The Problem of Selfishness

The chain of bad events that began from the Covid pandemic in 2020 to the Ukraine war of 2022 and supertyphoons of 2023 has created mental health issues among the public.

These have been accompanied by moral dilemmas such as:

• mask mandates versus the liberty to not wear masks
• NATO expansion versus Russian political influence
• Muslims versus Jews
• global warming versus economic growth

The causes of these are obviously one and the same – the selfishness that lingers in the hearts of most humans.

• In the Ukraine war, the cause is the selfishness of both NATO and Russia for Ukraine. This has affected the Ukranians the most.
• In the Gaza war, the cause is the selfishness of Hamas and Israel for Palestinian lands. This has affected Gazans 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. This has affected poor countries the most.

The most critical of these is the issue of global warming, as it affects everyone.

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.

To solve these problems, we have to look into the nature of selfishness.

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, see our bedroom, hear noise from the street, 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 of these.

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.

This is because material things cannot say anything hurtful to their users, whereas other people can contradict and disappoint us.

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. 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).

This 6th sense can will help people value living things more than material ones.

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).