Awareness – 17
I’m not saying there’s no
such thing as pure motivation. I’m saying that ordinarily everything we do is
in our self-interest. Everything. When you do something for the love of
Christ, is that selfishness? Yes. When you’re doing something for the love of
anybody, it is in your self-interest. I’ll have to explain that.
Suppose you happen to live in
Phoenix and you feed over five hundred children a day. That gives you a good
feeling? Well, would you expect it to give you a bad feeling? But sometimes it
does. And that is because there are some people who do things so that they
won’t have to have a bad feeling. And they call that charity.
They act out of guilt. That isn’t love. But, thank God, you do things for
people and it’s pleasurable. Wonderful! You’re a healthy individual because
you’re self-interested. That’s healthy.
Let me summarize what I was saying about selfless
charity. I said there were two types of selfishness; maybe I should have said
three. First, when I do something, or rather, when I give myself the pleasure
of pleasing myself; second, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others.
Don’t take pride in that. Don’t think you’re a great person. You’re a very
ordinary person, but you’ve got refined tastes. Your taste is good, not the
quality of your spirituality. When you were a child, you liked Coca-Cola; now
you’ve grown older and you appreciate chilled beer on a hot day. You’ve got
better tastes now. When you were a child, you loved chocolates; now you’re older,
you enjoy a symphony, you enjoy a poem. You’ve got better tastes. But you’re
getting your pleasure all the same, except now it’s in the pleasure of pleasing
others. Then you’ve got the third type, which is the worst: when you do
something good so that you won’t get a bad feeling. It doesn’t give you a good
feeling to do it; it gives you a bad feeling to do it. You hate it. You’re
making loving sacrifices but you’re grumbling. Ha! How little you know of
yourself if you think you don’t do things this way.
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Water heats gradually
and boils suddenly.
and boils suddenly.
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