The Problem of Selfishness

The chain of bad events that began from the Covid pandemic in 2020 to the Ukraine war of 2022 and the Gaza war of 2023 has created mental health issues in the public. Since then, moral dilemmas such as mask mandates versus liberty, NATO versus Russia, China versus the US, and Muslims versus Jews have presented themselves to most of the world.

The most critical of these is the issue of global warming versus economic growth.

This year broke heat records, with Vietnam breaking 110 local heat records last April. In the Philippines, classes were suspended because of the unbearable heat. In the Middle East, Dubai was struck by floods that were unthinkable in that dry desert environment.

The cause of these are obviously the selfishness that lingers in the hearts of most humans. In the Ukraine war for example, the selfishness of both NATO and Russia for Ukraine has caused problems for all parties, with Ukraine being the most affected. The selfishness of Hamas and Israel for Palestinian lands have caused a war that has affected Palestinians the most. In global warming, which is really an ongoing war against Nature, the selfishness of the oil and gas industry has led to record profits at the expense of the environment.

The Cause of Selfishness

In Hindu-Buddhist philosophy, selfishness arises from the limitations of the 5 senses.

When we wake up in the morning, we emerge from zero-senses to 5 senses which bombard us with 5-sense perceptions. We feel our beds, we see our bedroom, we hear noise from the street, all we feel the hunger from our stomachs all within a minute. These constantly hammer our minds, conditioning it, hardening the sense of its self, as the perceiving entity. So the more we perceive, the more our ego, as the feeling of the self, gets hardened. This isolates it from other selves or egos, making it self-ish or egotistic.

This is why we see selfish people preferring material goods like cars, phones, clothes, delicious food, etc. instead of relationships, friendships, and family. Usually, they just get pets which they can dominate and give orders to, instead of fellow-humans who can contradict and argue with them (from a similar self-ish mentality).

Cats and dogs also get hammered by their own 5-senses but it is easy to notice that they do not go overboard with their selfishness as to want to dominate other species or commit genocide on their own species. Instead, their selves still go with Nature and not against it.

The range of selfishness of humans, on the other hand, is far too alarming. Who could think that a species could invent nuclear weapons that can destroy the whole planet just to defeat their rivals? The mentality of: “If I can’t win, then we all lose” or “If I can’t have it, no one can” comes to mind. This shows a hardened self or heightened ego.

The Asian Solution

India and China are the birthplaces of advanced spiritual philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism which suppress the ego and train it to be one with Nature.

Their solution to the limitations of the 5 senses is to cultivate the 6th sense which Patanjali calls the state of “True Wisdom” (rtambhara tatra prajna). YOu can then use this True Wisdom to sort out the moral dilemmas or any difficulties in life, or even to prevent new problems from cropping up “taj-ja samskaro ‘nya-samskara-pratibandhi”.

In future posts, I will explain Patanjali’s yogic system for developing the 6th sense by imposing mental discipline (yama niyama) and sense-withdrawal (pratyahara).