding of what it means to have a “big ego.”

They do not get captured by any one ideology. They are not exclusively loyal to any one culture. They do not get intoxicated by our own private needs in an ignorance to others. Our human elegance is bigger than all of these.

As such, we are challenged by our higher reaches of humanity not to yield to social expectations. We are called to be free from the need to create greater cultural uniformity. Resist encasing ourselves in training states of consciousness. We must not withdraw from the complex demands of modern and postmodern life.

And, elegance invites us to be suspicious of our agendas attempting to negate our uniqueness, drives and aspirations. All of us, every facet of our beings and what we are becoming, can participate with intelligences that transcend our conventional selves; we can and in some ways we likely must participate with elegance.

In addition, we are likely to discover that we must devote absolutely all of ourselves to these larger possibilities of humanity.

 

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Editorial Assistant: Yaisa Nio / Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: Flickr / Capes Treasures

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