Switching Your Inside Out

The absolute deepest life experience is giving up one's life for someone else.  This isn't merely a more extreme version of normal experiences, a stretching of familiar emotions to unfamiliar magnitudes; it is another creature entirely.  It is to go from carving out sturdy, well crafted anthills of customary kind words or actions to forging mountain ranges on other planets.  Technically both deal with the same material, but the difference between the two is so great that using the same terminology interchangeably no longer makes sense.

          There is a significant difference in importance between what exists at the core and periphery of a person's life.  A person may be calloused and rough around the edges but hide a heart of gold.  Another might choose a career devoted to the wellbeing of the vulnerable but deeper down be fixated on their own personal interests.  When the core of our lives is not focused on others, we are trapped in a cage that we built inside ourselves, a cage that IS the self.  

          Egocentrism seeps into our lives in the same way that sand gets into everything on the beach despite our best efforts to keep it out, even when we spend some of our time and effort is spent benefitting others.  The particulates of self interest are impurities that obstruct us from reaching our potential and require removal one grain at a time.  While most people do good at least occasionally, it is rare to find someone whose life focus is the welfare of others. 

          The distinction between the core and periphery of our lives is important is because it isn't healthy or necessary to perpetually sacrifice all of our interests self-inflictingly.  It is perfectly good to pursue hobbies, have fun, go out to movies, eat food that tastes good.  The issue arises when these self-focused activities occupy the center of life rather than its periphery.  The problem is not that people don't ever each other or that they often do things that benefit themselves.  It is that the happiness of others isn't more central to them than their own.

          During the creation process of this blog I have looked at other sites that produce articles on motivational topics.  While the sites I found excelled in many areas, I was disappointed by how self-focused the content was.  The overriding message seemed to be that personal success is the greatest possible purpose for our lives.  Even when sacrifice for the interests of others was referenced, it was almost always described as a means to personal success.  In other words, altruism was described as an action in the periphery of our lives that is used to serve our own interests at the center.  We help other people because what goes around comes around, not because their happiness is actually more important than our own.

          Please note:  I'm not saying I don't approve of messages that encourage us to strive for and reach difficult goals.  What I AM saying is that those messages need to be complemented by references to true others-focused achievement or something critical will be missing.

          Another way to think of central/peripheral parts of life is to consider the directionality of our life purpose.  Do we help others to make ourselves successful and happy, or do we take care of our own wellbeing so that we can more fully help those around us?

          Giving up one's life is not limited to dying so that other people can live.  It means living for the sole purpose of helping others live more abundantly.  My message is that the latter can be true of us, and that it is the only meaningful thing we can do with our lives.

          Laying down one's life isn't a transition from good to great.  It is a metamorphosis from great to something that we don't even have words to describe.

          Such a turning inside out from self to others is such a high achievement that it borders on the divine.  I wonder what the Christian miracle actually constitutes if it is not the fact that a Being was born to our earth who chose to live unconditionally for everyone but himself at every moment of every day--and to death and back again?  In fact, if you take that one single attribute out of Jesus Christ's character, you don't have any of Him at all.  That is why those who criticize wars fought in the name of religion are mistaken, not that the wars weren't wrong, but that they were actually fought in the name of religion at all.  Religion is that we live entirely for another's good, and it is a rare war that accomplishes that feat.  Those who do not live for others without a shred of constraint are either not religious at all or are still in the process of becoming so, and wars that are fought for the sole purpose of destroying the enemy are in no sense of the word for their good.

          You shouldn't be discouraged to see that there is much of you that is focused on your own interests rather than those of others.  The most important decision you can make when you see self-centeredness in yourself is to start putting forth effort to change rather than letting yourself wallow in mediocrity.

          That change is worth it, not because it is the most satisfying experience possible, though it is, but because the lives of those that you love will be revolutionized for the better because of it.

   
       The turning of oneself inside out in its purest sense is the forgetting of self.  Why would anyone give attention to their own fear, inadequacy, arrogance, happiness, or anything else self related when their brother is teetering on the edge of the cliff?  That is the moment on which everything is sacrificed for the only pearl of any kind of price--the rushing forward to save that person who you feel more strongly about than words can describe.  Surely it is the happiest act to perform, but it is happiest precisely because it is not focused on one's own happiness at all.  If it were, it would not be happiness. Indeed, compared with the happiness of throwing your life to the peripheral wind for the sake of another, any other kind is mere frivolity.

          Everything of any worth that has ever been accomplished in this world has always been for the good of another.  I have literally never, not once, not one single time, found meaning in my life from any other source.  Distraction, yes, but not meaning.  If you choose to, you can be the agent of great good during your time on this planet.  Life is short, though.  What will it be?  Will you persist in living for yourself, or will you let go and finally be reborn to what life is really about?

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Picture attributions:  Bruno Caimi, Sun, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode A. Pagliaricci, Cocoon, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode Max Goldberg, Summer Storm Clouds, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode